American Historical Association Session Summaries Open Access

The CLAH Luncheon/Business Meeting was held on December 29, 1990. Outgoing president Murdo J. MacLeod (University of Florida) presided, and Louis R. Sadler (New Mexico State University) was executive secretary. After the introduction of officers and guests, the winners of CLAH yearly prizes were announced:

The James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize for the best article published in the HAHR was awarded to Arnold J. Bauer for his essay “Industry and the Missing Bourgeoisie: Consumption and Development in Chile, 1850-1959” (May 1990).

The Herbert Eugene Bolton Memorial Prize for the best book in English published in 1989 in the field of Latin American history was presented to two cowinners, Charles A. Hale for The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton University Press) and Ida Altman for Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press).

The Conference on Latin American History Prize for the best article in English in a journal other than HAHR went to William Culver and Cornel Reinhart, co-authors of “Capitalist Dreams: Chile’s Response to Nineteenth-Century Copper Competition,” which appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:4 (Oct. 1989). Laird W. Bergad received Honorable Mention for “The Economic Viability of Sugar Production Based on Slave Labor in Cuba, 1859-1878,” Latin American Research Review, 24:1 (1989).

The Distinguished Service Award was awarded to Ursula Lamb of the University of Arizona, with the citation

Ursula Lamb has consistently and rigorously worked as a historian. She has isolated and addressed significant questions and in seeking answers to them pointed, like the mariners she has written about, to territories many others have afterwards hastened to explore, often with much more fanfare.

In place of the usual luncheon speaker, those in attendance heard a roundtable of current and incoming editors of journals in the Latin American history field. David Bushnell (University of Florida), outgoing Managing Editor of HAHR, briefly outlined the trends in articles submitted and books reviewed, as well as noting some of the satisfactions and frustrations of the work as editor. Mark Szuchman (Florida International University), scheduled to become Managing Editor of HAHR on July 1, 1991, referred to the challenges inherent in maintaining the journal’s “flagship status” and called on members of the profession to collaborate with articles and reviews. James Micheal Riley (Catholic University of America) discussed his experience in editing The Americas, which has a smaller number of subscribers and of articles submitted than HAHR but continues to play an important role in the Latin American history field. He, too, issued a call for support from all members of the profession. Finally, Robert M. Levine (University of Miami), outgoing editor of the Luso-Brazilian Review, noted recent and forthcoming changes in the journal’s format and content but emphasized that its traditional coverage will continue even as the editors seek to broaden its scope and to increase scholarly dialogue with Brazilian and Portuguese scholars.

D. B.

The session on “Methodologies of Mexican Visual History” was chaired by John Mraz (Universidad Autónoma de Puebla) in the absence of Pedro Castillo (University of California, Santa Cruz). Mraz opened the panel with a presentation entitled Towards a Methodology of Mexican Graphic History,” in which he differentiated between “graphic” and “illustrated” history. Mraz argued that, though illustrated history is the most common form of using images to communicate about the past, it is methodologically unsound because it consists essentially of looking for images to serve as illustrations or “filler” for a historical discourse that has been constructed prior to and independent of visual research. He proposed instead that historians consider what might be offered by a truly graphic history, in which images constitute the beginning of research or where visual research exists in a dialectical relationship to the study of written sources. He demonstrated this point by showing slides of historical photographs that revealed aspects of material life and social relations that might have been difficult to find in written sources.

In his paper, “Historia visual e historia local,” Bernardo García Díaz (Universidad Veracruzana) addressed the relationship of visual and regional history. He argued for a methodological coincidence between these two disciplines, emphasizing the importance of particularity in each. This he contrasted to the way that visual histories commonly use images in a generalized and abstract way. As an example of the relationship of visual and regional history, he offered the recent series of books edited by the Universidad Veracruzana, “Veracruz en la historia.”

Paul Vanderwood (San Diego State University) discussed the use of picture postcards as historical evidence, illustrating his lecture with picture postcards that depicted the Mexican Revolution and U.S. war preparedness along the border. He noted that the postcards not only yielded data on material items, such as clothing and armaments, but suggested that the border experience prepared the U.S. military for the forthcoming World War I campaigns in France. He also noted the prevalence of cards that depicted mutilated Mexican corpses and wondered how they might have shaped the U.S. mentality toward Mexicans and the Revolution.

