Gettysburg College

Faculty Member, History

Visiting Assistant Professor

About

I am a historian of the long seventeenth century in colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World.  My interests and scholarly publications are in the comparative history of Jesuit missions in the Borderlands of the Americas and the history of oenology and the Atlantic wine trade in the Spanish empire.  I also work on Latin American literature.

My doctoral dissertation and manuscript “Vineyards in the Desert: The Jesuits and the Rise and Decline of an Indian Town in New Spain’s Northeastern Borderlands” is a study of the community development of a Jesuit mission in northeastern New Spain that later turned into a prosperous Indian town supplying wine and other agricultural products of Old World provenance to the northern periphery of the viceroyalty. 

My current project is “Oenology in the Center and Periphery of the Spanish Atlantic Wine Trade” where I show how important this trade was for the health of the Spanish Royal Treasury, yet also served as a form of cultural control over its colonies.  Wine was an essential component of Spanish colonial life, necessary for Catholic ritual, social acceptance as a “true” Spaniard (or criollo), and a potent form of cultural control: limiting the amount of wine available increased the ability of authorities (political, social, and cultural) to decide who was a Spaniard, as it was strictly prohibited to sell it to Indians.  Yet in three hundred years of colonial rule, wine was the single biggest export to the New World, and one of the few that involved only Spanish input of labor and resources (by the eighteenth century, most of Spain’s exports to its colonies were northern European manufactures).  However important the Atlantic wine trade was for the royal coffers, in the borderlands of Spain’s empire, imported wine could not reach, and a native if rustic viticulture industry evolved from ecclesiastical privileges on planting vineyards.  From Texas to California in the north, to Chile and Argentina in the south, this created the basis for today’s viticulture in these regions.  A draft of this article will be discussed in a workshop at Gettysburg College on November 1, 2011.