Entering the Colonial Archive: Jewish Latin American History

Catalog description

In this course, students will examine Colonial Jewish Latin American History through the story and archive of one woman: Esperanza Rodríguez, a conversa-mulata who began her life enslaved in a conversa's home in Seville and later became a crypto-Jewish matriarch in New Spain. The child of a Guinean enslaved mother and a New Christian father, Esperanza's story, found within primary sources from 17th-century Seville and Mexico City, bridges Latin American histories of race and colonialism with Jewish histories of religion and ritual. Esperanza's story invites analysis of the transatlantic slave trade and global commerce, gender and materiality, cross-community religious and cultural transmission, and violence and kinship in colonial Latin America. Students will think about how to tell multiply-layered stories of historical oppression, how to conceptualize relationships between minority groups within colonial contexts, and how to craft thoughtful historical narratives from complex archives. How does the oppressed become the oppressor? How do persecuted groups relate to one another amidst contexts of violence? How do networks of kinship form across and within communities? And how does the study of Jewish history in colonial Latin America provide questions, and some answers, to long-asked dilemmas surrounding race and religion in the early modern Atlantic World? An excerpt from Esperanza's archive will serve as the center of each course unit. Students will immerse themselves in the archival process, experiencing how one case study can serve as a means into collective, and even global, histories. This course teaches students about colonial Jewish Latin American history as it teaches students about archival theory, the historian's process, and the ways in which we construct new narratives from the past. Students will learn archival skills alongside and through content.