Robert Levine (University of Miami) commented on the session, noting that the methodological issues raised had greatly enhanced his understanding of visual history. He went on to describe the blockade that historians who wish to do visual history have encountered in the scholarly world, stating that the profession’s leading journals, such as American Historical Review and the Hispanic American Historical Review, decline to review important works employing visual history techniques. In the spirited debate that followed, a number of historians present confirmed the prejudices against visual history and called for greater acceptance by fellow historians—and publishers—of works that explore the frontiers of graphic history.

J. M.

[Ed. note: Prof. Levine’s videotape “Imágenes de Reinos” is one of the visual history materials that HAHR has reviewed (Feb. 1987).]

The session “The Nature of Recent Research on the History of the Family in in Latin America” was chaired by Darrell E. Levi (Florida State University). Sylvia Arrom (Indiana University), Mark Szuchman (Florida International University), and Elizabeth Kuznesof (University of Kansas) presented papers. K. Lynn Stoner (Arizona State University) and Levi commented. About 50 people attended and participated in an altogether too brief discussion of the papers.

Arrom spoke on “Mexican Family History,” identifying five types of studies: (1) elite families; (2) demographic/household histories; (3) legal studies; (4) racial intermarriage and endogamy; and (5) studies of relationships, emotions, beliefs, and values. She concentrated on elite families and demographic/household studies, pleaded for more case studies, and concluded that there are still many gaps in our understanding of the Mexican family, leaving us far from a synthetic overview.

In his paper on “The State of Family History in Spanish South America” Szuchman concentrated on Argentina and Chile and surveyed four themes: (1) production, reproduction, and patriarchy; (2) social control; (3) division of labor; and (4) the family and state building. Szuchman emphasized the contributions of nonhistorians. He advocated more attention to consciousness and mental disposition as likely to yield insight into family political and social motivations.

Kuznesof’s paper on “Primary Trends and Interpretations in Brazilian Family History” suggested that family history in Brazil is perhaps closer to a coherent synthesis than is the case with Spanish America. She surveyed recent findings on: (1) changing class and social structure in the context of capitalist development; (2) miscegenation, illegitimacy, and race relations; (3) the informal family; (4) the slave family; and (5) women and gender relations. Pointing to areas that need further research—such as the transition from slavery to free labor and the move from cottage industry to factory labor—Kuznesof concluded that continuing investigation will elucidate not only Brazilian family history but the history of Brazilian society as well.

In her comment Stoner commended Kuznesof’s attention to methodology and Szuchman’s use of literature as means of understanding the family. Stoner pointed to study of illegitimacy as a potentially rewarding area of research, arguing that illegitimacy is at the heart of revolution and counterrevolution and that Eva Perón, Agustín Farabundo Martí, Augusto Sandino, and Fidel Castro were all illegitimate. Stoner and Levi both endorsed Szuchman’s emphasis on studies of mentalité. Noting that Arrom devoted most of her paper to the dichotomy between elite and demographic studies, Levi argued that an outstanding task of the field is to integrate its qualitative and quantitative approaches, as Arrom has done in her study of women in Mexico City. Levi also called for more studies of the twentieth century and for augmenting attention to European family research with awareness of developments in the history of the family in Africa and Asia.

D. E. L.

“Biographies of Early Viceroys,” chaired by William S. Maltby, involved more than its title indicates. Peter Bakewell (Emory University) began the session with a paper on “Viceroy Toledo, Personality and Politician” in which he demonstrated how a naturally abrasive and autocratic character was employed, perhaps deliberately, to implement unpopular reforms. Don Francisco de Toledo was appointed viceroy of Peru in 1568 to reverse what Madrid perceived as administrative drift. The viceroy’s language mirrors his perception of the task at hand. Paz y sosiego, orden y asiento, seguridad, autoridad, and above all the revealing and frequently used verb allanar were the watchwords of his correspondence. His behavior was widely regarded as outrageous. Protests over his interference in municipal elections or against the brutal and highly irregular prosecution of the Inca community at Vilcabamba were met with the bland assertion that such matters fell within the viceregal prerogative. One of his most vivid exploits was to achieve control of the treasury by adding a fourth key to the customary caja de tres llaves, making it impossible for officials to open it without his permission.

