Browsing by Author "Sigal, Pete"

"Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century" explores the socioeconomic worlds of free women of means. I find that they owned slaves, engaged in cross-caste relations, managed their estates, maintained profitable social networks with other regional elites, and attempted to secure the economic futures of their children. Through an examination of notarial, ecclesiastical, and viceregal sources, I highlight the significant role this group played in the local economy and social landscape. My work demonstrates that free women of African descent engaged in specific types of economic endeavors that spoke to their investments in particular kinds of capital (economic, social, and cultural) that allowed them greater visibility and social legitimacy than previously documented. This dissertation, further, challenges a historiography that has over-emphasized the roles of race and gender in determining the lives of all people of African descent in colonial Latin America.

My dissertation, “Coloring the Sacred: Visions of Devotional Kinship in Colonial Peru and Brazil,” spans disciplinary, linguistic, and imperial bounds to explore how local devotion to saints expressed through visual media informed broader debates on the enslavement and the spiritual conquest of “New” world populations in colonial Brazil and Peru. Specifically, I explore a range of social actors—African slaves, indigenous muleteers, Portuguese merchants, and Spanish clergymen—who contributed to the multi-directional process of “coloring the sacred” by producing, consuming, and circulating images of saints. Juxtaposing an iconographic analysis of sacred image-objects (paintings, prints, sculptures, crucifixes, and oratories) alongside textual sources, I historicize how lay devotion to saints and their images could simultaneously bridge and mark ethnic divides, thus contributing to rich theoretical debates on hybridity, religion, and the construction of race in the Iberian Atlantic world.

This dissertation employs excess as an analytical framework to explore the ways in which commoner indigenous and mixed-raced peoples accessed the divine to alleviate the ills afflicting their communities. This study also highlights the moral and legal contexts in which colonial officials invoked excess to justify conquest. The documents that I have consulted show that monarchs, viceroys, clergymen and other state functionaries labeled transgressions such as idolatry, superstition, and deviant sex acts as “excesses.” In addition to these primary sources, my understanding of excess as a calculated rhetorical strategy that conflated non-European sociocultural experiences into a single pejorative category has been informed by historians and literary scholars of Latin America.

This dissertation develops three central arguments. First, European and Mesoamerican cultures recognized that excessive behaviors such as dissolution and licentiousness produced harmful repercussions in the terrestrial world. However, the precise definition of these categories and the ways in which they were addressed varied widely, providing the interstice necessary for Spanish colonizers to equate non-European cultural traditions with sin and immorality. A metaphysical impasse emerged as Europeans maintained a unidirectional relationship with the divine while Indigenous peoples emphasized reciprocity. Because Catholics opined that abstention from all sin was the best way to appease the Lord, the total eradication of excess, rather than its management, was the best way to secure good fortune in the terrestrial realm.

Second, additional conflict stemmed from whether geography was deemed to be sacred or profane. Throughout the colonial era, many indigenous and mixed-raced peoples believed that every aspect of the environment corresponded to a supernatural entity. Spanish colonizers, in contrast, approached geography from a secular perspective. Improper land usage failed to improve the terrain, leaving it wild, while acceptable forms of land tenure enhanced the surrounding area, rendering it cultivated. Areas distant from a city’s moral center were viewed as potentially dangerous, thereby transforming formerly sacred landscapes into dens of iniquity.

Third, although the sexual comportment and religious practices of commoners concerned both elite Spaniards and indigenous peoples, the sociopolitical changes that occurred after Iberians solidified their place in the upper echelons of colonial Mexican society meant that pre-Hispanic forms of sexual behavior and religious devotion were derided and pushed underground. Customs that had facilitated diplomacy, e.g. polygynous marriages, were stripped of their political utility and grouped alongside other sinful practices such as masturbation, sodomy, and. And while commoners continued to solicit the services of native and mixed-raced healers, Catholic officials disparaged them as Devil worshipers. Because excess was consistently interpreted to be antithetical to the imperial project, colonial officials attempted to excise practices such as idolatry, magic, and non-reproductive sex from the body politic. Spanish colonizers fretted about non-orthodox rituals, non-reproductive sexual acts, and other perceived excesses because the perpetuation of these practices threatened the construction of an orderly society.

"For Better or Worse: Divorce and Annulment Lawsuits in Colonial Mexico (1544-1799)" uses petitions for divorce and annulment to explore how husbands and wives defined and contested their marital roles and manipulated legal procedure. Marital conflict provides an intimate window into the daily lives of colonial Mexicans, and the discourses developed in the course of divorce and annulment litigation show us what lawyers, litigants and judges understood to be appropriate behavior for husbands and wives. This dissertation maintains that wives often sued for divorce or annulment not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to quickly escape domestic violence by getting the authorities to place them in enclosure, away from abusive husbands. Many wives used a divorce or annulment lawsuit just to get placed in enclosure, without making a good faith effort to take the litigation to its final conclusion. "For Better or For Worse" also argues concepts of masculinity, rather than notions of honor, played a strong role in the ways that husbands negotiated their presence in divorce and annulment suits. This work thus suggests a new way to interpret the problem of marital conflict in Mexico, showing how wives ably manipulated procedural law to escape abuse and how men attempted to defend their masculine identities and their gendered roles as husbands in the course of divorce and annulment lawsuits.

This dissertation examines the colonial history of medical rights in Latin America through a study of the world’s first vaccine. The Spanish introduced the smallpox vaccine to their empire in 1804, along with royal orders that vaccination be voluntary and medical consent a natural right ceded to parents. Yet, the vaccine first arrived there incubated in the bodies of two enslaved girls. Doctors would continue to rely on enslaved, indigenous, and other dispossessed bodies to conserve the vaccine for those otherwise accorded this ostensibly universal right. Their doing so prompted profound questions about individual liberty, embedding vaccination into struggles over the abolition of slavery, parental rights, and the preservation of colonial rule. By analyzing the politicization of preventative health, the dissertation follows the vaccine through the Spanish Caribbean and Mexico to ask why imperial—and later, national—authorities protected voluntary vaccination, what this choice meant for parents and patients, and what this story can tell us about the meaning and value of consent in an era of both race and rights-making.

To understand how consent operated, I trace the vaccine through the bodies that sustained it, examining the gendered and racialized claims to medical authority that legitimized the vaccine, the state’s patriarchal formulation of consent to it, and the responses and rejections of colonized subjects to both. Medical texts, newspapers, legal codes, orphanage records, plantation guides, and government reports related to the vaccine reveal that recognition of medical rights was inconsistent and often determined by elite assumptions about reason and bodily difference. Racial and sexual politics informed decisions about which bodies were best suited to incubate and test the vaccine, whose knowledge was deemed a threat to public health campaigns, and ultimately, who should be recognized as a parent, worthy of rights and capable of informed consent.

Amidst political and social unrest, I argue that these articulations worked to uphold colonial structures of power, as healthcare became woven into the fractional freedoms accorded to and claimed by subjects and citizens. Medical consent, as it was envisioned and employed in vaccination policies, helped to reinforce these hierarchies even after independence. Mexico retained voluntary vaccination, but the medical rights of women and men, particularly those of indigenous and African descent, remained restricted by assumptions about culture and competence. By tracing the vaccine through the postcolonial era, my project addresses the enduring effects of colonialism across political discourses of liberalism and access to resources and care. Such historicization suggests the limits of consent and prompts a more ethical conceptualization of "informed refusal" that embraces and respects indigenous and other cultural articulations of bodily autonomy.