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This chapter demonstrates that while Spain had a clear vision of what the conquered Aztec city should be, the city of the conquistadors was relatively short for it was soon transformed by its Creole inhabitants who made their own identity pronounced on its building and culture. For 300 years, the city of Mexico was the capital of viceroyalty. It was the capital of New Spain and was the seat of the metropolitan archbishopric of Mexico. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, a generation of young Creoles entered the secular priesthood and the religious orders. They challenged the predominance of European Spaniards, affirmed their talents and identity, and started looking back to the glorious past the conquistadors had destroyed. However, the development of the city was constrained and limited by the city’s status as the viceregal capital of New Spain. Its status hence meant that the city depended on the political decisions and cultural influences emanating from the Spanish. Out of this tension, a creative process of change emerged in which different ethnic groups and cultures intermingled and conflicted to ensure that the social composition and character of Mexico City would be different from the other cities in Spanish America. However, these changes were not brought without due loss. Due to the conquest and the Old World diseases the Mexico population fell to the near brink of oblivion. These epidemics and natural calamities continued to afflict the city throughout the colonial period.

After Phelipa de San Antonio and her allies' power within the convent had been minimized, abbesses and bishops attempted to find ways for the nuns in the La Purísima convent to be content or at least be at peace while complying with their constitution. Such measures involved lessening the strictness in enforcing the Rule, employing flexibility, allowing the nuns to participate in their own government, relaxing the construal of the vow of poverty, and even providing nuns with special privileges. These measures, however, were faced by certain challenges as broad changes introduced by viceroyalty affected ecclesiastical policy on convents. This chapter looks into how the vida común reforms, particular policies that governed the convent and the bishopric, and other such factors, aided in deterring instances of open rebellion during what was left of the colonial period.

This article examines the presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, of Africa from formulations of the trans-Atlantic focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. It critiques a long naturalised Ibero-American loop that tends to sidestep triangular and rhizomatic configurations and argues, amongst other things, that Spain’s colonization of the Americas finds in Africa both its prologue and its long, still ongoing, epilogue.

This chapter examines the metropolitan and viceregal attempts to locate and exploit valuable natural products like pepper, cinnamon, tea, and cinchona in the Spanish Indies. It explains that the attempts to transport foreign plants to Spain failed but the expeditions succeeded in terms of taxonomic botany. It also explores the geopolitics of natural history investigations in the Hispanic world and analyzes the relationship between Madrid and the viceroyalties as well as those among imperial locales.

This chapter explores the sexual practices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sodomites in the viceroyalty of Peru in order to evaluate how sodomy evinces the myriad experiences of individuals committing the sin. The sodomitical practices in the viceroyalty, being both personal and intimate experiences, not only constituted diverse phenomena—impossible to reduce to one single meaning tied to “nature” and the “unnatural”—but also influenced gender identities and, in the passion of sexual encounters, strengthened erotic and affective bonds. These realities of sodomy challenge the notion of sodomy as simply an act “against nature;” thereby complicating theological and juridical conceptions of sodomy as unnatural.