In “Don Luis de Velasco and the Corregidores,” John Frederick Schwaller (Florida Atlantic University) described a very different type of viceroy. Schwaller used the career of Luis de Velasco the younger, who was twice viceroy of Mexico, to illustrate a major difference between the two American kingdoms and to describe how the viceroy was forced to modify his tactics accordingly. In Mexico, corregidores were subject to viceregal control because (unlike Peru) their salaries were paid out of general Indian tribute revenues. Moreover, Velasco, who was committed to improving the lot of the Indians, could use his wide personal connections to appoint those who would be amenable to persuasion. Even so, Velasco was forced to fall back upon orders rather than persuasion. His ordinances of July 31, 1601, met with great opposition and were frequently evaded after his departure.

The final paper, by Edith Couturier (National Endowment for the Humanities), departed from the viceregal format. “An Aristocratic Widow in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, the Countess of Miravelle” provided an analysis of the strategies by which a formidable woman attempted to protect and extend the meager resources of her family. The husband of María Magdalena Dávalos y Orozco left her with nine children and a mass of obligations when he died in 1734. For the next thirty-five years, the countess carefully manipulated the marriages of her children, her aristocratic connections, and the legal system to maintain her status. “This life,” she said, “is a battlefield,” and few of her creditors would have disagreed. Her greatest coup was the marriage of her youngest daughter to the silver magnate Pedro Romero de Terreros, but even this advantage was to prove temporary. Her family survived as an aristocratic unit, but it did not truly prosper. Couturier believes that without Spanish inheritance laws and the institution of the dowry, even this achievement might have been impossible.

The comments of Stafford Poole were restricted to the two viceregal papers because, through no fault of the author, the third did not reach him in time for the conference. He drew a parallel between the personality of Francisco de Toledo and his Mexican contemporary, Martín Enríquez, and asked whether both were acting on real or imagined instructions from the Junta Magna. The extraordinary self-confidence of Toledo would seem to indicate that they were. The usefulness of someone like Toledo also illustrates why Ovando’s scheme for letrado viceroys was unworkable. For better or for worse, they would have had neither the authority nor the temperament for the job.

Velasco’s problems, on the other hand, illustrate the obstructionist powers of the bureaucracy, but what accounts for the difference between the corregidores of Mexico and those of Peru? Was Peruvian autonomy a legacy of geography or of the civil wars? What, for that matter, were the precise duties of a corregidor? Some of his functions are well known, but our understanding of the office is still unclear. The session concluded with questions and comments from the audience.

W. S. M.

Some 30 people attended this year’s program of the Gran Colombian Studies Committee, “Colombia’s Durable Oligarchs: The Ospinas, 1530-1990.” Those presenting papers were Eduardo Sáenz-Rovner (Universidad de los Andes), Frank Safford (Northwestern University), J. León Helguera (Vanderbilt University), and Maurice Brungardt (Loyola University, New Orleans). James D. Henderson (University of South Carolina) served as moderator; the audience provided comment.

Sáenz-Rovner spoke first, taking a historiographical approach in his discussion of Mariano Ospina Pérez, the Conservative who served as president of Colombia between 1946 and 1950. Sáenz’s overall impression is that nearly all of the literature perpetuates the somewhat uncritical appraisal of Ospina Pérez as a “good guy” and a moderate. One exception is the study of Alberto Mayor Mora that presents Ospina Pérez chiefly as a technocrat.

Frank Salford followed with a paper titled “Mariano Ospina Rodríguez as a Political Man.” Safford presented the midnineteenth-century figure, a cofounder of Colombia’s Conservative party, as a complex person who served his country in a number of significant ways. A philosophic conservative keenly interested in the maintenance of social order, Ospina Rodríguez lavished energy on the education of young men from rural areas, who he believed would internalize his own bourgeois values to the end of stabilizing society. So interested was Ospina Rodríguez in protecting property, said Safford, that the Colombian once went so far as to suggest that private property would be safer if his country were annexed to the United States.

