Damian Bacich

The manuscript that is here transcribed, analyzed and translated bears a fundamental importance for the history the American Southwest. It contains the report or “Autos Tocantes al alsamiento de/ los yndios de la provinçia de la/ Nueba Mexico” (Documents related to the uprising of the Indians of the province of New Mexico) that Antonio de Otermín, Governor of New Mexico, ordered prepared in 1680 regarding the attack on and destruction of Santa Fe and its surrounding towns by Indians who had united for this purpose.
The original document is conserved in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, and until now had remained unedited, with the exception of Herbert Eugene Bolton’s typed transcription (see Hackett 1911:94, note 3) and the English translation by Charmion Clair Shelby in Hackett (1942), which, up to now, has been the main source for historians to consult.
This is the first time the entire document has been published in Spanish; a new translation corrects numerous errors in existing translations; the edition is fully annotated with critical apparatus and onomastic indices.

In American Protestant Theology, Luigi Giussani traces the history of the most meaningful theological expressions and the cultural significance of American Protestantism, from its origins in seventeenth-century Puritanism to the 1950s. Giussani clarifies and assesses elements of Protestantism such as the democratic approach to church-state relations, "The Great Awakening," Calvinism and Trinitarianism, and liberalism. His rich references and analytical descriptions reconstruct an overview of the development of a religion that has great importance in the context of spiritual life and American culture. He also displays full respect for the religious depth from which Protestantism was born and where it can reach, and expresses great admiration for its most prominent thinkers and spiritual leaders, including Jonathan Edwards, Horace Bushnell, Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich. Further testament to Giussani's clear-minded and comprehensive knowledge of Christianity, American Protestant Theology makes the work of a master theologian available in English for the first time.

First published in Rome in 1535, Leone Ebreo's Dialogues of Love is one of the most important texts of the European Renaissance. Well known in the Italian academies of the sixteenth century, its popularity quickly spread throughout Europe, with numerous reprintings and translations into French, Latin, Spanish, and Hebrew. It attracted a diverse audience that included noblemen, courtesans, artists, poets, intellectuals, and philosophers. More than just a bestseller, the work exerted a deep influence over the centuries on figures as diverse as Giordano Bruno, John Donne, Miguel de Cervantes, and Baruch Spinoza.
Leone's Dialogues of Love consists of three conversations - On Love and Desire, On the Universality of Love, and On the origin of Love - that take place over a period of three subsequent days. They are organized in a dialogic format, much like a theatrical representation, of a conversation between a man, Philo, who plays the role of the lover and teacher, and a woman, Sophia, the beloved and pupil. The discussion covers a wide range of topics that have as their common denominator the idea of Love. Through the dialogue the author explores many different points of view and complex philosophical ideas. Grounded in a distinctly Jewish tradition, and drawing on Neoplatonic philosophical structures and Arabic sources, the work offers a useful compendium of classical and contemporary thought, yet was not incompatible with Christian doctrine.
Despite the unfinished state and somewhat controversial, enigmatic nature of Ebreo's famous text, it remains one of the most significant and influential works in the history of Western thought.

