Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America brings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America’s colonial and early national periods. Together the essays examine how "the unnatural” came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be “against nature”—sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation—along with others that approximated the unnatural—hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. In doing so, this anthology makes important and necessary contributions to the historiography of gender and sexuality. Amid the growing politicized interest in broader LGBTQ movements in Latin America, the essays also show how these legal codes endured to make their way into post-independence Latin America.

"Few decisions in life should be more personal than the choice of a spouse or lover. Yet, throughout history, this intimate experience has been subjected to painstaking social and religious regulation in the form of legislation and restraining social mores." With that statement, Asunción Lavrin begins her introduction to this collection of original essays, the first in English to explore sexuality and marriage in colonial Latin America. The nine contributors, including historians and anthropologists, examine various aspects of the male-female relationship and the mechanisms for controlling it developed by church and state after the European conquest of Mexico and Central and South America. Seldom has so much light been shed on the sexual behavior of the men and women who lived there from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. These chapters examine the variety of sexual expression in different periods and among persons of different social and economic status, the relations of the sexes as proscribed by church and state and the various forms of resistance to their constraints, the couple's own view of the bond that united them and of their social obligations in producing a family, and the dissolution of that bond. Topics infrequently explored in Latin American history but discussed her include premarital relations, illegitimacy, consensual unions, sexual witchcraft, spouse abuse, and divorce. Lavrin's opening survey of the forms of sexual relationships most discussed in ecclesiastical sources serves as a point of departure for the chapters that follow. The contributors are Serge Grunzinski, Ann Twinam, Kathy Waldron, Ruth Behar, Susan Socolow, Richard Boyer, Thomas Calvo, and María Beatriz Nizza da Silva. Asunción Lavrin is a professor of history at Arizona State University at Tempe. Her 1995 book, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940, won the Arthur P. Whitaker Prize from the Middle Atlantic Council on Latin American Studies.

In Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the US Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the multiple ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing on the records from over three hundred criminal and Inquisition cases between 1530 and 1821, Tortorici shows how the secular and ecclesiastical courts deployed the term contra natura—against nature—to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex during confession, and other forms of "unnatural" sex. Archival traces of the visceral reactions of witnesses, the accused, colonial authorities, notaries, translators, and others in these records demonstrate the primacy of affect and its importance to the Spanish documentation and regulation of these sins against nature. In foregrounding the logic that dictated which crimes were recorded and how they are mediated through the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history through the prism of the unnatural while showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.

In Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the US Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the multiple ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing on the records from over three hundred criminal and Inquisition cases between 1530 and 1821, Tortorici shows how the secular and ecclesiastical courts deployed the term contra natura—against nature—to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex during confession, and other forms of "unnatural" sex. Archival traces of the visceral reactions of witnesses, the accused, colonial authorities, notaries, translators, and others in these records demonstrate the primacy of affect and its importance to the Spanish documentation and regulation of these sins against nature. In foregrounding the logic that dictated which crimes were recorded and how they are mediated through the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history through the prism of the unnatural while showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.

Genealogical Fictions examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) over time and how the concept's enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings came to shape the region's patriotic and racial ideologies.

At the end of World War II, several Latin American countries seemed to be ready for industrialization and self-sustaining economic growth. Instead, they found that they had exchanged old forms of political and economic dependence for a new kind of dependency on the international capitalism of multinational corporations. In the much-acclaimed original Spanish edition (Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina) and now in the expanded and revised English version, Cardoso and Faletto offer a sophisticated analysis of the economic development of Latin America. The economic dependency of Latin America stems not merely from the domination of the world market over internal national and "enclave" economies, but also from the much more complex interact ion of economic drives, political structures, social movements, and historically conditioned alliances. While heeding the unique histories of individual nations, the authors discern four general stages in Latin America's economic development: the early outward expansion of newly independent nations, the political emergence of the middle sector, the formation of internal markets in response to population growth, and the new dependence on international markets. In a postscript for this edition, Cardoso and Faletto examine the political, social and economic changes of the past ten years in light of their original hypotheses.

The essays in this book examine how "the unnatural" came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be "against nature"(sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation) along with others that approximated the unnatural (hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. ).