Whether they be the painted walls and highly ‘dressed’ altars of Andean churches, or the collective knotted strings and litigation proceedings housed in locked chests in local Indian municipal councils, artifacts conjure up cultural interstices instrumental for discerning the “fine grain” of Spanish colonialism in the Andes. After the early years of the Spanish presence, the Andes became a mosaic of multifarious articulations of indigenous, European, and African ways of thinking, living, and weaving a social order that continued to change over time and across the geographical space of the viceroyalty of Peru.

In recent years, scholars from a variety of fields have advanced the idea that native legal activism worked as one of the most widespread and effective strategies for the defense of communal assets, political autonomy, and customary law in early colonial Peru. Indigenous claimants, petitioners, and legal intermediaries begin to appear in the historical record just ten years after the initial encounter at Cajamarca in 1532. After embracing Iberian legal culture in the early 1540s, individuals of noble Inca descent began to engage with local and metropolitan courts, preparing letters, reports, petitions, and proofs of services and merit aimed at securing their status within the new order. Native lords (caciques) and communities of non-Inca origin joined as active litigants and petitioners in the late 1540s, hiring advocates and solicitors and sending their own delegations to tend to their legal affairs in Lima, seat of a royal court of appeal. During the two decades that followed the promulgation of the New Laws (1542), which granted these courts of appeal or audiencias in the Americas the right to assess and revise Indian tributary quotas, Lima experienced an explosion of litigation by native polities requesting a reduction of their fiscal burdens and caciques seeking confirmation of their chiefly rank. Lawsuits pertaining to lands and pastures, town boundaries, and lordship (cacicazgo) rights soon ensued. In the early 1560s, the first Andean caciques crossed the Atlantic on behalf of their communities and reached the still-itinerant Habsburg court. Indigenous groups quickly became expert litigators in secular and ecclesiastical courts. Their legal activism continued unabated throughout the Habsburg era.

In building its early modern empire across the Atlantic, Spain deployed an army of legal bureaucrats who were rooted in the Iberian culture of letters and inherited Roman law. To rule their possessions in the New World, the Habsburgs attempted a wholesale incorporation of indigenous peoples into a Hispanicized legal culture. They redistributed the native population, introduced new forms of communication, and implemented their notions of justice and social order to counter the authority of kurakas (ethnic lords) in the Andes. Over time, the establishment of Spanish legal and political institutions encouraged new supra-ayllu (community) loyalties among Andeans, while in the newly created reducciones or Indian towns, native literate officials became the immediate brokers between the colonial state and the República de Indios, a colonial reordering of indigenous worlds. Working closely with one another, indigenous escribanos, alcaldes ordinarios, procuradores de cabildo (legal advocates of the Indians’ council), along with interpreters and fiscales de iglesia (overseers of Indian conversion), performed their jobs in local office in both expected and unanticipated ways. They interwove alphabetic literacy with their experience as servants of the state and the church, creating alternative legal practices and interpretations.

The first Christian churches were built in the Andes soon after Spaniards arrived. Initially simple structures, they were later remodeled into large stone monuments. Aside from their architectural construction, the furnishing and decoration of these churches was an ongoing project that involved many participants, often under the watchful eye of a parish priest. Art historians have uncovered fascinating cases in which native artists exercised agency in creating works to be displayed in church interiors, many of which expressed Andean as well as Christian beliefs. This scholarship has focused primarily on the art forms of painting and sculpture, which were very visible within the church, especially in cases such as the baptism murals discussed by Ananda Cohen Suarez in this issue. An underappreciated yet equally notable aspect of church decoration was textiles. Throughout the colonial period churches were abundantly adorned with “church clothing,” textile ornaments meant to cover floors, walls, and altars as well as clothe church functionaries and religious statuary. The purchase and maintenance of church textiles consumed the lion's share of annual church budgets.

The arts of the colonial Andes bear witness to a complex and contested story of evangelization that involved a variety of actors, including priests, artists, indigenous congregations, and confraternities. Sculptures of saints, sumptuous retablos (altarpieces), canvas paintings with elaborate gilded frames, and mural cycles devoted to a variety of biblical themes were employed in the religious instruction of indigenous communities, and as catalysts for sensorial modes of communication. The visual arts provided a tangible analogue to sermons and printed catechisms, offering parishioners a lens through which to envision the sacred. Adapted from European iconographic models and infused with local references and symbolism, religious art throughout the colonial Americas introduced new visual vocabularies to indigenous congregations, who quickly became conversant in these images of conversion.

The editorial office has received a number of edited volumes of articles that will be of interest to our readership. These works tend to be less suitable for unified reviews than monographs, and thus a considerable backlog has developed. To introduce these volumes, we occasionally list in this section the publication information and tables of contents entries for those we have received. The five volumes selected for this issue focus on politics and economics, with emphases on neoliberalism and the Cuban economy.

Between July 23 and July 25, 2014, the University of Montevideo hosted the Fourth Jornadas Internacionales de Historia del Paraguay, with sponsorship from the Universities of Georgia, Köln, and Rennes 2. Organized by Thomas Whigham and Juan Manuel Casal, the conference included 45 presenters and 70 attendees traveling to the Uruguayan capital from the United States, Germany, Spain, Italy, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Students from both the National and Catholic Universities of Asunción also took part with one of their number, Claudio José Fuentes Armadans (Universidad Católica), providing an interesting presentation on the history of the Liberal Party. First-time contributors to the conference included Carlos Gómez Florentín (SUNY Stony Brook), who discussed the environmental history of the hydroelectric complex at Itaipú, and Justin Michael Heath (University of Texas, Austin), who traced the evolution of frontier security in the early Jesuit missions. The Jornadas also benefited from repeat contributors, including Ignacio Telesca (Universidad Nacional de Formosa/CONICET), who analyzed the historical content of Paraguayan textbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Bridget María Chesterton, who discussed how the “sweet herb” ka’a he’e (stevia) has affected markets and habits of consumption in more recent times.