Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Susan Deans-Smith. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Susan Deans-Smith. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis advisor: Owen Stanwood / This dissertation is a history of the First Irish Diaspora and its relationship to the Spanish Empire’s eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms. Although there is a long history of Irish migration to Spain, I argue that the conjuncture of the War of the English Succession (1688-1695) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) foreclosed hopes of a reversal of the seventeenth century Irish land-confiscations which defined the English conquest and colonization of Ireland, pushing thousands of Irish Catholics into exile near-simultaneous to the ascension of a reform-minded Bourbon monarchy to the Spanish thrown which opened new opportunities for useful subjects. At the same time, these wars established the emergent British Empire as a rising Atlantic hegemon and exposed the fragility of a Spanish Empire widely viewed by contemporaries as in decline. In such a context, Irish familiarity with British methods of empire-making made them ideal imperial translators for the Spanish Crown precisely as the empire embarked on its Bourbon Reform program. Genealogy and religion formed the foundations of Irish assimilation into the Spanish Empire – the Irish became Hiberno-Spaniards because of the “genealogical fiction” that the Irish sliocht (“race,” literally “seed”) descended from Spaniards and because they were Catholic. In Spain, the impact of this Hiberno-Spanish diaspora on the Bourbon Reforms began following the War of the Spanish Succession and reached its crescendo in the aftermath of Spain’s disastrous defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Specifically, Hiberno-Spanish imperialists in the metropole were important participants in the debates and decisions that promoted liberalizing national-colonial trade, investments in infrastructure, the emulation of foreign practices such as British and Irish economic societies, and more; i.e. the emulation of British political economy. Their principal contribution to the empire was the translation of political economic statecraft and a cosmopolitanism of exile that honed their ability to translate foreign ideas in an age of imperial emulation and made them especially effective imperial intermediaries in polyglot and liminal spaces such as the Gulf Coast borderlands. There, in Cuba, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, Hiberno-Spanish slavers, governors, merchants, and imperialists were important contributors to Spain’s real but ephemeral resurgence in colonial North America and the Atlantic world. The Spanish Empire collapsed and Irish emigration patterns rerouted to North America, but Hiberno-Spaniards and the Bourbon Reforms first accelerated the processes of colonization and slavery that transformed Cuba and the Gulf Coast into the world’s capital of cotton, sugar, and slavery in the nineteenth century. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

A imprensa insurgente encomendada por Miguel Hidalgo e por José Morelos, durante o movimento de independência da Nova Espanha, marcou uma ruptura com a imprensa oficial no início do século XIX. Ao levantar os problemas sociais do Vice-Reino e estratégias para combatê-los, configurou um novo espaço de debate político que respondia prioritariamente às urgências de notícias da guerra e à publicação de constantes manifestos em que se justificava a causa separatista. Analisar o desenvolvimento dos impressos durante a independência constitui um mecanismo para compreendermos a formação de espaços de sociabilidade num momento de debate intenso sobre a formulação de uma identidade mexicana. Os jornais revolucionários podem ser lidos, a partir desta perspectiva, não apenas como um lugar de discussão, mas como um elemento que se vincula a outras instâncias de ação social e estabelece uma comunicação a fim de formar opiniões políticas. / The insurgent press demanded by Miguel Hidalgo and José Morelos, during the independence movement of New Spain, established a rupture with the official media from the early 19th century. When putting through the light the social problems of the Vice-Reign and the strategies to fight against it, a new space for political debate was created, answering mainly to the urgency of the news from the war and the publication of constant manifests in which the independence is a mechanism for us to understand the formation of places for sociability in a moment of intensive debates on the construction of a Mexican identity. The revolutionary newspapers can be read, through this perspective, not only as a place for arguments, but also an element connected to other social practices and establish a communication with the mission to create political opinion.

A imprensa insurgente encomendada por Miguel Hidalgo e por José Morelos, durante o movimento de independência da Nova Espanha, marcou uma ruptura com a imprensa oficial no início do século XIX. Ao levantar os problemas sociais do Vice-Reino e estratégias para combatê-los, configurou um novo espaço de debate político que respondia prioritariamente às urgências de notícias da guerra e à publicação de constantes manifestos em que se justificava a causa separatista. Analisar o desenvolvimento dos impressos durante a independência constitui um mecanismo para compreendermos a formação de espaços de sociabilidade num momento de debate intenso sobre a formulação de uma identidade mexicana. Os jornais revolucionários podem ser lidos, a partir desta perspectiva, não apenas como um lugar de discussão, mas como um elemento que se vincula a outras instâncias de ação social e estabelece uma comunicação a fim de formar opiniões políticas. / The insurgent press demanded by Miguel Hidalgo and José Morelos, during the independence movement of New Spain, established a rupture with the official media from the early 19th century. When putting through the light the social problems of the Vice-Reign and the strategies to fight against it, a new space for political debate was created, answering mainly to the urgency of the news from the war and the publication of constant manifests in which the independence is a mechanism for us to understand the formation of places for sociability in a moment of intensive debates on the construction of a Mexican identity. The revolutionary newspapers can be read, through this perspective, not only as a place for arguments, but also an element connected to other social practices and establish a communication with the mission to create political opinion.

