At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

Abstract

At the Crossroads:Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America Camilla Townsend (bio) The people of San Germán, Puerto Rico, had gone to sleep for the night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke the people's slumber with sudden violence were well informed, for one of their number had produced a map based on knowledge he acquired while he was living in the town as a slave. He had escaped not long ago and made his way home to the island of Dominica on a raft. Now he had returned with some well-armed brethren. This sixteenth-century version of special forces broke into the houses where they knew other Kalinagos were held, took the people they sought, and then melted away again into the darkness.1 Such an archival drama as this is the stuff of legend, or of Hollywood; it is also the stuff of modern historians' dreams. No story could be more satisfying to most of us than this real-life drama featuring mobile, cosmopolitan, and feisty Indigenous people using the knowledge they had gained from their varied life experiences to empower themselves and their loved ones. Yet if we wish to end the movie that is playing in our mind's eye on a high note, we cannot allow the camera to pull back or waver; we must not let it pick up the dozens, possibly hundreds, of other Kalinagos still in bondage in Puerto Rico, or any of the other enslaved people lying wide-eyed in the darkness, awaiting the horrors that the morrow would bring. Thinking about this wider view may make us uncomfortable. Is it the case that our desire to find a trajectory that demonstrates empowerment may sometimes—just sometimes—interfere with what we call our scholarship? Has the moment perhaps come for us to acknowledge that wider reality more [End Page 207] distinctly and consider how we may want to see our practices evolve to account for it? Most of the authors in this joint issue of the William and Mary Quarterly and the Hispanic American Historical Review, "Colonial Roots/Routes in North America and Latin America," would vote yes. The editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review and the William and Mary Quarterly could not foresee what they would elicit when they released their call for contributions to a joint issue of the two journals. They fielded three panels at the 2019 meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) around the joint issue's theme. The editors simply sought scholars who wished to speak to both early Americanists and Latin Americanists, and given that the chosen venue was the ASE conference, they assumed the study of Indigenous peoples would play an important role. Beyond that, they had no expectations, as the theme was broad. A subset of the original presenters, as well as a few individuals who were solicited later, eventually met online in the spring of 2021 to discuss their fully elaborated papers and consider their collective significance. As the articles were work-shopped, peer reviewed, and revised, it became clear that they shared certain common elements. For about twenty years now, scholars studying the early modern Americas have been partisans of the notion of mobility. We have been interested in the mobility of bodies (the movement of people, both individually and collectively) as well as of psyches (human beings' extraordinary ability to uproot and then successfully reembed themselves elsewhere). We have sought what we called cosmopolitanism among people previously assumed to be place-bound and culture-bound. We have explored the creation of new cultural frameworks and ethnic identities on the part of people whose circumstances pushed them into motion or who themselves chose new circumstances, referring to the process by various terms—most often creolization (if we studied the African diaspora) or ethnogenesis (if we studied the Indigenous). Whenever possible, we have focused on the power of mobile peoples to subvert the expectations of dominant groups. We have loved to envision the era we study as dynamic and exciting, its global...