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"Megged, Amos"
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Rituals and Sisterhoods
Rituals and Sisterhoods reveals the previously under-studied world of plebeian single women and single-female-headed households in colonial Mexican urban centers. Focusing on the lower echelons of society, Amos Megged considers why some commoner women remained single and established their own female-headed households, examining their unique discourses and self-representations from various angles. Megged analyzes these women's life stories recorded during the Spanish Inquisition, as well as wills and bequests, petitions, parish records, and private letters that describe-in their own words-how they exercised agency in male-dominated and religious spaces. Translations of select documents and accompanying analysis illustrate the conditions in which women dissolved their marriages, remained in long-lasting extramarital cohabitations, and formed female-led households and \"sisterhoods\" of their own. Megged provides evidence that single women in colonial Mexico played a far more active and central role in economic systems, social organizations, cults, and political activism than has been previously thought, creating spaces for themselves in which they could initiate and maintain autonomy and values distinct from those of elite society. The institutionalization of female-headed households in mid-colonial Mexico had wide-ranging repercussions and effects on general societal values.Rituals and Sisterhoods details the particular relevance of these changes to the history of emotions, sexuality, gender concepts, perceptions of marriage, life choices, and views of honor and shame in colonial society. This book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of colonial Latin American history, the history of Early Modern Spain and Europe, and gender and women's studies.
eBook
Rituals and sisterhoods : single women's households in Mexico, 1560-1750
\"An approach to lingering views on single, plebeian women in Latin American historiography and specifically Mexico. Major revelations that single women in lower echelons of society in early to mid-colonial Mexico were able to transcend class and race barriers in spite of poverty and unfavorable social circumstances\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
“ENCLOSURES WITH INCLUSION” VIS-À-VIS “BOUNDARIES” IN ANCIENT MEXICO
Recent in-depth research on the Nahua Corpus Xolotl, as well as on a large variety of compatible sources, has led to new insights on what were “boundaries” in preconquest Nahua thought. The present article proposes that our modern Western concept of borders and political boundaries was foreign to ancient Mexican societies and to Aztec-era polities in general. Consequently, the article aims to add a novel angle to our understanding of the notions of space, territoriality, and limits in the indigenous worldview in central Mexico during preconquest times, and their repercussions for the internal social and political relations that evolved within the Nahua-Acolhua ethnic states (altepetl). Furthermore, taking its cue from the Corpus Xolotl, the article reconsiders the validity of ethnic entities and polities in ancient Mexico and claims that many of these polities were ethnic and territorial amalgams, in which components of ethnic outsiders formed internal enclaves and powerbases. I argue that in ancient Mexico one is able to observe yet another kind of conceptualization of borders/frontiers: “enclosures with inclusion,” which served as the indigenous concept of porous and inclusive boundaries, well up to the era of the formation of the so-called Triple Alliance, and beyond.
Journal Article
SALVAGING RECURRING THEMES OF HISTORICAL MEMORY IN THE COHUIXCA PROVINCE OF TEPECOACUILCO (COHUIXCATLACAPAN), GUERRERO, MEXICO, 1460 TO 1580
This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero. To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the colonial Spanish courtroom. It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (“land papers,” titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in assembling the mental shreds and remnants of past experiences to restore them within the traditional framework and formulae of information transmission only modestly affected by the Spanish conquest.
Journal Article
Between History, Memory, and Law: Courtroom Methods in Mexico
A deep reading of testimony delivered at the Spanish colonial court of the Audiencia uncovers distinctive speech formulas, nonverbal cues, and conceptual constructs that throw light on the intentions and goals, as well as the cultural predispositions, of communities and individuals. Historians can employ a similar methodology to derive patterns of \"cognitive schemata\" from testimony in other legal settings of the early modern era.
Journal Article
Female-Headed Households
Women-headed households in colonial Mexico, “sisterhoods” in particular, created a solid alternative to the paterfamilias and the patriarchal family model. Femaleheaded households functioned as pseudoconsaguinal “families” that included either biological, fostered, or adopted children, as well as functioned as alternative frameworks for the materialization of inheritance and self-sustenance. As shown, the perseverance and strength of women-headed households, as a new model for a social concordat, especially in urban areas, stood up in sheer contrast to Spanish code of law represented in the Spanish matrimonial model. The basic questions tackled here are: How precisely did female-headed households form? How did these
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