Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This paper analyzes the jurisdictional dimension of the Royal Treasury of New Spain during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, based on two aspects. On the one hand, it determines the legal formula through which the monarch granted the power to exercise jurisdiction to a specific group of employees: the royal officers of the Treasury and the administrators and commissioners of certain revenues (sale taxes, quicksilver, cards, stamped paper, Indian capitation, etcetera). On the other hand, it shows how the appearance of these judges and courts of the Treasury took place over a long time as a result of two phenomena, namely: the variation in the range of revenues branches that made up the Royal Treasury of New Spain and the changes in the management policies of these items.

This article analyses different legal documents regarding the life of the Marquis of Moncada. It examines two of his manuscripts to demonstrate that some military men read literature and practiced written translation in New Spain during the second half of the 18th century, besides performing their military labor.

In the middle of the 16th century, licentiate Jerónimo de Valderrama arrived in Mexico City as visitor to the Indies. A small part of that visit has come to us in a documentary corpus traditionally known as the Osuna Codex. It collects the complaints of the native community within the Royal Court in the form of different pictograms. As the Codex was studied more for its administrative character, its material side has been neglected throughout different studies. This article proposes, therefore, to analyse the Osuna Codex from the point of view of codicology and study of the image, in order to try to answer questions regarding the crafting processes, the creators of the Codex, or its journey from the very place of its creation to where it is kept today.

In the mid-eighteenth century began the process of colonization that originated the Colony of Nuevo Santander (present day Tamaulipas), a situation that generated and encouraged the resistance of its native inhabitants. The essay analyses its development in the province in a chronological order and identifies the aborigines who fostered it. The hypothesis here proposed is that the native resistance manifested itself with more force in the center-south and north of Nuevo Santander, and that, despite sharing certain characteristics with the native protagonists, it would be the cultural aspects that differentiated them which would influence the objectives of each one and the way in which the phenomenon behaved in those areas. Likewise, the attention that the viceregal authorities paid to the resistance in the northern part of the viceroyalty contrasted markedly with its counterpart, because the pacification of the northern border was defined as a matter of viceregal character. This study is rooted on a comparative method which analyses the information compiled within the indexes that record those acts of the natives in the center-south and north of the territory, which nourished tenacity. The analysis reveals that both the behavior and the dimensions that the two resistance processes acquired show significant differences, related to their impact, range, and to the way in which local and external authorities confronted the situation in both areas, a process wherein local interests yielded to national ones.

The election of san Bernardo as patron saint of Mexico City in 1699 exposed the links between the City Council of the viceregal capital, the convent of the Bernardas, and some members of the Consulate of Merchants. The election made it possible for authorities, membersof the Church, and merchants to make use of practices such as the granting of loans and the making of local political-administrative decisions for personal profit. Such practices were the result of conjunctural negotiation dynamics among corporations, which occurred after the grain supply crisis that originated the tumult of 1692. These practices allowed the corregidor, Don Carlos Tristán del Pozo, the regidor-merchant, Don Pedro Jiménez de los Cobos, and the city council officials, Simón Fernández de Angulo and Juan García de las Rivas, to act as transversal agents.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate, with a detailed analysis of quantitative and qualitative primary documentary sources, like parochial books, reports and correspondence exchanges delivered by the authorities of the time, what was the real reason for the mortality rate in Yucatán in the early nineteenth century. Were the so called famines the main reason for an increase in burials, as indicated on the documentation and defended by the regional historiography? Or is it that epidemics had something to do with crises besides being just another variable to consider? This work employs a demographic-historical approach to juxtapose the calamities that hit the structure and the agrarian production of Yucatán, such as subsistence crises and famines, with the epidemics registered in that period. The death toll in three corn producer towns, with a lot of indigenous population and calamities chronologically identified and bounded to the proposed periodization (1799-1810) are the ones that will show objectively if the deaths responded to the famines or the yellow fever, measles, and other current illnesses in the region.

Review about Guillermina del Valle Pavón, coord., Negociación, lágrimas y maldiciones. La fiscalidad extraordinaria en la monarquía hispánica, 1620-1814, Colección Historia Económica (México: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 2020).

Since the arrival of Europeans in America, scientific thought imposes upon itself the need to build an imaginary within which this new reality fits. The body of the American must be objectified in order to be controlled. The scientific discourse would generate representations of the “other”, as an object of inquiry and study, with a view to justify domination. This article looks into the account of the surgeon Pedro Arias de Benavides and his Secretos de cirugía, especial de las enfermedades de morbo gallico y lamparones y mirrarchia (Valladolid, 1567), in order to investigate issues related to the body images of otherness that arise from his pen, the composition of this otherness in the eyes of the author, and how he explained its relationship with health and disease, therapies, resources, and the surroundings.

Review about Francisco Javier Cervantes Bello, Redención y deuda en una ciudad episcopal. Puebla 1798-1821, Colección Memoria de la Ciudad (Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla/H. Ayuntamiento del Municipio de Puebla, 2021).

Reseña sobre Fernando Olvera Charles, “Sobrevivir o fenecer en el noreste novohispano”. Estrategias de los indígenas ante la colonización y su incidencia en el comportamiento de la resistencia nativa en Nuevo Santander, 1750-1796 (San Luis Potosí: El Colegio de San Luis/Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2019), 208 pp.