In this groundbreaking study on the intersection of race, science, and politics in colonial Latin American, José Jouve Martín explores the reasons why the city of Lima, in the decades that preceded the wars of independence in Peru, became dependent on a large number of bloodletters, surgeons, and doctors of African descent. The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima focuses on the lives and fortunes of three of the most distinguished among this group of black physicians: José Pastor de Larrinaga, a surgeon of controversial medical ideas who passionately defended the right of scientific learning for Afro-Peruvians; José Manuel Dávalos, a doctor who studied medicine at the University of Montpellier and played a key role in the smallpox vaccination campaigns in Peru; and José Manuel Valdés, a multifaceted writer who became the first and only person of black ancestry to become a chief medical officer in Spanish America. By carefully documenting their actions and writings, The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima illustrates how medicine and its related fields became areas in which the descendants of slaves found opportunities for social and political advancement, and a platform from which to engage in provocative dialogue with Enlightenment thought and social revolution.

Based on extensive archival research in Peru, Spain, and Italy, Making Medicines in Early Colonial Lima, Peru examines how apothecaries in Lima were trained, ran their businesses, traded medicinal products, prepared medicines, and found their place in society. In the book, Newson argues that apothecaries had the potential to be innovators in science, especially in the New World where they encountered new environments and diverse healing traditions. However, it shows that despite experimental tendencies among some apothecaries, they generally adhered to traditional humoral practices and imported materia medica from Spain rather than adopt native plants or exploit the region’s rich mineral resources. This adherence was not due to state regulation, but reflected the entrenchment of humoral beliefs in popular thought and their promotion by the Church and Inquisition.

Covering more than 500 years of history, culture, and politics, The Lima Reader seeks to capture the many worlds and many peoples of Peru’s capital city, featuring a selection of primary sources that consider the social tensions and cultural heritages of the “City of Kings.”

Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Miguel A. Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.

Ideally suited for use in broad, swift-moving surveys of Latin American and Caribbean history, this abridgment of McKnight and Garofalo's Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812 (2009) includes all of the English translations, introductions, and annotation created for that volume.

Examines the full range of humanities and social science scholarship on people of African descent in Latin America.

This book explores how ideas about race travelled across national borders in early twentieth-century Latin America. It builds on a vast array of scholarly works which underscore the highly contingent and flexible nature of race and racism in the region. The framework of the nation-state dominates much of this scholarship, in part because of the important implications of ideas about race for state policies. This book argues that we need to investigate the cross-border elaboration of ideas that informed and fed into these policies. It is organized around three key policy areas – labour, cultural heritage, and education – and focuses on conversations between Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals about the ‘indigenous question’. Most historical scholarship on Chile and Peru draws attention to the wars fought in the nineteenth century and their long-term consequences, which reverberate to this day. Relations between the two countries are therefore interpreted almost exclusively as antagonistic and hostile. Itinerant Ideas challenges this dominant historical narrative.