Adelphi University

Faculty Member, History

Assistant Professor

College of Arts and Sciences

About

Research Interests: 

I am very excited to begin a position this fall as Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York!  This year, I will teach courses on colonial and modern Latin America and World History.

I received my PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles in June of 2009 under the guidance of Kevin Terraciano, a noted scholar of indigenous peoples of colonial Mexico.  From 2009 to 2011, I was University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. 

I am dedicating this year to my book project, "Indians of the Silver City of Zacatecas, Mexico: 1546-1806."  This project examines how groups of ethnically and linguistically diverse indigenous migrants re-created native communities and  re-constructed their respective indigenous identities in the multi-ethnic urban center of Zacatecas, colonial Mexico’s preeminent silver mining city.  The study offers new perspectives on the responses of urban-dwelling native  peoples to colonial rule, illustrating how they used the institutions and negotiated the sociopolitical environment of the colonial urban setting to foster social organizations, community formation and group cohesion.    In so doing, the project stresses re-creation, continuity, and innovation rather than transformation and cultural loss.  It argues that native peoples successfully re-created dynamic indigenous communities and identities vis-à-vis changing economic and cultural backgrounds, which persisted through the late-colonial period, by developing strategies that continued some indigenous practices while also responding innovatively to the urban environment. Research for this project is supported this year by funding from the University of California President’s office, a Harvard Short-Term Research Grant in Atlantic History, and the Conference on Latin American History Lewis Hanke Post-Doctoral Award.

An article based on my research, “The Creation of Indigenous Leadership in a Spanish Town: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1609-1752,” was published last fall (Ethnohistory 56:4, 2009).  The article considers how the development of indigenous, Spanish-style town councils unified the city’s disparate ethnic groups, converted native settlements into formal sociopolitical entities, created an official leadership class, and contributed to the perpetuation of a corporate indigenous identity within the city through the late colonial period. 

I recently completed three article projects not included in my manuscript project. 

The first, “Laboring Above Ground:  Indigenous Women in New Spain’s Silver-Mining District, Zacatecas, Mexico, 1620-1770,” will be published in the Hispanic American Historical Review (forthcoming 2013).  This article considers the roles and contributions of indigenous women in Zacatecas from the mid to late-colonial period. The essay focuses on the importance of their labor to silver production, community formation, and family cohesion and argues that indigenous women were as valuable to the smooth running of the city and the extraction of silver as their male counterparts.

The second essay is a piece I co-authored with Pablo Sierra, “Mine Workers and Weavers:  Afro-Indigenous Labor Arrangements and Interactions in Puebla and Zacatecas, 1600-1700.”  This book chapter considers how labor arrangements influenced Afro-indigenous interactions in these two important cities.  It argues that the rate of formal Afro-indigenous unions in Zacatecas and Puebla differed due to the varying degree of cultural contact fostered in each city’s dominant labor institution, the mine and the textile mill.  This piece will appear in an anthology that I am co-editing:  City Indians in Spain’s American Empire:  Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1600-1830. 

“Of Rocks and Rivals:  The Saçemis of Zacatecas, Mexico, 1587-1628,” examines how a series of rock fights between native peoples, called saçemis, and the campaigns to suppress them both provoked yet, paradoxically, diffused intra- and inter-community conflicts in the early seventeenth century. While Spaniards viewed these fights as random brawls, this piece argues that they had preconquest precedents and served an important sociopolitical function.  It also highlights how the campaigns to suppress them revealed and created further rivalries between different members of colonial society over issues of autonomy and jurisdiction. This article project is my first stake in an empire-wide book project on ritual fighting between native peoples in Mexico and the Andes.

The anthology I am co-editing, the first of its kind in English, includes works by several noted scholars and highlights the struggles and contributions of urban native peoples to colonial society in several of New Spain's most important cities.  The goal of the collection is to expand the geographic range, chronological scope, and thematic content of urban native studies by examining such topics as the role of natives in settling frontier regions, interethnic relations, notaries and chroniclers, and the continuation of indigenous governance. The anthology will be published by Sussex Academic Press (winter 2011).

I have presented my research at several conferences including the annual meetings of the American Society for Ethnohistory, the American Historical Association, the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies, the Society for the Study of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, and the Reunión de Historiadores de México, Estados Unidos, y Canadá. This year, I co-organized two panels on Urban Indians for the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory (Los Angeles, Oct. 2011). I am also presenting a paper on indigenous women at Ethnohistory and participating on a round table on publishing at the 2012 meeting of the American Historical Association (Chicago).

I am on the Executive Committee of the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies and on the organizing committee of the 2011 Ethnohistory meeting.

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