"Few decisions in life should be more personal than the choice of a spouse or lover. Yet, throughout history, this intimate experience has been subjected to painstaking social and religious regulation in the form of legislation and restraining social mores." With that statement, Asunción Lavrin begins her introduction to this collection of original essays, the first in English to explore sexuality and marriage in colonial Latin America. The nine contributors, including historians and anthropologists, examine various aspects of the male-female relationship and the mechanisms for controlling it developed by church and state after the European conquest of Mexico and Central and South America. Seldom has so much light been shed on the sexual behavior of the men and women who lived there from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. These chapters examine the variety of sexual expression in different periods and among persons of different social and economic status, the relations of the sexes as proscribed by church and state and the various forms of resistance to their constraints, the couple's own view of the bond that united them and of their social obligations in producing a family, and the dissolution of that bond. Topics infrequently explored in Latin American history but discussed her include premarital relations, illegitimacy, consensual unions, sexual witchcraft, spouse abuse, and divorce. Lavrin's opening survey of the forms of sexual relationships most discussed in ecclesiastical sources serves as a point of departure for the chapters that follow. The contributors are Serge Grunzinski, Ann Twinam, Kathy Waldron, Ruth Behar, Susan Socolow, Richard Boyer, Thomas Calvo, and María Beatriz Nizza da Silva. Asunción Lavrin is a professor of history at Arizona State University at Tempe. Her 1995 book, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940, won the Arthur P. Whitaker Prize from the Middle Atlantic Council on Latin American Studies.

Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America brings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin AmericaÕs colonial and early national periods. Together the essays examine how "the unnaturalÓ came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be Òagainst natureÓÑsodomy, bestiality, and masturbationÑalong with others that approximated the unnaturalÑhermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. In doing so, this anthology makes important and necessary contributions to the historiography of gender and sexuality. Amid the growing politicized interest in broader LGBTQ movements in Latin America, the essays also show how these legal codes endured to make their way into post-independence Latin America.Ê

A highly readable survey of women's experiences in Latin America from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America brings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America’s colonial and early national periods. Together the essays examine how "the unnatural” came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be “against nature”—sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation—along with others that approximated the unnatural—hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. In doing so, this anthology makes important and necessary contributions to the historiography of gender and sexuality. Amid the growing politicized interest in broader LGBTQ movements in Latin America, the essays also show how these legal codes endured to make their way into post-independence Latin America.

The Sexual History of the Global South explores the gap between sexuality studies and post-colonial cultural critique. Featuring twelve case studies, based on original historical and ethnographic research from countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the book examines the sexual investments underlying the colonial project and the construction of modern nation-states. Covering issues of heteronormativity, post-colonial amnesia regarding non-normative sexualities, women's sexual agency, the policing of the boundaries between the public and the private realm, sexual citizenship, the connections between LGBTQ activism and processes of state formation, and the emergence of sexuality studies in the global South, this collection is of great geographical, historical, and topical significance.

“A gem of historical scholarship!”—Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America How do intimate relationships reveal, reflect, enable, or enact the social and political dimensions of imperial projects? In particular, how did colonial relations in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century southern California implicate sexuality, marriage, and kinship ties? In Colonial Intimacies, Erika Pérez probes everyday relationships, encounters, and interactions to show how intimate choices about marriage, social networks, and godparentage were embedded in larger geopolitical concerns. Her work reveals, through the lens of social and familial intimacy, subtle tools of conquest and acts of resistance and accommodation among indigenous peoples, Spanish-Mexican settlers, Franciscan missionaries, and European and Anglo-American merchants. Concentrating on Catholic conversion, compadrazgo (baptismal sponsorship that often forged interethnic relations), and intermarriage, Pérez examines the ways indigenous and Spanish-Mexican women helped shape communities and sustained their culture. She uncovers an unexpected fluidity in Californian society—shaped by race, class, gender, religion, and kinship—that persisted through the colony’s transition from Spanish to American rule. Colonial Intimacies focuses on the offspring of interethnic couples and their strategies for coping with colonial rule and negotiating racial and cultural identities. Pérez argues that these sons and daughters experienced conquest in different ways tied directly to their gender, and in turn faced different options in terms of marriage partners, economic status, social networks, and expressions of biculturality. Offering a more nuanced understanding of the colonial experience, Colonial Intimacies exposes the personal ties that undergirded imperial relationships in Spanish, Mexican, and early American California.

The author uses marriage to examine the social history of New Mexico between 1500 and 1846