Savannah Esquivel

Review of Rosario I. Granados, ed., Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America, Exh. cat. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press and Blanton Museum of Art, 2023. PAINTED CLOTH offers a new dimension to the study of the Spanish Americas by asking how colonial subjects used fashion and fabric—painted, sculpted, woven, and worn—to think productively about the social and spiritual worlds around them. This stunning exhibition catalog showcases a selection of artworks and artifacts from primarily seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Spain and Peru and was the result of fruitful collaboration with private collections worldwide. Thoughtfully curated and edited by Rosario I. Granados, Marilynn Thoma associate curator for art of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton Museum, the catalog marks the occasion of the first large-scale exhibition of the art and material culture of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton. The catalog’s essays enhance the exhibition by delving into the active roles played by historically marginalized groups, elucidating the social and technical aspects informing the symbolic meaning of textiles and their expressive forms. It also highlights several less-studied artifacts, such as sewing tables and embroidered coverlets, placing domestic furnishings in conversation with the portraits of colonial elites and the sitters who used these items. From sewing boxes to embroidered chasubles, casta paintings to sumptuously dressed sculptures of the Virgin Mary, Painted Cloth thus reveals fabric in its multitudinous forms as a critical point of departure for writing inclusive histories of colonial Latin America.

Review of Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla, eds., Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire (Duke University Press, 2020). INDIGENOUS TEXTUAL CULTURES examines literacy practices and communication technologies in Indigenous societies impacted in particular by British and French intrusion in the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Literacy has often been examined from the point of view of imperial agents or anti-colonial leaders. Indigenous Textual Cultures shifts focus by highlighting the potency of orality and auditory practices. It contends Indigenous societies used alphabetic literacy to intervene in emergent transregional communication networks, often sustaining Indigenous knowledge practices through a “symbiotic relationship” between literacy and orality (149). A range of studies examines how Indigenous textual literacy exposed contradictions within colonial matrices of power, undermined the authority of the written or printed word, and compelled colonial agents to rethink material and discursive contours of mass literacy campaigns. The volume delivers a nuanced picture of how Indigenous mobilizations of literacy created new intellectual forums in an increasingly interconnected world.

Review of Juan Luis Burke, Architecture and Urbanism in Viceregal Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries  (New York: Routledge, 2021). Architecture and Urbanism surveys the urban development of Puebla de los Ángeles, Mexico, tracing the growth and expansion of this colonial city during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries up to the economic crisis and decline in the eighteenth century. Because it showcases underutilized regional archives, Burke’s book is an essential point of departure for any scholar or student interested in Ibero-American architecture...

This essay examines the placement and displacement of Nahua labor in the architectural history of Mexico’s early colonial monasteries. It takes as its point of departure the story of a ghost in the Tlaxcala monastery as told by a Franciscan missionary to analyze the discursive and spatial dimensions of emergent racial ideologies in Mexico’s earliest Catholic missions. While the ghost’s appearance signals the eruption of unresolved tensions between the missionaries and the Tlaxcalans in a cohabited religious complex, the specter also animates settler colonial domination. Cross-referencing Nahuatl and Franciscan documents reveal the ghost story as a whitewashed tale of monastic ritual life wherein the ghost effaces Indigenous labor at precisely the moments and places missionaries deemed it most threatening. In so doing, this study illuminates how racial ideologies were structured discursively and experientially at the missions and contributes to urgent debates about how the history and preservation of Catholic architecture in Mexico conceals and represses the lived experience of Indigenous peoples.

This dissertation examines how Nahuas used their Franciscan monastery—its spaces, imagery, and institutional structure—to challenge Spanish hegemony in the Atlixco Valley, the bread-basket of sixteenth century New Spain. It concentrates on the artistic and sociopolitical interventions of Indigenous Nahuas within the public and private spaces of the monastery of San Martín de Tours, Huaquechula, Mexico to upend a frequent assumption that Indigenous people engaged with Christianity on a superficial level and predominately through outdoor, public rituals. Analysis of the Huaquechula monastery's multiple topographies repositions Nahuas as insiders, physically and socio-politically situated within the monastery to negotiate power asymmetries and advance Nahua interests and futures. My chapters follow Nahuas from the most public to the most private sacred spaces within the Huaquechula monastery to trace two distinct but overlapping issues: the development of a sixteenth century Nahua ...

Review of Ana Pullido Rull, Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). In MAPPING INDIGENOUS LAND, author Ana Pulido Rull investigates how Native nobles and painters used maps to intervene in land distribution in New Spain between 1536 and 1620. Mexico City’s Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) preserves over two hundred land-grant maps (mapas de mercedes de tierras) and appended court documents. While Pulido Rull focuses on fourteen maps, the volume’s findings emerged from an exhaustive examination of the genre’s corpus. In New Spain, painted maps were required evidence in land litigation, and the creation of a map was an essential step in the procurement of land titles. Pulido Rull shows how the design and visual conventions of Native-made maps influenced the outcomes of conflicts over land, arguing the cartographs represent subjective understandings of space. The analysis places renewed attention on the pictorial and legal processes that drove the commodification of Indigenous lands in the early colonial period,...