Converts in New Spain

Converts in New Spain
Author: Alicia Gojman Goldberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2020-04-17
Genre:
ISBN:

This book, originally published in the 1980s is one of the pioneering studies of the Jewish population in Mexico. The author, Alicia Gojman not only has a long and outstanding career as a historian; she has also played a significant role in the culture of contemporary Mexican Jews. She has been the promoter of a cultural project that has managed to combine important documentary collections maintained in a vital center dedicated to the study and dissemination of the Judeo-Mexican culture. She has promoted far-reaching editorial projects, in which the memories, images, documents and contributions of generations of Jews in Mexico have been combined.Converts in New Spain, is a study about the Converts and Crypto-Jews who travelled along with conquerors and colonizers to the New World. 1492, the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, is the end of the history of Spanish Judaism and the beginning of the history of the convert in the Americas. The history of the converts in the New World starts with its discovery, since they themselves participated in the exploration and colonization in a much grater degree than in commonly acknowledged. As part of the Spanish society, they came to the Americas feeling like other Christian Spaniards, "chosen" by God to find in this New World, a New Jerusalem. Their integration to the colonial society was not easy, when they were asked for their "blood cleanness," or when they were harassed by the Inquisition Tribunal. However, these converts, participated in the economic, political, social and cultural development of New Spain. Originally published in Spanish by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, this is the first English edition.About the author: Alicia Gojman Goldberg was born in Mexico city. She has a PhD degree in History from UNAM, where she is a professor and researcher at the FES Acatlán. She has published over 20 books and 194 articles about Mexican and Jewish history.She is the Honorary Director of the Jewish Research and Documentation Center in Mexico; a member of the Mexican National Research System since 1984. She has received UNAM's Sor Juana in 2005, an Honorary Fellowship from Tel Aviv's university in 2006; the Cultural award from the Mexico-Israel Cultural Institute in 2007. The Anastasio Sarabia Award for Archival work in 2009. During her management as president of the Ashkenazi Community Documentation and Research Center she obtained the award as the best private archive awarded by the National Archive of Mexico and UNESCO's Memory of the World award in 2009.

Theaters of Conversion

Theaters of Conversion
Author: Samuel Y. Edgerton
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2001
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780826322562

Mexico's churches and conventos display a unique blend of European and native styles. Missionary Mendicant friars arrived in New Spain shortly after Cortes's conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521 and immediately related their own European architectural and visual arts styles to the tastes and expectations of native Indians. Right from the beginning the friars conceived of conventos as a special architectural theater in which to carry out their proselytizing. Over four hundred conventos were established in Mexico between 1526 and 1600, and more still in New Mexico in the century following, all built and decorated by native Indian artisans who became masters of European techniques and styles even as they added their own influence. The author argues that these magnificent sixteenth and seventeenth-century structures are as much part of the artistic patrimony of American Indians as their pre-Conquest temples, pyramids, and kivas. Mexican Indians, in fact, adapted European motifs to their own pictorial traditions and thus made a unique contribution to the worldwide spread of the Italian Renaissance. The author brings a wealth of knowledge of medieval and Renaissance European history, philosophy, theology, art, and architecture to bear on colonial Mexico at the same time as he focuses on indigenous contributions to the colonial enterprise. This ground-breaking study enriches our understanding of the colonial process and the reciprocal relationship between European friars and native artisans.

Truth Many Tongues

Truth Many Tongues
Author: Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-12-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780271086002

Examines how the Spanish monarchy managed an empire of unprecedented linguistic diversity, making only sporadic efforts to propagate Spanish during the sixteenth century. Challenges the assumption that the pervasiveness of the Spanish language resulted from deliberate linguistic colonization.

