BARRAGAN REVIEW SPECTACULAR WEALTH HAHR

Book Reviews / Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries 361 This book undoubtedly will be one that every scholar whose work touches at all on questions of indigenous gender roles will read. If I have a critique, it is that the title does not do the work justice. Upon first hearing it, one suspects that one is about to read a long essay on the need to rethink our assumptions about the idea of the archive. Instead, one finds the harvest of many years of work with every possible record in every possible archive. The book is a monumental achievement. camilla townsend, Rutgers University doi 10.1215/00182168-7370390 Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. By lisa voigt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 225 pp. Paper, $29.95. Spectacular wealth and festivals were produced in the two colonial mining towns addressed in this book: the great silver town of Potosı́, in the Spanish empire; and Minas Gerais’s Vila Rica do Ouro Preto (Rich Town of Black Gold), in the Portuguese empire. Festivals and the display of power are important topics analyzed widely in Europe since Jacob Burckhardt. Researchers have now a database, from the University of Oxford, of early modern festivals between 1500 and 1800, and the British Library has digitized 253 Renaissance festival books for different ceremonies between 1475 and 1700. In Spanish America the literature and sources available are much fewer; besides the books by Linda Curcio-Nagy and Stephanie Merrim for Mexico, the historiography for Spanish American festivals is scattered across articles. Lisa Voigt’s book is therefore an important contribution. Spectacular festivals glorified the crown, the church, and sovereigns while demonstrating vassals’ submission. Voigt states, however, that people celebrated their own purposes in these “public transcripts,” borrowing James Scott’s concept. Inspired by previous studies such as Teofilo Ruiz’s on festive traditions in Spain and Carolyn Dean’s on Corpus Christi, the author’s point ofdeparture is the “multiplicity of agendas pursued by different participants in festivals” (p. 15). The book is built around different accounts, in the first part using texts produced about the festive events and in the second part exploring specific groups of participants, such as creoles, Indians, and people of African descent. For Potosı́, we have accounts of the 1608 Corpus Christi fiesta, the 1622 commemorations of the death of Philip III and the coronation of Philip IV, and Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela’s description of Viceroy Diego Morcillo Rubio y Auñón’s 1716 entry. In all of these, the authors highlight and promote the abilities of the nación criolla. The 1608 Corpus Christi festival featured allegorical “invenciones” entering the plaza; for the 1622 celebrations, one such invención, by creoles, was a float featuring the mountain of Potosı́, a clear allusion to their dispute with the Basques. Finally, the viceroy’s 1716 entry, painted by Melchor Pérez Holguı́n and described by Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, was an occasion not only to show that Potosı́ sustained the king, and indeed the whole world, but also to criticize him and the money spent amid the mining crisis. 362 HAHR / May In contrast to Potosı́’s invenciones, Minas Gerais employed literary texts in its commemorations, part of its self-promotion as a “lettered city”: Triunfo Eucharistico (1733), which described the Holy Sacrament’s transfer to a new church, and Aureo Throno Episcopal (1749), written for the new bishop’s reception in Mariana. In the Triunfo Eucharistico, the author presents a city of great piety and religiosity. Part 2 scrutinizes the performances described in these texts. The 1608 Corpus Christi festival featured a mock battle between the Moors and the Christians, with Potosı́’s Indians playing the former. In the Potosı́ reenactments the battles were more evenly matched than they had been in history, and four of the festival’s eight comedias were dedicated to the Incas’ imperial triumphs. There was another performance on the float bearing the Potosı́ mountain, from which a little Indian boy emerged, dressed as a carrier of ores, and scattered silver among the crowd from a bag. In Minas Gerais, Mariana’s new bishop witnessed a dance of Carijó Indians performed by young mulattoes. Is this a sign of domination, exotic Others wielded as entertainment in primarily white festivals? Or is it resistance, given its similarity to performances for the coronations of African kings? In her close reading of festival descriptions in the texts, Voigt argues that these performances and festivals were acts of self-celebration, and she considers the Triunfo Eucharistico as an instance of black’s people press (“prelo”). It is certainly important to underline that these festivals were not only displays of the powerful. The question is how to differentiate the shared space and even cultural production within the events’ script from those aspects of contestation in each particular festival. Promoting the people and their cities was intrinsic to these occasions. Thus we should not immediately deem them expressions of “an American identity” (p. 153). I found myself wondering whether being criollo meant something different in the early seventeenth century and a century later, when Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela was writing. From today’s vantage, the confrontation between Basques and criollos central to the 1622 commemorations seems more a political struggle than a fight over identity (see Bernd Hausberger). Voigt could have considered more the differences between the festivals and how they changed over time. Another of Voigt’s contributions is to raise the question of cross-racial representation: mulattoes playing as Indians in Minas Gerais, and Potosı́’s Indians acting like Incas. At least some of these were theatrical representations, which continue to occur today. As in the big festivals held in contemporary Bolivia, people used to explain this by saying that they were putting on their disguise (disfraz) to play others. Maybe we should think of these representations as a kind of opera, as has been suggested by Maurizio Sánchez Patzi for contemporary popular music. Spectacular Wealth challenges us to analyze the multiplicity of the interventions and interpretations enacted in these festivals and to transcend the borders of any one empire in our scholarship. rossana barragán, International Institute of Social History doi 10.1215/00182168-7370401