The Indian In Spanish America

Even before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, the practice of taking captives was widespread among Native Americans. Indians took captives for many reasons: to replace--by adoption--tribal members who had been lost in battle, to use as barter for needed material goods, to use as slaves, or to use for reproductive purposes. From the legendary story of John Smith's captivity in the Virginia Colony to the wildly successful narratives of New England colonists taken captive by local Indians, the genre of the captivity narrative is well known among historians and students of early American literature. Not so for Hispanic America. Fernando Operé redresses this oversight, offering the first comprehensive historical and literary account of Indian captivity in Spanish-controlled territory from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Originally published in Spanish in 2001 as Historias de la frontera: El cautiverio en la América hispánica, this newly translated work reveals key insights into Native American culture in the New World's most remote regions. From the "happy captivity" of the Spanish military captain Francisco Nuñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, who in 1628 spent six congenial months with the Araucanian Indians on the Chilean frontier, to the harrowing nineteenth-century adventures of foreigners taken captive in the Argentine Pampas and Patagonia; from the declaraciones of the many captives rescued in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the riveting story of Helena Valero, who spent twenty-four years among the Yanomamö in Venezuela during the mid-twentieth century, Operé's vibrant history spans the entire gamut of Spain's far-flung frontiers. Eventually focusing on the role of captivity in Latin American literature, Operé convincingly shows how the captivity genre evolved over time, first to promote territorial expansion and deny intercultural connections during the colonial era, and later to romanticize the frontier in the service of nationalism after independence. This important book is thus multidisciplinary in its concept, providing ethnographic, historical, and literary insights into the lives and customs of Native Americans and their captives in the New World.

A study of the hierarchical social order imposed on indigenous peoples by their Spanish conquerors.

The Return of the Native offers a look at the role of preconquest peoples such as the Aztecs and the Incas in the imagination of Spanish American elites in the first century after independence.

This volume, the first of its genre in English, brings together the pioneering work of scholars of urban Indians of colonial Latin America. An important, but understudied segment of colonial society, urban Indians composed a majority of the population of Spanish America's most important cities. The geographic range, chronological scope, and thematic content of urban native studies is addressed by examining such topics as the role of natives in settling frontier regions, interethnic relations, notaries and chroniclers, and the continuation of indigenous governance. In spanning the entirety of the colonial period, the persistence and the creation of urban Indian identities and their contributions to colonial society is brought to the fore. Scholarly contributions include chapters by Susan Schroeder, "Whither Tenochtitlan? Chimalpahin and Mexico City, 1593-1631" and David Cahill, "Urban Mosaic: Indigenous Ethnicities in Colonial Cuzco". The volume opens with commentary by John K Chance, pioneer scholar of urban Indians in Latin America and author of the highly praised Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca and is summed up in "Concluding Remarks" by Kevin Terraciano, author of the widely acclaimed The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Nudzahui History. The diverse themes, time periods, and geographic regions discussed herein make this illustrated book essential reading for all those engaged in colonial and indigenous studies.