Abstract: This dissertation studies the Spanish translations of the Dialogues of Love (Dialoghi d'amore), written by Yehuda Abravanel (Leone Ebreo). First published in Rome in 1535, the Dialogues harmonized Neoplatonic concepts of love with biblical and kabbalistic teachings. Three translations of this popular work were published in Spanish in the sixteenth century, the best known of which was made by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Madrid, 1590). What drove the translation of this work into Spanish and how did the translations compete with one another? The first translation (Venice, 1568) rescued the Hebrew and Spanish identity of the author and his text, and subverted the prevailing notion that Abravanel had converted to Christianity. In contrast, the second version (Zaragoza, 1584), translated by an Aragonese nobleman, attempted to render the work less suspect to ecclesiastical censors by converting some of Ebreo's concepts into less ambiguous language and inserting references to Catholicism not found in the original. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1590), in following these first two, made lexical choices and used margin annotations (derived largely from the 1564 Latin translation) to create a version of the Dialogues that retained the ambiguity of the Italian and opened the work to implications for the debate about the conquest of the Americas. Garcilaso's translation must therefore be seen in the context of the previous two in order to be understood fully. Finally, included is a study of a Spanish manuscript translation, Ms. 1057 of the Biblioteca Pública Muncipal in Porto, Portugal. This manuscript, written in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, displays a re-division of the book and greater manipulation by the translator, who subtracted and re-wrote passages that he considered doctrinally problematic from a Christian perspective. The translator remains unidentified, though a possible link to Garcilaso's re-editing of his own translation should be explored. These last three translations and the modifications to the original text contained therein indicate an intellectual climate in the Spanish-speaking world in which Platonism is still of great interest despite its being suspect from a doctrinal perspective, and they point to new directions for the study of this literary era.

Yehuda Avravanel's Dialoghi d'amore probably had its greatest impact in the Spanish-speaking world. Over a period of some fifty years, four separate and distinct translations were produced in Spanish, most notably that of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, which drew on elements from those that preceded it.

In this article I reconstruct the life of María Sylveria Pacheco, a frontier woman whose life spanned the decades of Spanish, Mexican and U.S. rule in the San Francisco Bay Area. A daughter of Anza party member and San Francisco Presidio soldier, Miguel Antonio Pacheco y del Valle, Sylveria was born and raised at Mission Santa Clara during the tenure of Fathers Magín Catalá and José Viader. In the 1830s she married German aristocrat Karl von Gerolt, only to be widowed a month after her wedding. Following secularization, she ran a boarding house for Anglo-American immigrants in what was the women’s neophyte dormitory at the mission during the tumultuous years of the U.S.-Mexico War and the annexation of Alta California. She later moved to the East Bay and married an American immigrant. She was also heiress to Rancho Arroyo de las Nueces y Bolbones, which later became the city of Walnut Creek. Her life was profiled in a 1916 issue of Bret Harte’s Overland Monthly.

As a woman, a single mother and a Californio, Sylveria Pacheco lived on the margins of the Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American societies she inhabited. Yet she also persevered in adapting to the enormous changes she witnessed during her lifetime. A fuller investigation of her life can help provide a more granular view of life in northern Alta California.

In 1833 a group of Mexican-born Franciscans from the College of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Zacatecas was sent to Alta California to replace their Spanish confreres in several of the northern missions. The Franciscan priests were not prepared, however, for the situation they would encounter as a result of mission secularization. With missions in decay and stripped of both their resources and their native inhabitants, these priests eventually found themselves marginalized in a society in which their Spanish predecessors had been protagonists. The political changes of the 1840s, from local insurrections against Mexican authorities and inter-Californio rivalries to the difficulties of U.S. military occupation, forced a shift in identity among some of these friars. No longer missionaries, they had to adapt to a hand-to-mouth existence and the lifestyle of an itinerant pastor, while seeking wherever possible to advocate for Native rights. Beginning with H. H. Bancroft, California historians often portrayed the priests' unorthodox lifestyles as the result of corruption and ignorance. A closer look at the life of one of these friars, José María Suárez del Real, helps contextualize their choices within the trying circumstances of years of upheaval and uncertainty.

During the sixteenth century, vernacular translations began to assume greater prominence in Spanish literary circles. Such translations at times served as vehicles to encode debates on empire, identity and history. One such case is that of the translations of Yehuda Abravanel's Dialogues of Love (1535).

José María Suárez del Real, the last Franciscan at the Santa Clara Mission, is often caricatured as a corrupt and feckless cleric. Yet he managed to navigate a tumultuous era in California history and leave a lasting mark on the area he served.

Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love achieved a broad Spanish-language readership thanks to the three published Spanish translations that appeared during the sixteenth century, in addition to the circulation of manuscript translations. Yet not long after the publication of the first Spanish translation, signs of ecclesiastical censure begin to appear: the 1581 Portuguese Index issued an order of expurgation of the work; the Spanish Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum of both 1612 (Sandoval y Rojas) and that of Zapata in 1632 would eventually prohibit all vernacular editions of the Dialogues as well as command the expurgation of the 1564 Latin edition translated by Giovan Carlo Saraceno. This paper explores Inquisitorial motivations that led to the eventual censure and ban of Leone Ebreo’s work and their possible connections to the author’s own theories on allegory and the safeguarding of philosophical and theological doctrine.

For the past few years I have taught a graduate seminar on the culture of Alta California at San José State, a large, public university. Courses dealing with the Spanish/Mexican era are frequently taught at California universities, many of which rely on the excellent translations of source material that are available. My course, is unusual, however, in that it is taught in Spanish. “Reading” Alta California in Spanish often means relying on archival documents that are frequently incomplete or difficult to decipher for the untrained eye. Moreover, most of the students in my courses are of Hispanic/Latino heritage (a growing demographic), and often develop a relationship to the persons, places and events in primary documents that is much more direct than it might be with those more linguistically and culturally removed.
In my paper I describe my experience teaching such courses, serving a constituency that can greatly profit from their re-discovery. I also advocate for the creation of a corpus of printed Spanish-language texts from Alta California to be the basis of future courses and to serve future scholars.

Conversión de los Saluiseños de la Alta California (Conversion of the Saluiseños of Alta California) (c. 1840) by Pablo Tac is the only published document written by an indigenous Californian during the Spanish-Mexican period. Born at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, north of San Diego, California in 1820, Tac wrote the manuscript while studying to be a Catholic priest at a seminary in Rome. Conversión de los Saluiseños is Tac's attempt to present the history and customs of his people, the Quechnajuichom, (Luiseños) to a readership unfamiliar with Native American life. While part of the work deals with the encounter of the Tac's ancestors with Spanish missionaries and soldiers that ultimately led to the founding of Mission San Luis Rey, the bulk of Conversión de los Saluiseños paints a portrait of life at the mission through the eyes of a native person. Tac portrays the mission as a native community under Spanish dominion, which strives to preserve its traditional ways while...

Conversión de los Saluiseños de la Alta California (c. 1840) by Pablo Tac is the only published document written by an indigenous Californian during the Spanish-Mexican period. Born at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, north of San Diego, California in 1820, Tac wrote the manuscript while studying to be a Catholic priest at a seminary in Rome. Conversión de los Saluiseños is Tac's attempt to present the history and customs of his people, the Quechnajuichom, (Luiseños) to a readership unfamiliar with Native American life. While part of the work deals with the encounter of the Tac's ancestors with Spanish missionaries and soldiers that ultimately led to the founding of Mission San Luis Rey, the bulk of Conversión de los Saluiseños paints a portrait of life at the mission through the eyes of a native person. Tac portrays the mission as a native community under Spanish dominion, which strives to preserve its traditional ways while adapting to a new political and cultural order. A...

In 1833 a group of Mexican-born Franciscans from the College of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Zacatecas was sent to Alta California to replace their Spanish confreres in several of the northern missions. The Franciscan priests were not prepared, however, for the situation they would encounter as a result of mission secularization. With missions in decay and stripped of both their resources and their native inhabitants, these priests eventually found themselves marginalized in a society in which their Spanish predecessors had been protagonists. The political changes of the 1840s, from local insurrections against Mexican authorities and inter-Californio rivalries to the difficulties of U.S. military occupation, forced a shift in identity among some of these friars. No longer missionaries, they had to adapt to a hand-to-mouth existence and the lifestyle of an itinerant pastor, while seeking wherever possible to advocate for Native rights. Beginning with H. H. Bancroft, California historians...