In Memoriam R. Douglas Cope 1955–2019

The Americas, 2008

has been one of the most influential historians of colonial Latin America in general, and of the Inquisition in particular. He received his university and graduate education in his home state at the University of New Mexico. His professional career took him to Mexico City during the exciting period of the 1950s and 1960s. From there he went on to be one of the guiding forces in the consolidation of the Latin American Studies program at Tulane University. This interview was conducted in the summer of 2007 at Dr. Greenleaf's residence in Albuquerque. Tell me about your childhood, your youth, and what led you to an interest in Latin America.

I’ve decided to go back to the document, “Informaciones: Juan Gonzalez Ponce de Leon” AGI/Mexico, 203, N.19 because I have been seeing the same old data concerning the undocumented consort of Juan Ponce de Leon being listed again online. History, especially erroneous theory concerning Juan Ponce de Leon is still being disseminated to our children by stalwart essayists and historians. I guess old things are very hard to let go by some people.

Applying the contemporary biological notion of race to the early modern Hispanic world is a fraught exercise. Nevertheless, imagining how colonial Spanish Americans saw, understood, and used physical difference to order the world around them is highly revealing of how the Spanish erected their global empire. Like most Westerners, the early modern Spanish differentiated among social groups by distinguishing ancestry and phenotype. The Spanish ruled their American territories with an early modern version of "separate but equal" governance, most notably through the division of the New World into the república de Españoles and the república de indios. Each republic had its own rules, local bureaucracy, and system of courts. The built environment mirrored this divide; walls separated Spanish settlements from unwelcome outsiders. Within cities themselves, separate ethnic quarters-like Mexico City's Spanish-only traza, made famous in Douglas Cope's classic, The Limits of Racial Domination-were meant to keep racial and ethnic groups physically separate. 1 Colonial Spanish society was also organized, and divided, by the concept of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood. However, by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish Americans increasingly identified themselves and others by the more nebulous term of calidad, or quality, whereby one's cultural position, dress, occupation, and status might not match with one's actual identity.

BOOK REVIEWS I NATIONAL PERIOD vo 1. 6 5 , no • 3 603 1985 macy of material conditions" at the expense ofideology, and of the ways in which the book makes virtually no estimate of the psychological effects of material conditions, no temporal linkages with what are referred to as the relatively horrific conditions during the earlier "gold" and "silver" ages of sugar, and no spatial linkages with slavery outside the British Caribbean, with conditionsin Africa, or in industrial Britain.

Early American Literature, 2002

Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies

The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics