Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico

by Javier Villa-Flores (Editor), Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Editor)

Overview

The history of emotions is a new approach to social history, and this book is the first in English to systematically examine emotions in colonial Mexico. It is easy to assume that emotions are a given, unchanging aspect of human psychology. But the emotions we feel reflect the times in which we live. People express themselves within the norms and prescriptions particular to their society, their class, their ethnicity, and other factors. The essays collected here chart daily life through the study of sex and marriage, love, lust and jealousy, civic rituals and preaching, gambling and leisure, prayer and penance, and protest and rebellion. The first part of the book deals with how individuals experienced emotions on a personal level. The second group of essays explores the role of institutions in guiding and channeling the expression and the objects of emotions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826354631
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	05/15/2014
Series:	Diálogos Series
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Javier Villa-Flores is an associate professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he has written Carlo Ginzburg: el historiador como teórico and Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico.

Sonya Lipsett-Rivera is a professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750-1856 and To Defend Our Water with the Blood of Our Veins: The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla (UNM Press), and she is the coeditor of Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico (UNM Press) and The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (UNM Press).

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Introduction Javier Villa-Flores Sonya Lipsett-Rivera 1

Part 1 Personal Emotions

Chapter 1 Of Sadness and Joy in Colonial Mexico Jacqueline Holler 17

Chapter 2 The Language of Desire in Colonial Mexico Linda A. Curcio-Nagy 44

Chapter 3 "If I Can't Have Her, No One Else Can": Jealousy and Violence in Mexico Sonya Lipsett-Rivera 66

Part 2 Emotions and Institutions

Chapter 4 The Emotions of Power: Love, Anger, and Fear, or How to Rule the Spanish Empire Alejandro Cañeque 89

Chapter 5 Myth, Ritual, and Civic Pride in the City of the Angels Frances L. Ramos 122

Chapter 6 Refraining a "Dark Passion": Bourbon Morality, Gambling, and the Royal Lottery in New Spain Javier Villa-Flores 148

Chapter 7 Keeping and Losing One's Head: Composure and Emotional Outbursts as Political Performance in Late-Colonial Mexico Andrew B. Fisher

Chapter 8 Anxiety, the Future, and Mexican Independence Matthew D. O'Hara 198

Glossary 221

References 225

Index 249