SCARCE Colloquium (Web)

Venue: Univ. of Vienna – and virtuel space
Time: 19.01.2025, 15:00

Women of all ethnicities and ages played a vital role in the evolution of New Spain’s northern silver mining district. Colonial authorities often decried women’s ability to move from one site to another within the mining district, citing the illicit behaviors of wandering or roaming women. This paper considers how women took advantage of the socio-economic conditions present in the mining district—the chronic need for labor, the money-economy, a tradition of mobility, the challenges of policing in frontier settings, small populations, and imbalanced sexual demographics—to negotiate their sexual practices and trajectories, including those that contravened Spanish gender norms.

Dana Velasco Murillo is Associate Professor of History at the Univ. of California, San Diego. She received her PhD from UCLA in 2009. She is a social and ethnohistorian of early modern Latin America. Her research focuses on recovering the histories of the non-elite groups of colonial Mexico’s northern silver mining district, especially native peoples and women. She is the author of Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546-1810 (Stanford Univ. Press, 2016), and several edited volumes. Her current book project, The Chichimeca Arc: War, Peace, and Resettlement in America’s First Borderlands, 1546-1616, centers nomadic indigenous peoples in the development of New Spain’s sixteenth-century empire. Chichimeca Arc has received funding from an American Council Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and Summer Stipend, a Huntington Library Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, an Anneliese Maie Humboldt Yale History Network Travel Grant, and an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant.

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ERC Project „Sustained Concerns: Administration of Mineral Resource Extraction in Central Europe, 1550-1850 (SCARCE)“ (Web)

Source: SCARCE’s first Newsletter