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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
The genesis for this special issue on "Words and Deeds" was a panel discussion held in conjunction with the January 1997 joint meeting of the Conference on Latin American History and the American Historical Association in New York City. Participants Richard Boyer, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Kimberly Hanger, and Jane Landers presented the papers included in this volume. The essays all flowed together so nicely and initiated such a lively exchange among panelists and the audience that the editors of The Americas asked us to prepare them for publication, incorporating some of the commentary offered at the session. What you read in the following pages is a result of that process, although we still think it rather ironic that a journal produced by the Academy of American Franciscan History should want to include articles with so many off-color words and references to sexual conduct and violence!
The fact that these essays generated such interest as conference papers and appear in this special issue of The Americas confirms the value cultural historians are placing on the study of insults, conflicts, and other confrontational behavior to reconstruct societal norms and worldviews and assess challenges to them. What constituted an insult or defined anti-social behavior reveals much about what the community considered each person's position in it; resistance to one's assigned role and identity or objection to someone else misconstruing this identity unmasked a sense of injustice that community members, especially its leaders, had to rectify in order to maintain social order.
1 One of the best publications to collect recent cultural analyses of Latin America is Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, edited by Beezley, William H., Martin, Cheryl English, and French, William E. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994).Google Scholar
2 Martin, , Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar and “Popular Speech and Social Order in Northern Mexico, 1650–1830,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32:2 (April 1990), 305–24.
3 For some examples again refer to the essays in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance, as well as to: Beezley, , Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes in Porfirian Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Lockhart, James, Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Stern, Steve J., ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Taylor, William B., Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
4 Cutter, Charles R., The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), p. 31.Google Scholar
5 Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion.
