This chapter introduces the volume by offering a reflection on the notion of transition within and across Latin American literary production from 1492 to 1800. This period is defined by a series of transitions as, motivated by personal ambitions or brought by force, Europeans and later Africans and Asians crossed oceans to inhabit the already inhabited lands of the Indies. Native societies and the emergent European colonial societies were transformed by these interactions and the processes that underlay them. This introductory essay explores the broad historical context for this period of transition as it was registered on local and global scales. The book is organized around six thematic areas, which in turn are introduced.

Seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias exemplified the multiracial life of imperial Iberian port cities. Few European doctors served the newly cosmopolitan areas of the empire that fostered alarming new experiences of climate, disease, and injury. Surgeons and herbalists of African descent competed for Iberian clients and played significant roles in defining the spaces of a port city vulnerable to all sorts of invasion. Europeans entrusted their ill bodies to casta healers while fearing death at the hands of those healers’ colleagues, who might be motivated to revenge by the slave system or by the internal tensions of European politics or marriages. This essay teases out the gendered competition among casta surgeons and herbalists who told stories with their words and movements through hospitals, jails, city walls, neighborhoods, churches, and homes of the port city. It draws especially on the trials of herbalist Paula de Eguiluz and surgeon Diego Lopez whose stories allay and arouse the fears of the Iberians they lived with and treated.