Inventing Lima: The Making of an Early Modern Colonial Capital, 1535-1710

FAIN: FB-51578-05

Alejandra Beltide Osorio
Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA 02481-8203)

"Inventing Lima" plots the construction of Lima as the ceremonial and administrative center of the Viceroyalty of Peru under the Spanish Hapsburg Monarchy. Through the analysis of civic and religious ceremonies, and of a seventeenth-century dispute between Lima and Cuzco over their right to represent the viceroyalty, this study challenges a historiography which has depicted coastal Lima as a colonial enclave culturally and politically divorced from its Andean highlands. The study finds instead, that colonial Lima was concerned with projecting its image and power into the Andean interior. This projection was realized through the vehicle of a colonial baroque culture brought to America by Spain, but reworked in the colonial setting.

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