León Helguera continued with a genealogical study of the immediate ancestors of the celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ospinas. He convincingly established that Ospina Rodríguez and his descendants were not directly related to the Ospinas who participated in the conquest of New Granada and who rose high in colonial society. The modern Ospinas are in fact descended from humble campesinos of Guasca, Cundinamarca, who married wisely and who experienced social promotion thanks to the movement for national independence. Helguera explained the modern Ospinas’ Antioquian connection as a consequence of Mariano Ospina Rodríguez’s internal exile following the assassination attempt against Bolívar in 1828.

Maurice Brungardt concluded this year’s program with a paper on Diego de Ospina, whom he described as the richest man in New Granada in the seventeenth century. Best remembered as the founder of Neiva, Diego de Ospina parlayed military ability and business acumen into a vast fortune with which he was able to purchase high political office. Especially interesting were Brungardt’s statistics on the sources of Ospina’s wealth, on his several enterprises worked with slave labor, and on his public offices, their cost, and the income they produced for him.

J. D. H.

The session “Workers, Populism, and the Latin American State,” chaired by Charles Bergquist (University of Washington), was attended by some 40 people. Steven Hirsch (George Washington University) presented the first paper, “Urban Workers and the Limits of Aprista Hegemony, 1931-48.” He argued, contrary to standard interpretations, that some Aprista-influenced unions in Lima exhibited considerable independence from party directives during this period. Such initiatives included both strike activity and cooperation with anti-Aprista regimes, especially during the war and postwar periods.

David LaFrance (Oregon State University) presented the second paper, “Labor and the State in Carrancista Puebla, 1917-20.” Using material drawn primarily from the archives of the Departamento de Trabajo in Mexico City, he analyzed the complexity of the relationship among workers in the core of Mexico’s textile industry, the foreign capitalists who owned the mills, and the various revolutionary factions in control of national and local organs of the state. He concluded that despite the combativeness of textile workers throughout this period, the gains they wrested from capitalists and from a supposedly reformist state were modest.

Daniel Greenberg (Pace University) gave the third paper, “Labor Militancy and the Concordancia: Agustín Justo and the Federation of Telephone Workers and Employees’ Strike of 1932.” Focusing on this single strike against the telephone company in the province of Buenos Aires, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based International Telephone and Telegraph Company, he addressed the broad issue of the nature of labor politics during the conservative interregnum (1930-43) between the “populist” regimes of Hipólito Yrigoyen and Juan Domingo Perón. He showed that the intransigence of the firm’s management and the importance of a public service vulnerable to sabotage led Justo’s representatives to intervene and eventually enforce a settlement generally favorable to the union. Whether this is a special case or an example of a broader trend during a period of transition between two populisms, he concluded, is a question worth additional research.

Barbara Weinstein (State University of New York, Stony Brook) provided the first comment. She placed all three papers within a current of recent labor scholarship that rejects the traditional emphasis on worker cooptation and manipulation by populist regimes. She noted, however, that none of the papers dealt with labor/ state relations during periods customarily classified as populist (such as the first governments of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina); that only Hirsch pursued this kind of revisionism “consciously”; and that, given the evidence of capitalists’ intransigence in all the cases, all three authors failed to address the question of how much worse labor’s fate might have been had workers not engaged in militant struggle.

Peter Klarén (George Washington University) could not attend the meeting; his comments, exclusively focused on Hirsch’s paper, were read by Bergquist. He emphasized the importance of Hirsch’s argument in the context of the literature on labor and populism and urged him to go further in emphasizing the influence of Aprista labor on Peruvian politics generally.

A full half hour remained for discussion. Among the general issues raised was the question of whether these were special cases or parts of some larger pattern of relations between labor, capital, and the state in twentieth-century Latin America.

C. B.

The session on “The Mission as Frontier Institution: Global Perspectives on Conversion, Colonization and Acculturation” was chaired by Noel Q. King (University of California, Santa Cruz). From 30 to 60 people attended.

David Sweet (University of California, Santa Cruz), who wished to acknowledge the assistance in preparation given by Rick Warner, presented the keynote paper, “The Ibero-American Frontier Mission in Indian History: Bolton Revisited for the 1990s.” He demonstrated how the canonical text of the 1920s “Mission as Frontier Institution” approach published in the American Historical Review of 1917 had been overtaken by a vast number of other considerations including some appreciation of the human and ecological devastation brought about. He gave a long list of these, carefully based on an immense amount of primal documentation and field study. Above all he showed how something of what was experienced by the autochthonous peoples could be reliably recovered by the historian and used as a basis for more balanced study.

Jessica Coope’s (University of Nebraska) paper on “Cultural and Religious Conversion to Islam in Ninth-Century Umayyad Córdoba focused on Spanish Christians who went over to Islam and the reception they received, especially in view of the ambiguities of being sharers in Arabic language and culture as well as in Islam. The material cited drew on the Arabic as well as the Latin sources with telling effect, especially where they dealt with the same cases of conversion.

In “Buddhism and Colonization: Imperial Japan and the Northern Frontier” James E. Ketelaar (Stanford University) indicated the role of Shin Pure Land and Sōtō Zen in the subjugation of the Ainu and the colonial assimilation of Hokkaido during the Meiji era (with a glance back to the history of the previous centuries). Again the lack of a language that can convey the horrible was emphasized, and the interplay of imperialisms, politics, class, and economic struggles brought out. The labor history aspect, including the proposal for the use of impressed Ainu and convicts by a minister of the interior whose legal training was shaped at Harvard, was among the many important sidelights presented.

In the lively discussion that followed it was pointed out that missions had continued and prospered as an important item of historical study and research from Bolton to our own day. Now was not a time for mere debunking but for trying to set forth more balanced history. The phenomenon of mission, with or without economic or imperialist motives, occurs in many religions and ideologies and can be detected as an important ingredient in a good number of historical reactions.

N. Q. K.

Chaired by Catherine LeGrand (McGill University), the panel “Twentieth-Century Colombia: How Aberrant A Case?” brought together three papers that grappled with issues relating Colombian history to that of the rest of Latin America. Richard Stoller (Duke University) presented a paper entitled “Party Politics and Economic Decline in Northeastern Colombia, 1904-1930.” The author stressed the utility of a regional focus for understanding the social bases of politics and the centrality of party affiliation to the ordering of Colombian social life. Specifically, this paper aimed to explicate the linkages between economic stagnation and increased partisan conflict in the department of Santander with particular emphasis on the reasons for the rise of gamonalismo at the local level, on factors that inhibited the power of compromise-minded elites based in the regional capital, and on the importance of political as well as economic resources in the careers of local politicians. Stoller concluded that by taking a long-term perspective and using local-level prosopography as well as other innovative methodologies, Colombianists should be able to “deconstruct the party system and understand its social logic without recourse to the self-justificatory jargon and assumptions of Colombian exceptionalism.”

Christopher Abel (University of London) presented a report on research in progress that he titled “The History of Public Health in Colombia Since the 1940s: Who Cares?” Based on work in libraries and documentation centers and also on interviews conducted in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali, the paper addressed four major themes: (1) the evolution of public policy; (2) ideology, social stratification, and health care; (3) the changing relationship between the private and public sectors; and (4) the evolution of the health-care professions. The speaker also raised questions of periodization, of the relationship between external influences and domestic factors, and of pressures for health-care reform from the private sector, public employees, and organized labor.

Augusto Gómez (Universidad Javeriana and Instituto Colombiano de Antropología) unfortunately was unable to attend the session. He did, however, submit his paper, which is available from the session chair. Titled “Slavery, Debt Peonage, and Terror; Systems of Domination of the Indigenous Labor Force During the First Rubber Cycle in the Colombian Amazon (1850-1930),” this paper is based on unpublished reports from the Ministerio de Gobierno among other sources. It details the effects of the quina and rubber booms on the native population of the upper Caquetá-Putumayo, the first stage by which the region was opened to colonization by mestizo settlers who have continued to pour in since the 1930s. Gómez’s paper is symptomatic of a growing interest in the Amazon among Colombian historians and anthropologists who are seeking to define similarities and differences between what happened in Colombia and the Amazonian experiences of other Latin American countries.

Judith Ewell (College of William and Mary) provided a commentary, particularly on Richard Stoller’s paper. She questioned whether status necessarily reflects wealth in rural localities, and she raised the issue of whether or not economic resources are necessary for the functioning of clientelist networks. Her comments were followed by a lively discussion with the audience that lasted one-half hour beyond the time the session was to have ended.

C. L.

The meeting of the Colonial Studies Committee featured a paper by the Peruvian scholar Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy (Universidad Católica del Perú) that compared and contrasted the Andean revolts of the last half of the eighteenth century—the Quito rebellion of 1765, the great rebellion of Túpac Amaru in 1780-81 in Upper and Lower Peru, and the revolt of the Comuneros in New Granada in 1781. John Jay TePaske (Duke University) presided; approximately fifty people attended.

Themes explored by Professor O’Phelan included the need for more precise definition of the movements as revolts, rebellions, or revolutions, and messianism and utopianism as elements in these movements. Her analysis centered on certain key variables involved in all three rebellions—the role of the cacique, the mita, mining, the trade system, networks of kinship relationships, patterns of common, everyday violence, and conflicts and ties among caste groups. Lastly, she attempted to find threads connecting late eighteenth-century movements with the establishment of juntas de gobierno between 1809 and 1814. O’Phelan stressed particularly changes in local economic conditions and governmental imposition of new, onerous taxes and monopolies at the root of Andean discontent at virtually all levels of society. Thus, castes, Indians, and creoles, all protesting new, unpopular economic policies and local injustices, formed a critical mass of rebels for each movement. Moreover, this local unhappiness with governmental fiscal policies tied the movements of the 1780s to the juntas de gobierno in the independence period. Millenialism, utopianism, and revival of Inca nationalism were less important elements in the insurrections.

Spirited discussion focused on the rewards and pitfalls of schematic comparative analysis of the late eighteenth-century revolt and the differences in the Mexican and Andean milieus at the same point in time, particularly the existence of the mita in Peru as a crucial variable and heightened intellectual activity in New Spain, which created a stronger sense of American identity there.

J. J. T.

The Brazilian Studies Committee and the Camões Center for the Study of Portuguese Speaking Peoples co-sponsored an address by Fernando Novais of the Universidade de São Paulo, Campinas, on recent trends in Brazilian historiography. After being introduced by Steven Topik (University of California, Irvine), who chaired the session, Novais presented a wide-ranging and warmly received discussion of the history of Brazilian history to a distinguished and greying audience. He noted that until twenty years ago very few Brazilians besides José Honório Rodrigues concerned themselves with historiography. Recently, however, historiography has received more attention; every session of the national historical association (ANPUH) has panels on historiography. Unfortunately, these tend to be studies of specific historians, e.g., Varnhagen, Southey, Buarque de Holanda, rather than topics. There still is a reluctance to problematize Brazilian historiography.

The relative backwardness of Brazilian historiographical studies, according to Novais, stems in good part from the slow academic development of the discipline of history. Only in 1934 (in his Paulista-centric view) was the first university founded. Historical studies were divided into “chairs.” The first chairs were in American, Brazilian, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern and Contemporary history. Some of the first professors were Frenchmen, such as Fernand Braudel, but they did not teach Brazilian history, which was dominated by traditionalists such as Affonso Taunay.

The turning point came in 1968 when the military, interested in purging radical professors, accidentally aided the discipline of history by abolishing the chair system. Students became freer to study the area of their choice. At the same time, the military greatly expanded the number of graduate institutions, causing a great growth in the number of M.A. and Ph.D. theses.

The other important influence on Brazilian historiography was the arrival of the U.S. Brazilianist “wave” in the 1960s. Unlike the French who had previously had the greatest influence on Brazilian studies and who had come as teachers, the North Americans came as researchers studying and living in Brazil. Brazilianists affected Brazilian historians—often indirectly—with their empiricist emphasis, their interest in Latin American history as a whole, and the fact that many of them were specialists in areas other than history. North Americans have become so influential that even Brazilian reception of French Annales approaches such as the study of mentalités comes through North Americans such as Natalie Davis and Robert Darnton.

