Portrait of Sebstiana Inés Josefa de San Agustín

It is said that clothes express power. Images from Mexico and the Andes, called the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, however, demand more sensitive description. Clothing in Latin America voiced power with many inflections, including politics, race, wealth, gender, and, especially among the Creoles, or Spaniards born in the New World, the experience of living in a diaspora. The Spaniards who...

Natural curiosities, sources of wealth, trading partners, and strategic allies against encroaching European powers—such were some of the many ways colonial governments viewed the Indigenous inhabitants of North America up to the mid-eighteenth century...