Sylvia Sellers-García – författare

In 1792 in rural San Salvador, Juana Aguilar was accused of committing what the authorities called a “heinous” crime. Aguilar was suspected of being a “hermaphrodite,” and while this in and of itself was not a crime, determining Aguilar’s sex would resolve whether the relationships Aguilar had with women were criminal. Aguilar’s possessions were confiscated, the accused was placed in jail, and a long criminal case ensued. Over the course of this case, almost a dozen medical experts examined Aguilar’s person, and Aguilar escaped imprisonment twice before finally being apprehended in distant Guatemala City. In an age when medicine and science were gaining ever more authority in the process of construing identity, the legal authorities of colonial Central America relied heavily on doctors and midwives to determine what Aguilar “really was.” For decades, Aguilar’s case fell out of view, and scholars believed the only extant source was the examination notes of a medical expert who testified for the court. With this volume, the entire case—with testimony from the defendant, depositions and witness statements, inventories of Aguilar’s belongings, and new details about Aguilar’s intrepid escapes from prison—is made available in English. Sellers-García translates and contextualizes Aguilar’s account and brings to the forefront issues and problems that we wrestle with today: the policing of supposed sexual deviance, the reliance on medicine for the creation of identity categories, and the criminalization of gender difference.While Aguilar’s experience was unique, it reveals broad and surprising truths about how the institutions of colonial Central America confronted difference. The volume offers readers an opportunity to engage with rare primary sources and will be especially valuable to students of gender and sexuality studies, the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of Latin America.

A true story of violence, punishment, and a transformative moment in Guatemalan history that “deftly ranges across Italian iconography, Maya cosmovision, casta paintings, Enlightenment urbanism, conceptions of death, masculinity, gender violence, crime and punishment, and the growth of the state.” (Laura Matthew, Hispanic American Historical Review)On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Díaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, The Woman on the Windowsill pinpoints the last decade of the eighteenth-century as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history, when the nature of justice changed dramatically.  Sylvia Sellers‑García reveals how this bizarre and macabre event came with an increased attention to crime that resulted in more forceful policing and reflected important policy decisions not only in Guatemala but throughout the Spanish Empire. This engaging true crime story serves as a backdrop for the broader consideration of the forces shaping Guatemala City at the brink of the modern era.

The Spanish Empire is famous for being, at its height, the realm upon which "the sun never set." It stretched from the Philippines to Europe by way of the Americas. And yet we know relatively little about how Spain managed to move that crucial currency of governance—paper—over such enormous distances. Moreover, we know even less about how those distances were perceived and understood by people living in the empire. This book takes up these unknowns and proposes that by examining how documents operated in the Spanish empire, we can better understand how the empire was built and, most importantly, how knowledge was created. The author argues that even in such a vast realm, knowledge was built locally by people who existed at the peripheries of empire. Organized along routes and centralized into local nodes, peripheral knowledge accumulated in regional centers before moving on to the heart of the empire in Spain.The study takes the Kingdom of Guatemala as its departure point and examines the related aspects of documents and distance in three sections: part one looks at document genre, and how the creation of documents was shaped by distance; part two looks at the movement of documents and the workings of the mail system; part three looks at document storage and how archives played an essential part in the flow of paper.