This essay presents the first comprehensive analysis of a series of land deeds prepared by the Laraos of Yauyos, Peru, during the First General Land Inspection to secure title to farm- and pasturelands. Scholars have shown the centrality of this first general inspection for the country’s agrarian history, but almost invariably reducing it to the appropriation of native lands and the formation of colonial rural estates. Many works have explored the mechanisms by which Spanish actors secured title to formerly indigenous lands during the Inspection, the start of a process that has been recently termed “the great dispossession.” Much less attention has been placed, however, on the strategies of native Andean commoner groups that not only used the Land Inspection to protect their holdings but also relied on it to break away from their original villages, acquire new lands, establish new settlements, and accrue recognition as independent communities. Through the analysis of the Laraos primordial titles, I show that, key in this process was the collection of narratives and the performance of walkabouts that, when committed to writing in the form of title-maps and witness testimonies, gave communities-in-the-making the necessary tools to succeed in these self-directed projects of commoner colonization.

In this forum, four scholars re-examine the noble or commoner status of Indigenous Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. They debate the validity of his assertions and how the conditions of his life should frame our reasoning. They re-consider how written documents were used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A handful of archival documents generated by petitions and lawsuits fuels this scholarly reconsideration of his lineage, local status, and economic circumstances. These court cases enliven the study of this fascinating historical figure who wrote a long letter to the King accompanied by hundreds of line drawings. In the first article in the forum, historians Adrian Masters and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra shape the discussions over Guaman Poma’s rank and status into a debate. They unequivocally declare Guaman Poma a commoner who unsuccessfully attempted to use an increasingly document-oriented colonial system to gain power and official recognition. They assert that this commoner Lázaro was an imposter whipped for falsely asserting an Indigenous elite heritage (cacique). They argue that Lázaro’s commoner status further elevates his historical importance for the study of the early modern era. In two responses to these assertions, historians Francisco Quiroz Chueca and José de la Puente Luna point out the many ways scholars have already been raising questions about Guaman Poma’s identity, and they voice caution about how much the existing documents can definitively resolve these questions. In a rebuttal, Masters and Cañizares-Esguerra return to underscore why they think Guaman Poma was an “uncommon commoner.”

This essay is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave at the annual reception of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) at the American Historical Association meetings in New York City in January 2025. It was written as a keynote address connected with my acceptance of CLAH’s Distinguished Service Award for 2024. I focus here on what have been the two most critical and intertwined commitments of my roughly five-decade career as a historian of Mexico and Latin America: broad intellectual collaboration across disciplines, academic generations, and national boundaries, and a two-way notion of mentoring. Apart from my own monographic research, these commitments have played out in an array of editorial arenas—academic journals, multi-authored collections, a massive country-level compendium of documents, and a long-running book series—that have remained integral to my intellectual growth and figured importantly in the mentoring of my doctoral students and their mentoring of me. My career trajectory in this regard may well have been a road less travelled and one certainly not for everyone; still, there is a case to be made for giving greater emphasis to broader collaborative strategies of research and dissemination in our work as scholars and teachers of Latin America’s past.

This article examines a rare sixteenth-century manuscript lectionary (Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Manoscritti, AH._X.9) containing Nahuatl translations of Biblical texts, long associated with Bernardino de Sahagún and the Franciscan evangelization project in New Spain. Through interdisciplinary analysis combining ethnohistory, art history, and conservation, the authors illuminate Indigenous roles in colonial knowledge production. The lectionary, in effect, offers a core sample of the intellectual labor of Indigenous peoples involved in its creation: They served as scribes and Biblical translators, as papermakers, and possibly as bookbinders. Unique among the corpus of Nahuatl lectionaries, this manuscript was created from two types of native paper, one for the main text and another for binding reinforcement. Considering the paper as the outcome of pre-Hispanic technologies allows us to expand the field of Indigenous knowledge manifested in the Christian book to include material knowledge, as well as theological and linguistic knowledge. This trinity of knowledge allows us to link the lectionary to Sahagún’s Nahuatl sermonary (Newberry Library Ayer MS 1485) produced at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. The lectionary’s preservation of neophytes’ alphabet practice offers singular evidence of the pedagogical practices at the Colegio.