Historical studies are very concerned with fashion, which has shifted from political history to working-class movements to ideology and discourse to mentalities. Recent studies employ French methods on subjects such as sex, gestures, and sodomy in the post-1889 and particularly the post-1930 periods. Too often historians believe that what is new is per se good. But, cautioned Novais, they should ask if the study is new and good, not just new. These new histories cannot use the same concepts as earlier studies, because they have new subjects. Unfortunately there are no new concepts in the new history. With the crisis in Marxism, they are falling into narratives and descriptions.

Since the Brazilianist audience in attendance was the subject of the talk as well as its object, there followed an eager discussion. Many questioned the influence and reception of Brazilianist works, suggesting that there was really just a trickle, not a flood of North Americans. Others lamented the decline of Brazilianists. All found Novais’s talk provocative.

S. T.

Some 35 colleagues and guests heard two thoughtful lectures on slavery in Peru at the Andean Studies Committee Meeting of the CLAH. Nils Jacobsen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) recorded the proceedings. In her paper, entitled “The Body, the City, and History: Slaves and Free Persons of Color in Lima, 1680-1699,” Nancy van Deusen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) sought to demonstrate the contradiction between the great importance of slaves for Lima s colonial economy—as the backbone of the labor force in construction, artisanal industries, and manual services—and their alienation, understood as their complete lack of control over their own lives. Many blacks were homeless and poor, especially in old age when their bodies had lost the capacity for labor. Convents, monasteries, and other religious houses were crucial as places of work and, in old age, of survival for both slave and free blacks. As the number of slaves grew during the seventeenth century, the municipal and ecclesiastic authorities became increasingly intent on controlling and isolating the black population. This concern climaxed in the construction of the Hospital de San Bartolomé, one of the very few charitable institutions in the Spanish Indies expressly built for free blacks and mulattos. By the late seventeenth century, the hospital also served slaves. While the large building complex gave the blacks of Lima “a space of their own,” many who came there did not recover from their illnesses and died.

In her extended paper, entitled “Relaciones rural-urbanas de los esclavos de Lima, 1790-1854,” Christine Hünefeldt (University of California, San Diego) suggested that slaves on Peru’s central coast, through negotiation, resistance, and contracts, played the key role in the demise of slavery, and that the movements between the city of Lima and its agrarian hinterland provided a crucial element in the slaves’ strategy. Social control over slaves on rural estates varied greatly. While large haciendas even increased the number of slaves, labor discipline on mediumsized estates tended to be lax, and there was evidence for the “peasant breach” on smallholdings utilizing slaves. The greatest share of manumissions between independence and emancipation in 1854 was the result of “auto-manumissions,” the patient and persistent pursuit of the slaves themselves to apply earnings to purchasing their own freedom and that of their children and spouses. As possibilities for monetary income and for manumission were greater in the city than in the countryside, slaves took advantage of any means to move to the city. Slave women played a crucial role in the process of auto-manumission, first seeking their own freedom and then that of their children. They exploited many tactics and ruses to this end, relying on openings in the legal system, networks of friends and relatives in the city, protection by clerics and municipal authorities, and the competition between creoles for slaves. Legal avenues for undermining slavery in the author’s view were considerably more important than rebellion, flight, or marronage.

In her prepared comments, Susan Ramírez (DePauI University) stressed that both papers significantly contributed to a reinterpretation of the social situation of slaves and the process leading to emancipation in Peru. Noting some problems in the conceptual structure of van Deusen’s paper, she took as the author’s most important conclusion that the terms “free” and “slave” were relative in colonial Lima because of the controls imposed by institutions and city ordinances on all blacks and because of the ambivalent meaning of manumissions. Ramírez praised Hünefeldt’s innovative linkage of urban and rural slavery in the context of the institution’s decomposition. She expressed doubts on the representativeness of the author s data and suggested that structural factors leading to emancipation should not be neglected vis-à-vis the emphasis on actions by the slaves themselves, warning against the facile adoption of politically fashionable interpretations. In the following lively debate, members of the audience especially raised the issue of the economic significance of manumissions and the decomposition of Peru’s slavery regime.

N. J.