Spain Unmoored

Spain Unmoored
Author: Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253025060

Long viewed as Spain's "most Moorish city," Granada is now home to a growing Muslim population of Moroccan migrants and European converts to Islam. Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar examines how various residents of Granada mobilize historical narratives about the city's Muslim past in order to navigate tensions surrounding contemporary ethnic and religious pluralism. Focusing particular attention on the gendered, racial, and political dimensions of this new multiculturalism, Rogozen-Soltar explores how Muslim-themed tourism and Islamic cultural institutions coexist with anti-Muslim sentiments.

The Mexican Mission

The Mexican Mission
Author: Ryan Dominic Crewe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108492541

Offers a social history of the Mexican mission enterprise, emphasizing the centrality of indigenous politics, economics, and demographic catastrophe.

New Spain, 1600-1760s

New Spain, 1600-1760s
Author: Roger E. Hernández
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780761429364

Information on the history of Spanish exploration in America.

The Mapping of New Spain

The Mapping of New Spain
Author: Barbara E. Mundy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2000-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226550978

To learn about its territories in the New World, Spain commissioned a survey of Spanish officials in Mexico between 1578 and 1584, asking for local maps as well as descriptions of local resources, history, and geography. In The Mapping of New Spain, Barbara Mundy illuminates both the Amerindian (Aztec, Mixtec, and Zapotec) and the Spanish traditions represented in these maps and traces the reshaping of indigene world views in the wake of colonization. "Its contribution to its specific field is both significant and original. . . . It is a pure pleasure to read." —Sabine MacCormack, Isis "Mundy has done a fine job of balancing the artistic interpretation of the maps with the larger historical context within which they were drawn. . . . This is an important work." —John F. Schwaller, Sixteenth Century Journal "This beautiful book opens a Pandora's box in the most positive sense, for it provokes the reconsideration of several long-held opinions about Spanish colonialism and its effects on Native American culture." —Susan Schroeder, American Historical Review

Bad Christians, New Spains

Bad Christians, New Spains
Author: Byron E. Hamann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2019-10-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100069903X

This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved the relations of Europeans and Native Americans in an Oaxacan town (in New Spain, today’s Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worlds preserved in the inquisitorial files share many things. By comparing and contrasting the two inquisitions, Hamann reveals how very local practices and debates had long-distance parallels that reveal the larger entanglements of a transatlantic early modern world. Through a dialogue of two microhistories, he presents a macrohistory of large-scale social transformation. We see how attempts in both places to turn old worlds into new ones were centered on struggles over materiality and temporality. By paying close attention to theories (and practices) of reduction and conversion, Hamann suggests we can move beyond anachronistic models of social change as colonization and place questions of time and history at the center of our understandings of the sixteenth-century past. The book is an intervention in major debates in both history and anthropology: about the writing of global histories, our conceptualizations of the colonial, the nature of religious and cultural change, and the roles of material things in social life and the imagination of time.

Capturing the Landscape of New Spain

Capturing the Landscape of New Spain
Author: Rebecca A. Carte
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816532249

The son of an encomendero, Baltasar Obregón was twenty years old when he joined the 1564 expedition led by the first governor of Nueva Vizcaya, Francisco de Ibarra. The purpose of the expedition was to establish mining settlements in the borderlands of New Spain and to suppress indigenous rebellions in the region. Although Obregón’s role in the Ibarra expedition was that of soldier-explorer, and despite his lacking an advanced education, he would go on to compose Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva España twenty years later, expanding his narrative to include the years before and after his own firsthand experiences with Ibarra. Obregón depicts the storied landscape of the northern borderlands with vivid imagery, fusing setting and situation, constructing a new reality of what was, is, and should be, and presenting it as truth. In Capturing the Landscape of New Spain, Rebecca A. Carte explains how landscape performs a primary role in Obregón’s retelling, emerging at times as protagonist and others as antagonist. Carte argues that Obregón’s textualization offers one of the first renderings of the region through the Occidental cultural lens, offering insight into Spanish cultural perceptions of landscape during a period of important social and political shifts. By examining mapping and landscape discourse, Carte shows how history and geography, past and present, people and land, come together to fashion the landscape of northern New Spain.