<p>"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.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation addresses key questions that are yet to be answered related to the involvement of local patrons in the decoration of northern New Spanish churches. The case study of the Jesuits' church of San Ignacio in Santa María de las Parras (located in present-day Coahuila, Mexico) reveals new evidence that prominent Spanish and Tlaxcaltecan Indian benefactors participated in the adornment of private devotional chapels in this religious space. In Parras, the Jesuits and secular landowners cultivated vineyards and participated in the lucrative business of viticulture that transformed this mission settlement by the mid-seventeenth century into a thriving winemaking center. As the Jesuits created their own "spiritual economy" in Parras on the northeastern frontier, they fostered alliances with Spanish and Tlaxcaltecan vineyard owners to serve both their religious and temporal interests (Chapter One). The surviving evidence of artworks and inventories reveals that these benefactors donated funds to decorate their own chapels in San Ignacio. This financial support helped the Jesuits purchase and import paintings by prominent artists working in Mexico City for display in their Parras church. While these patrons selected the iconographies of the artworks they funded, the Jesuits also arranged their chapels in a carefully ordered sequencing of images to promote devotions that were commensurate with Ignatian spirituality (Chapter Two). To shed more light on the process in which the Jesuits coordinated the circulation of devotional images from Mexico City to Parras, this study will examine travel logs to document the mobility of the Jesuits and their frequent movement between metropolitan settings and the northern frontier. By tracking the circulation of individuals as well as artworks, it is possible to uncover how the Society's process of fostering relationships with donors operated in Parras just as it did in larger cities such as Mexico City, Lima, Cuzco, and Rome (Chapter Three). Vineyard metaphors that resonated with special symbolic meaning at Parras also took on a new relevance when martyrdom became an omnipresent subject in the wake of Indian revolts. Evangelization on the frontiers of the Christian world became integral to the Jesuits' formation of their missionary identity in both New Spain and Europe. This study will present evidence of rare martyrdom drawings produced in Mexico and transported to Rome that played an active role in transforming the importance of the New Spanish frontier and catalyzed the creation of new artworks in Mexico City and Rome (Chapter Four). The evidence uncovered in this study has important implications for the field of colonial art history, as it reveals that art production in Parras was not an isolated missionary phenomenon but rather part of a dynamic network of artistic patronage and cultural exchange that moved in both directions between Europe and New Spain. This re-contextualizing of center-periphery paradigms further demonstrates that metropolitan and frontier relationships were not always opposed to each other, but rather interacted within a larger network of artistic dialogue. / History of Art and Architecture

This is the story of Spanish belonging in New Spain and the creation of New Spaniards. Tracing Spanish perceptions of place, the body, belonging, and Indian mortality, as well as constructions of “nativeness” and “Spanishness” from the conquest, this work does three things. First it examines the ideological constructs behind Spanish belonging, and the ideas that Spaniards brought with them about their bodies and their relationship to the environment. Second it follows the progression of these ideas through the first three generations of Spanish colonization, paying particular attention to the way that political rivalries, the exigencies of the crown, and Indian mortality affected discourse on belonging and identity. Finally, it captures a moment at the turn of the seventeenth century, when residents of New Spain began to re-imagine their belonging and their relationship to the land and its original inhabitants. / text

La Quijotita y su prima (1818) by Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi (1776-1827) is a highly significant consideration of women and their role in New Spain presented in the form of a novel. It is the first book-length treatise dedicated to a discussion of the education of women in the viceroyalty. Lizardi emphasizes the importance of preparing women for marriage, while denouncing the oppression and violence to which they were often subjected. He stresses their role as heads of the domestic sphere, but ultimately ascribes their success to the guidance of an enlightened paterfamilias. A discussion of Lizardi's controversial career as a reformer and writer at the end of the viceregal regime, his position with regard to the Church, and his reading of Cervantes, Fénelon, Feijoo, Montengôn and others, provide a context for his reflections on education. This analysis calls into question some of the anachronistic interpretations of La Quijotita.