New Cures

Chapter 3 examines the creation and administration of the Caracas Company as an organization designed to increase trade to Venezuela but also to police its coastline. Although realizations of Spanish commercial vulnerabilities predated the Bourbon period, bureaucrats in the new dynasty singled out contraband trade as an especially troubling defect. Venezuelan commercial rejuvenation represented one of the earliest Bourbon reform projects. Crown ministers conceived of the Caracas Company as a solution to the province’s commercial dysfunction. Madrid allowed the Caracas Company to maintain its commercial privileges in Venezuela despite prickly relations with the colony’s subjects because it was a profitable enterprise. This reality delayed the implementation of comercio libre reforms in Venezuela until 1789, long after every Spanish American colony aside from New Spain had been permitted trade liberalization. Essentially, an early Bourbon reform had overpowered the designs of later ones. Continued Company control assured that the province would remain a conflict zone. As this chapter emphasizes, imperial reformers were not ignorant or inflexible where smuggling was concerned. Rather, their plans miscalculated how deeply it was stitched into the fabric of Venezuelan life.

Introduction

Chapter opens looking at the place of missions within political and philosophical structure of the Spanish empire. As Spain attempted to reform its empire in the eighteenth century in response to enlightenment concepts, it changed the way it conducted its frontier missions system. The history of the missionaries of Ocopa provided an interesting insight into these changes. They were generally seen as in line with enlightenment concepts, yet also a threat to the growing enlightenment inspired concept of royal absolutism. This study, therefore, fits within larger body of works on the Bourbon Reform period of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that changes to the Spanish borderlands were a result of interactions between political actors throughout the empire.

To Educate and Evangelize

Chapter 4 examines the case studies of three new primary schools for non-elite girls in and around late-colonial Guatemala City, as locals called the recently relocated capital. These educational initiatives illustrate both change and continuity, blurring the perceived battle lines between baroque and enlightened pieties. Enlightened feminine ideals based on the social utility of educated mothers and Bourbon reform efforts operated in conjunction with on-going alliances between laywomen and clergy and an attachment to monastic models of feminine piety. These schools also show how laywomen acted as pioneers and innovators, shaping educational reform through creative engagement with Bourbon reforms, Enlightenment ideas, and progressive Catholicism. The formation of Guatemala City’s “Teacher’s College” for native women in the Beaterio de Indias also challenged entrenched racial ideologies and illustrates a critical shift toward acknowledging native laywomen’s capacity to serve as teachers and spiritual leaders.

“LIKE HEROD'S MASSACRE”: Quarantines, Bourbon Reform, and Popular Protest in Oaxaca's Smallpox Epidemic, 1796-1797

At the end of August 1796, Balthasar Ruiz, a weaver from Teotitlán del Valle, departed with his son to sell woven goods in the mountainous region to the south. Over 23 days, he traveled a distance of 45 miles as the crow flies and upon his return was jailed when the boy fell ill with smallpox. The two had made a typical journey in an atypical time: administrators throughout the intendancy of Oaxaca were actively pursuing a program of contagion avoidance as smallpox spread there from Guatemala and Chiapas. What Oaxaca's intendant, Antonio de Mora y Peysal, called the “new project” consisted of regulating travel and commerce and isolating infected residents in casas de curación. In Teotitlan, textile producers found themselves at the outskirts of their village laboring to build a makeshift infirmary for their children and a camposanto, a consecrated field, for burial of smallpox victims. Months later, some from the village would call the regime a violation “like Herod's massacre.” At the time, quarantined in their village without access to markets or crops, there was little else for the men to do.

“LIKE HEROD'S MASSACRE”: Quarantines, Bourbon Reform, and Popular Protest in Oaxaca's Smallpox Epidemic, 1796-1797

At the end of August 1796, Balthasar Ruiz, a weaver from Teotitlán del Valle, departed with his son to sell woven goods in the mountainous region to the south. Over 23 days, he traveled a distance of 45 miles as the crow flies and upon his return was jailed when the boy fell ill with smallpox. The two had made a typical journey in an atypical time: administrators throughout the intendancy of Oaxaca were actively pursuing a program of contagion avoidance as smallpox spread there from Guatemala and Chiapas. What Oaxaca's intendant, Antonio de Mora y Peysal, called the “new project” consisted of regulating travel and commerce and isolating infected residents in casas de curación. In Teotitlan, textile producers found themselves at the outskirts of their village laboring to build a makeshift infirmary for their children and a camposanto, a consecrated field, for burial of smallpox victims. Months later, some from the village would call the regime a violation “like Herod's massacre.” At the time, quarantined in their village without access to markets or crops, there was little else for the men to do.