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This paper studies certain forms of violence which occurred during the conquest of Antioquia between 1540 and 1550. As this province was a border area, both because of the aboriginal resistance and because of the confrontation between the governorates of Cartagena and Popayan, war and punishment against indigenous peoples was gruesome, even for the context of the Conquest. The aim of the paper is not to study the uniqueness of Antioquia, but to show that the border war was an imperial problem and that it relaxed morals allowing a punitive system foreign to civilized confrontation but valid in peripheral areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes that the colonial discourse by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the Official Chronicler of Indies in the first half of the 16th century, takes in contact with certain pre-Columbian indigenous expressions of the Caribbean and Central America. In particular, we focus on the representations that the chronicler creates about the areíto, or Indian feast, the most indescribable and incomprehensible manifestation among their practices. I propose that, in presence of the areitos, Oviedo's colonial discourse becomes brittle and contradictory, plurivalent. Thus, to approach the symbolic level of the Historia General j Hatural de las Indias, I utilize a literary-critical perspective together with the help of the study of some information provided by ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general, the probanzas de méritos y servicios have been used to reconstruct the history of the New World Conquest from the viewpoint of Spaniards. However, many Indians quickly familiarized with this legal tool and employed it in order to defend their own interests in the colonial system. This paper aims to examine the use that Mayas, Chontales or Mexicans made of the probanzas in sixteenth-century Yucatán. I will try to highlight how the strategies they implemented in order to present their merits and deeds not only depended on the objectives they followed and on their familiarity with the colonial legal culture, but also on their knowledge of the agents and interests at stake in the peninsula. Therefore, I will claim the intrinsic political value of the probanzas, being their authors either Indians or Spaniards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the disappearance of indigenous villages during the colonial period in the region of Los Altos de Jalisco. Several authors have analyzed the catastrophic decline of this population following the arrival of the Europeans to the Americas; however, at least for western Mexico there are no detailed studies that address the redistribution of space after the loss of population. Such a situation is even more obvious in the case of Los Altos de Jalisco, where, although there have been many studies aiming to understand the ranch property as a typical local settlement, the ancient indigenous villages in the area have been almost unnoticed, hence the relevance of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]