This first half of a two-semester introduction to the history of Latin America centers on the colonial period: the years of Spanish and Portuguese colonization from the early sixteenth century to the beginning of mainland Latin American nationhood in the nineteenth century.

What does it mean to speak of “Latin America” or to say that “Latin America was becoming Latin American” during these colonial centuries? To address this question in some of its regional complexities and developments, special attention will be given in the readings and lectures to the encounters, struggles, and adjustments of Europeans and native Americans; changing institutions and ideas about empire; Indians, Africans, and others under colonial rule in the core areas of highland Spanish America and Brazil; structures of society and thought as they formed and changed; some individual lives; local variants; and movements toward national independence. (For more on approaches to this history and issues at stake, see the introduction to Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History.)

The chronological boundary for the mid-term examination is the late sixteenth century (the end of Peter Bakewell’s “formative” period, when certain broad patterns of colonial life in the core areas had become apparent).

Some class time every week will be devoted to images of buildings, paintings, sculpture, and other artifacts from the times and places under study. Visual materials are also part of your reading assignments. As Octavio Paz, Mexico’s famous poet, essayist, and historian of ideas, said, “architecture is the mirror of societies, but a mirror that shows enigmatic images that we must decipher.” The images you will see are intended to illustrate, amplify, or redirect themes and changes raised in the lectures and other readings, and to give you another way to document life and thought in the colonial period. These images of material culture need to be “deciphered” or at least reckoned with—located in time and place, and connected to your larger study of Latin America’s colonial history. As the images in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History are meant to suggest, they are not only illustrations of something else; they are sources in their own right. As you work toward an understanding of this history, some of the images should be as important to you as the readings and lectures.

Beginning in mid-September, selections of music from the colonial period will welcome you to the classroom during the ten minutes before the lecture begins. A schedule of the music is included on the course website and you should plan to take a few notes as you listen. You may discover in what you hear another source of creative thinking about colonial Latin America.