James D. Riley became the first lay editor of The Americas journal in 1987, leading the journal to its current status as a leading refereed academic publication of Latin American history and cultural studies. The interview addresses Riley’s formative years as a scholar, his work with the Academy of American Franciscan History and The Americas, and the transformation of the journal from 1987 to his retirement from the academy.

This article establishes the role white women played in shaping the urban labor force and the economy in late colonial times in Lima, roughly from 1790 to 1822. It focuses on the impoverished elite women who, by the end of the colonial period, had to ask for alms to avoid working with their own hands. An important part of the Limeño elites could not respond to the twofold challenge: the negative consequences of the economic and administrative reforms of the Bourbons, and the relative flexibilization of the social order in Lima by the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adapting to new conditions, the Spanish elites generated a social discourse that reaffirmed status and ethnicity as a means to distinguish themselves from the “vicious” plebeian sectors. More than one thousand applications to Church relief programs serve as the main foundation of this article; they are made up of at least one fifth of the white female population of the city in 1806. The article enters into dialogue with studies on socio-labor practices and the history of gender and ethnicity by engaging with concrete experiences of poor elite women in a city considered to be the opulent center of the Spanish colonial power.

This article traces the professional life of Rafael Almarza, the last royal escribano (notary) of Mérida in the captaincy of Venezuela, and his role in undermining monarchical authority among the enslaved community displaced in the plains region (Los Llanos) during the war of independence in 1814-18. Despite their status as minor officials within the Spanish imperial bureaucracy, notaries, through the records they made, helped to establish legally binding truths underlying everyday actions, making them influential agents of colonial rule in the community they served, particularly among those seeking notarial documents to obtain freedom. During the battles for independence, escribanos like Almarza facilitated the transition of sovereignty and created documents that fomented the independence cause among enslaved individuals during the years of total war. By examining the manumission documents found in the notarial book Almarza kept during exile, the author of this article shows the importance of enslaved people in granting legitimacy to the emerging leadership of José Antonio Páez and the Republican project. At the same time, this study aims to provide a new look at manumission during the early stages of nation-building and the involvement of underrepresented groups in this process.

Through presence or absence, indigeneity has long been at the center of Bolivian politics, culture, and nationalism.1 It carries immense social import. Yet what Indigenous means and who gets counted as part of this umbrella category has never been clear or static. Although Bolivia's racial and ethnic categories seem as etched in stone as the Andes themselves, individual classification is fluid and situational based on sociocultural markers that change over time. These markers include occupation, literacy, dress, language, surname, and residence. Individuals may move through these categories (and not only in one direction) over the course of their lives. This fluidity, combined with changing meaning and the valorization of indigeneity at the national and international levels, has led to wild fluctuations in official statistics on race since independence. The social construction of these categories came to the fore in 2012 when the census reported that Bolivians who identified as Indigenous had dropped to 40 percent of the population, down from 62 percent only eleven years earlier. International observers were left wondering, where did all the Indigenous people go?2