Books in the Latin American Originals series

The first complete English translation and annotated study of Bartolome de Las Casas's 1552 Confesionario. Explores its history and its guidelines for confessors administering the sacrament of confession to conquistadores, encomenderos, slaveholders, settlers, and others who had harmed indigenous peoples.

An abridged, annotated translation of Girolamo Benzoni's 1572 History of the New World, which describes firsthand encounters between Europeans and Native Americans, New World geography, and indigenous flora and fauna.

In early April 1536, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada led a military expedition from the coastal city of Santa Marta deep into the interior of what is today modern Colombia. This title reconstructs the tale of the Jimenez expedition, the early stages of the Spanish conquest of Muisca territory, and the foundation of the city of Santa Fe de Bogota.

A translation of letters written by settlers in the Rio de la Plata region of South America during the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.

An English translation of a sixteenth-century Spanish manuscript, by an Inca Jesuit, about Inca religion and the spread of Christianity in colonial Peru. Includes an introductory essay.

Explores the history of the postmortem cesarean operation, which was performed in order to extract the fetus and save its soul through baptism. Examines accounts of the operation from across the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century.

The first English translation of Michael de Carvajal's Spanish play Complaint of the Indians in the Court of Death, originally published in 1557. Translated by Carlos Jauregui and Mark Smith-Soto. An annotated bilingual edition, with an introduction that discusses the origins and ideological significance of the play.

An English translation of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's "Thirteenth Relation," an early seventeenth-century narrative of the conquest of Mexico from Hernan Cortes's arrival in 1519 through his expedition into Central America in 1524.

An English translation of accounts of the experiences and responses of the indigenous peoples of western Mexico in the first half of the sixteenth century to Spanish efforts to establish control over the region that they would call Nueva Galicia.

An English translation of a Dutch travel account, published in Amsterdam in 1646, that describes the Dutch attempt to establish a foothold in the abandoned Spanish colonial city of Valdivia, Chile, in order to find gold and establish alliances with the indigenous Mapuche people.