This article parts from the premise that the famous Andean chronicler don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, long understood as a native lord, was the indigenous commoner Lázaro. This insight, rarely acknowledged by scholars, opens new horizons. It expands our understanding of the transformations gripping Andes society at the end of the sixteenth century, which was experiencing a steady but unmistakable ‘archivalization’ in which social status became increasingly tied to documentary collections. Lázaro’s quest to fashion himself as a lord ran headfirst into this archival record, revealing new challenges commoners faced in navigating post-conquest society. Centering Lázaro as the author of the opus the Primera nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615) also reveals important aspects about its structure, content, and aims. We argue that Guaman Poma’s work was primarily a critique of this emerging archive; he cast himself as a Christ-like ecclesiastical investigator. He listened to the poor, Christ-like, yielding him secret insights into Peru’s woes. But he was also like Christ in that he possessed an ancient Davidic lineage: He was a commoner-king. We conclude by rethinking Lázaro’s life and work through the lens of other commoner-iconoclasts of microhistorical fame: Martin Guerre and Mennochio.

When the future Brazilian independence hero José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva turned 20 years old in 1783, he left Brazil to study at the University of Coimbra, as his generation’s privileged sons did. Upon graduating, he embarked on a lengthy government-sponsored trip to study mineralogy across Europe. From 1790, he immersed himself in the latest scientific doctrines and mining techniques in France, Denmark, Sweden, northern Italy, and most importantly German territories. After 10 years of traveling, he began teaching at Coimbra and Portugal’s Mint and then took over a new Intendancy of Mines tailor-made for his new qualifications. He returned to Brazil only in 1819 after 36 years away.

During World War II, Disney films on Nazism, health, and United States–Latin American friendship flickered across screens throughout Latin America. They were the centerpiece of an unprecedented propaganda program by the United States, and they were shown to Latin Americans both in theaters and through mobile projectors by the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). While the OIAA and the Disney films have received considerable scholarly attention, the complex collaboration between the government organization, communication scientists, the animation film studio, and local actors in creating, distributing, and measuring propaganda has not. With the goal of creating favorable attitudes toward the United States in the minds of individual Latin Americans, the OIAA and Disney developed a novel propaganda approach based on entertainment and education. They coupled it with a comprehensive distribution system based on local projectionists who showed the films to millions of Latin Americans and measured their reactions. Local governments allowed and supported these free screenings to bolster their own popularity. Latin American voices to criticize the US instrumentalization of Disney were few, and the overall reception of the films was very positive. On the basis of an inadequate evaluation that equated popularity and reach with effect, the Disney films were considered successful propaganda by the OIAA, paving the way for a global application of the new propaganda approach. Disney propaganda for Latin America was driven by the involved actor’s unbounded faith in film’s suitability for propaganda and must thus be understood as a hype around the untapped potential of a relatively new medium.

Guaman Poma does not need to be presented as a superhero to highlight his place in history as the author of a codex containing a protest, a proposal, and a history of the Andes. Indeed, the case of Guaman Poma must be understood in its historical context, as it has been studied since its publication in Paris almost a century ago, in 1936. Thanks to rigorous studies by scholars from many countries, we are increasingly learning more about the author and his work, concluding that this is a completely plausible case—a product of the circumstances in which he lived, was formed, and developed over several decades during the consolidation of the colonial regime in the Andes.

We demonstrate that there is almost universal historiographical consensus that Guaman Poma was an Indigenous elite, partly because all his various writings claimed he was and partly because his vast access to paper, print, and knowledge could have not possibly be accessed by a commoner. We trace many commoners in early seventeenth century Peru that, like Guaman Poma, mastered literacy, print culture, and vast knowledge, while claiming noble status. He was not alone. We also insist that his Coronica demonstrates profound changes in bottom-up indigenous political dialogue in the wake of the Toledan reforms of the 1570s. As claims now began to be supported by archival documentation, social mobility could no longer rely solely on charismatic authority and mobilization of witnesses. Guaman Poma repeatedly failed at producing archival documentation to back up his claims to nobility, testing the patience of multiple Indigenous communities and leading to a life of expulsion, itinerancy, and poverty that paradoxically helped to make his genealogical claims even more grandiose.

The year 2024 marks an important double anniversary for the journal The Americas. On the one hand, it marks 80 years of publication, with the first issue dated July 1944. On the other, it marks the quincentenary of the arrival of the first Franciscans to North America, when the first group of missionary friars landed in what is now Mexico. The history of the journal is rooted in the Franciscan Order. In April 1944 Franciscan historians from throughout North America met in Washington, DC, and founded the Academy of American Franciscan History. The goal of the Academy, as articulated in the records of that inaugural meeting is to “discover and assemble documents and books of Franciscan interest, to compile a complete bibliographical index of American Franciscana, to edit and publish documents, and to issue original historical works.”1 The Academy additionally pledged to publish a journal, a quarterly review of inter-American cultural history: The Americas.