In September 1833, eleven students aged between fourteen and twenty-one were imprisoned and brought before judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso in Santiago de Chile. They were accused of leading a rebellion that had rocked the country’s foremost educational institution, the Instituto Nacional, earlier that month. When asked who had initiated the revolt or invited them to join, the students refused to name names, insisting instead that theirs had been “a complot of all.” Their statement echoed similar assertions made by protesters across the Spanish Atlantic, from Castilian peasants to Andean Natives. Tracing the confrontation between the Instituto students and Judge Valdivieso, this article examines how appeals to collective agency and unanimous action disrupted the attribution of penal responsibility. I argue that such strategies served not only to deflect blame but to assert the legitimacy of revolts and other dissident political acts. The article explores how students confronted the judge’s interpretation of their movement, from their motivations to the dynamics of the insurrection. To justify their revolt, it shows, the Instituto students had to mobilize their knowledge of the law—not to claim its protection, but to undermine its capacity to render their actions intelligible.

This article offers a critical analysis of the song “Female Song for the Resurrection of Our Lord,” found in the colonial manuscript titled Cantares mexicanos. While seemingly a Christian hymn, a close reading of this song reveals deep continuities with pre-Hispanic Nahua religious thought, cosmology, and ritual language. Through contextualized textual analysis grounded in ethnohistorical scholarship, the study uncovers the song’s hybrid nature and the Indigenous conceptual models embedded within its Christian language and imagery. The article places the song within the evangelization efforts of sixteenth-century Franciscan friars in New Spain, highlighting the role of Native authors, singers and translators in shaping Indigenous devotional expression. It argues that the analyzed piece functioned not merely as a catechetical tool but as a site of cultural negotiation, where Christian themes were reinterpreted through Indigenous frameworks—most notably, by aligning Saint Francis with the Nahua corn deities, whose cult, associated with regeneration, sustenance, and cyclical vegetation renewal, coincided with Easter celebrations. Though rarely studied, this song contributes meaningfully to debates on syncretism, Indigenous authorship, and resistance in early colonial Christian literature. Emphasizing the agency of Native intermediaries, the article reveals the dialogic nature of missionary textual production and offers a more nuanced understanding of the Cantares mexicanos corpus.

The study of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America during the colonial era has long been a central pillar in the historiography of Latin America. This essay, a contribution to the TAM Vault series, provides an overview of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory through a quantitative and qualitative study of relevant articles and book reviews published in The Americas. My primary goal in writing this essay is to demonstrate how increased attention to Indigenous-language sources, beginning in the 1990s, has transformed the writing of colonial history in Mexico and Central America. By tracking data from relevant publications and analyzing the debates and discussions featured in the journal, I construct a chronological historiography of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory from 1944 through 2019.

This article argues that the formation of a topological structure in the Luso-American postal system from 1800 to 1820 produced a form of spacetime compression: a temporal acceleration in communications achieved by the shrinking of distances and intensification of flows. This acceleration was closely tied to a revolutionary context that heightened the urgency of political communications. In particular, reforms prompted by the Portuguese throne’s migration to America instigated significant changes in postal networks. Drawing on a range of legal and administrative documents, letters, almanacs, and newspapers, the study highlights the expansion, diversification, and regularization of the network. It further underlines the links between communication infrastructure and social experiences of space and time, suggesting that a comprehensive postal network fostered a global experience of accelerated time. Using digital cartography alongside other sources, the article contends that the spatial dimension of modern accelerated temporality is rooted in topological space.

There is a marked tendency to view Latin America’s twentieth-century international history through the lens of US hegemony, and Europe has been particularly impacted by this historiographical trend. On the basis of a review of 41 articles published in The Americas over the past 81 years, this essay explores The Americas’ important role in promoting scholarship on the variety of connections between Latin America and Europe. By bringing together two temporal currents—the chronology of history and the chronology of historiography—it traces how scholarship on Latin America’s twentieth-century relationship with the wider world has evolved. During the Cold War years, the majority of articles focused on Latin America as an arena for great power/superpower rivalry, but from the end of the previous century, scholars publishing in the journal made increasing use of different scales of analysis to uncover the multidimensional flows across the Atlantic. Ultimately, work published in The Americas on twentieth-century transnational relations has shown that Latin America and Latin Americans are important actors on the global stage with significant agency in drawing upon separate international influences and alliances to best suit their own domestic purposes, sometimes with significant consequences for the wider world.

At the start of the seventeenth century the eastern Cuban town of Bayamo became a regional entrepôt. Merchants from France, England, Genoa, and the fledgling Dutch Republic arrived at the shores of the port of Manzanillo to trade linens, silks, and enslaved Africans for hides from the Cuban interior. The governor of Cuba, Pedro de Valdés, sought to stop this unlicensed trade and sent his lieutenant governor to Bayamo to investigate. His investigation found that Bayamo was a microcosm of the Caribbean itself, with people from all nations congregating on the shores of the Cauto River, where they formed both mercantile and social bonds in defiance of Spain’s trade monopoly. The lieutenant governor’s efforts to end contraband trade provoked a rebellion in Bayamo and a raid in the nearby city of Santiago de Cuba, where English raiders attempted to capture the investigator. The townsfolk appealed to the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo and reaffirmed their loyalty to the Spanish empire, while simultaneously playing overlapping jurisdictions against each other. This article demonstrates the complex relationships between local Spanish colonists, foreign merchants, and the regional colonial institutions that impacted the way local actors navigated commercial and legal channels.

Daniel James, a preeminent historian of the Argentine working class and Peronism, has fundamentally transformed how we understand Latin American labor history. This oral history interview, conducted by four of his former doctoral students, explores the personal, intellectual, and methodological foundations of his pioneering work. James discusses his working-class upbringing in post-war England as the son of Communist Party militants, his formative experiences at Oxford during the late 1960s, and his introduction to Argentina during the politically charged early 1970s. The conversation traces his evolution from the social history approach of Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class (1988) through his methodological innovations in oral history with Doña María’s Story (2000) to his recent collaborative work on photography and memory in Paisajes del pasado (2025). James reflects candidly on the influence of E. P. Thompson, Walter Benjamin, and the Latin American Labor History Workshop on his scholarship, while emphasizing the centrality of relationships, empathy, and historical imagination in his approach to working-class history. The interview also addresses his teaching philosophy, his commitment to graduate mentorship, and his view of history as a moral enterprise aimed at rescuing ordinary people “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” James concludes by outlining two prospective research projects on Argentine photography and political exile.

An interview with Peter Klarén where he discusses his studies and his career of many decades as a prominent Peruvianist.