In late eighteenth-century Mexico City, Spanish colonials, particularly members of the urban middle and popular classes, performed a number of weddings and baptisms on puppies (which were wearing clothes or bejewelled collars) in the context of fandangos or dance parties. These ceremonies were not radical challenges to orthodoxy or conservative reactions in the face of significant economic, political, religious and cultural Bourbon reforms emanating from Spain. Employing Inquisitorial investigations of these ceremonies, this article explores the rise of pet keeping, the meanings of early modern laughter and the implications of the cultural and religious components of the Enlightenment-inspired Bourbon reforms in late colonial Mexico.

This article examines the political imbroglios surrounding the tenure of José García de León y Pizarro (1778–84) as visitador and president-regent of the Audiencia or Kingdom of Quito, in order to demonstrate the deep political divisions that emerged in Spain's Atlantic empire over the Bourbon Reforms. García Pizarro's policies strengthened the colonial state and produced a dramatic increase in crown revenues, but they also led to a groundswell of protest from local elites and even provoked the condemnation of his successors. These political struggles in Quito reveal the many competing viewpoints about the reform and renovation of Spanish Empire. The Bourbon Reforms emerged from a series of hotly contested political struggles on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to patchy and even distinctive outcomes in different regions of the empire. This political contestation also helps to explain why no coherent, commonly accepted plan for the reform of Spain's Atlantic empire ever emerged during the century.