Neighbors and Others: Space, Peoples, and Jurisdiction in Early Modern Seville and Lima

This project will carry out research necessary to complete a book manuscript that examines the production of spatial, juridical, spiritual and discursive relationships between dominant and subaltern subjects in fifteenth-century Seville and sixteenthcentury Lima. “Neighbors and Others” asks how Spanish officials in the two cities created neighborhoods intended to separate Christians from Muslims and Jews, or Spaniards from Indians and Africans, and whether the subjected populations actually inhabited those neighborhoods. It also examines the legal jurisdiction created to deal with the civil requirements of subject Jews, Muslims, Africans, and Indians, and how those jurisdictions interacted with that of the dominant populations (Christians, Spaniards). By so doing, the book asks how Spanish Christian authorities understood and designed policies to contain “difference” in the two cities, but also asks whether the people sodesignated acted within those categories, outside them, or by moving between them. Neighbors and Others will press us to examine the multiplicity of ways that historical subjects experienced their world rather than looking through the naturalized categories as presented by the archive.