Amy Beach’s “dramatic works” encompass a select few compositions over the course of her career, united by shared themes and collaboration with other female artists: two dramatic unstaged arias for solo voice and orchestra, Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte (1892) and Jephthah’s Daughter (1903); and her only opera, Cabildo (1932). These dramatic works are few and far between in her oeuvre, but they represent landmarks in her lifelong creative processes. Eilende Wolken, Beach’s first commissioned work, is one of the first examples of her use of folk song in her compositions. Jephthah’s Daughter is a challenging and mature work, straddling her years focused primarily on composition and the revival of her performing career. Cabildo is filled with borrowed folk song and her own melodies with a romantic plot set during a major American historical event, representing the qualities of American opera she suggested for years.

Chapter seven examines the political fallout that began in the 1570s, when the New Kingdom archbishop began to ordain dozens of mestizo priests in order to comply with the Crown’s mandate to place priests fluent in indigenous languages within native mission parishes (doctrinas), a change inspired by the Council of Trent’s encouragement for increased ministrations in the vernacular. Surprised to receive Crown instructions explicitly prohibiting the ordination of mestizos, in 1576 the archbishop emerged as a defender of the value and validity of the ordinations of individuals of mixed ethnicity. Yet the same archbishop resisted the promotion of a local mestizo to an elite position in the Santafé cathedral. This chapter examines how the complex motivations of the archbishop and elite ecclesiastics – as they sought to create a second-tier mestizo priesthood – were related to exclusivist discourses about “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre). The confrontation over the legal issue ultimately provoked the Crown into elaborating imperial law, which connected matters in the New Kingdom to concerns in Peru and elsewhere in the Indies.

This chapter reveals the great level of control that local elites accumulated over both local and royal institutions in Santo Domingo, to expand their influence to other parts of the Spanish Caribbean and acquire a profitable network of associates and introduce contraband goods into the city. Rodrigo Pimentel’s political life provides an illuminating example of the particularities of Santo Domingo’s institutional life, but on a larger scale, it also reveals the profound limitations that the Spanish Monarchy’s bureaucratic apparatus had to govern its own Caribbean territories and, by extension, most of its colonial dominions beyond Mexico City and Lima. Under the Habsburg, colonial centers of royal authority, Audiencias and governors often became extensions of the communities that hosted ministers and royal officials, and not anchors of royal power in remote Spanish possessions, as the crown initially intended. In theirdealings withhigh courts, these local groups of power both made and unmade the Spanish empire: they limited the influence of Madrid, but by using royal institutions for their own ends, they shaped the edges of the empire according to their own interests.

This chapter explores two complementary dimensions of acquisition and display of power by local elites in Santo Domingo. The first is political and institutional. In the early sevententh century, the sale of offices became standard practice in the Spanish empire allowing local elites to buy seats of regidores in local Cabildos across the empire in perpetuity, thus gaining control of their own local governments. A seat on the Cabildo of Santo Domingo became a prized possession for elites to reaffirm their position in the island social hierarchy. It also enabled access to important economic opportunities, which triggered rivalries among its members. The second one is also political, but it is more narrowly focused on racial politics, on the role of these elite men as slaveholders and the way they used their enslaved workers in their personal and political rivalries. The elites of Santo Domingo proudly manifested their power and tried to impose it upon their peers through their use of their enslaved workers, whose obedience (particularly when deployed in opposition to others) gave true meaning to the institutional and class power these elite men had acquired.