Bianca Premo
Biographic Data
| ID | 329296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bianca Premo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bianca |
| FAMILY NAME | Premo |
| SIGNATURE | PREMO B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida International University |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-5145-345X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas
Birthing a Better Nation
This review, undertaken by students with diverse regional and disciplinary expertise in a graduate seminar at Florida International University, frames these three pathbreaking books on Cuba, Brazil, and Mexico within a burgeoning history of reproductive regimes. The seminar on Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Latin America, led by historian Bianca Premo, included consideration of topics beyond the theme of reproduction, including feminism, t…
Christoph Rosenmüller. Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755
Journal Article Christoph Rosenmüller. Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755. Get access Christoph Rosenmüller. Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xv, 341. Paper $29.99. Bianca Premo Bianca Premo Florida International University, US Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume …
Half Real: Presence and Absence in Mexico's Juzgado General de Naturales
This article centers on the materiality of Indigenous legal interactions with the viceroy in the special colonial court, the Juzgado General de Naturales, which was located, at least ostensibly, inside the viceregal palace in Mexico City. The partial destruction of the palace during a riot in 1692—a year that roughly bisected Spanish colonial rule in Mexico— serves as a focal point for exploring the dynamic history of personal encounters and phys…
Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating Age in Colonial Spanish American Law
It is easy to presume that age's legal value rests in the autonomy and rights that accrue to the liberal (male, propertied) citizen who has reached the age of majority. But this is not universally so. In Spain's American colonies, legal age talk involved multiplying privileges rather than exclusionary subtraction. Few indigenous peoples, enslaved people of African descent, or members of the free casta poor tallied the years they had lived in a ma…
A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond
Recent global legal histories argue that jurisdictional competition between authorities, often at the edges of territories, ordered empires and nations. But we still need more concrete, grounded understandings of how local actors understood and produced jurisdiction, and we need clearer methodologies for recovering those understandings from archives that privilege imperial, often European concepts of law, authority, and territory. A single case f…
Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700
The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire
The principal protagonists of this history of the Enlightenment are non-literate, poor, and enslaved colonial litigants who began to sue their superiors in the royal courts of the Spanish empire. With comparative data on civil litigation and close readings of the lawsuits, 'The Enlightenment on Trial' explores how ordinary Spanish Americans actively produced modern concepts of law.
Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire
"This is a history of the Enlightenment, the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. But rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, its principal protagonists are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlight…
Being and Becoming
Historians have long noted that a defining feature of Spanish imperial slave law was the right slaves possessed to sue their masters. This chapter historicizes that right in the civil sphere, and dates it to the advent of new jurisprudential ideas and slaves’ increased legal activity beginning in the mid-1700s. Enslaved litigants began to appeal to royal courts over new types of cases, including the right to self-purchase, as well as to reinterpr…
Gender Crossings. Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire / Transatlantic Obligations. Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain
The Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962
During the Christmas holidays of 1960, some Cuban youths unwrapped gifts of militia field campaign tents or fatigues. Presents such as these might even have been delivered by bearded milicianos playing the Three Kings of the Epiphany, a holiday that the government had begun to promote over the overcommercialized and Americanized Christmas the year before, in the last days of the revolution's first year in power.Such engaging details appear throug…
Custom Today: Temporality, Customary Law, and Indigenous Enlightenment
This article draws comparatively from civil disputes over community authority in eighteenth-century Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as Lima and Trujillo, Peru, to spotlight a turning point within a longer history of the invocation and invention of indigenous legal custom. Early modern Spanish notions of legal custom had two temporal trajectories, one harkening back to a “time immemorial,” the other pointing to repeated community practice. In the late eig…
Felipa's Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca
This article reassesses the notions of culture that are tied up with our understandings of gender and ethnicity in colonial Oaxaca. It examines the lawsuits indigenous women leveled against husbands and lovers in the eighteenth century to revisit some canonical scholarly claims about gender culture among the region's inhabitants. Traditional scholarship has approached such cases as evidence of women's assertion of agency in their relationships wi…
Familiar: Thinking beyond Lineage and across Race in Spanish Atlantic Family History
Bianca Premo, Familiar: Thinking beyond Lineage and across Race in Spanish Atlantic Family History, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2, Centering Families in Atlantic Histories (April 2013), pp. 295-316
The Limits of Gender Domination: Women, the Law, and Political Crisis in Quito, 1765-1830
This book is a delightfully provocative, if ultimately problematic, contribution to the historiography of women and the law in Spanish America. The author emerges from the judicial archives of late colonial and early republican Quito with an account that places the political history of the city and its environs next to the gendered legal practices of its inhabitants. Demonstrating that women in colonial Quito possessed a fair amount of legal auto…
Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930
Book Review| March 01 2011 Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 Nara B. Milanich Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009 xv + 355 pp., $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper) Bianca Premo Bianca Premo Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2011) 8 (1): 138–140. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2010-059 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon…
An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America
There exists a long-standing historiographical mystery concerning the legal origins of the practice of Spanish American slaves suing their masters for freedom in royal courts. This essay highlights the importance of working judges' judicial philosophy in the formulation of this customary 'right'. A close reading of two rare eighteenth-century judicial opinions from Lima, Peru, exposes the rationale of the judges, particularly the Creole judges, w…
Before the Law: Women's Petitions in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
At first glance, there is nothing unusual about the fact that, in 1790, a woman went to a magistrate in Mexico City to request money from her husband while their divorce case was pending. Everything about the lawsuit seems ordinary, even down to the litigant's name, Doña María García. Decades of historical scholarship on gender have familiarized us with women just like her, women who tactically employed the courts of the Spanish empire in the lar…
On Currents and Comparisons: Gender and the Atlantic ‘Turn’ in Spanish America
This article is part of a History Compass cluster on ‘Rethinking Gender, Family and Sexuality in the Early Modern Atlantic World’. The cluster is made up of the following articles: ‘On Currents and Comparisons: Gender and the Atlantic ‘Turn’ in Spanish America’, Bianca Premo, History Compass 8.3 (2010): 223–237, doi: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2009.00658.x ‘Women and Families in Early (North) America and the Wider (Atlantic) World’, Karin Wulf, History …
The Maidens, the Monks, and Their Mothers: Patriarchal Authority and Holy Vows in Colonial Lima, 1650–1715
With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550 - 1700
Considering that their traces are so faint in traditional historical sources, colonial Andean women certainly have fascinated modern historians. Even in the earliest days of Andean ethnohistory, women sparked enduring scholarly debates concerning religion and resistance and the role of gender and class in state formation. Karen Graubart’s book brings colonial Andean women into the twenty-first century. She joins a new generation interested in the…
Misunderstood Love’: Children and Wet Nurses, Creoles and Kings in Lima's Enlightenment1
‘The creole,’ Juan Pablo Viscado y Guzman wrote in a 1781 letter, ‘far from being abhorred’ by the non-white majority of the New World, ‘is respected, and what is more even loved ... Born among India
Pena y protección: Delincuencia juvenil y minoridad legal en Lima virreinal, siglo XVIII
Este artículo analiza las interacciones entre el Estado colonial y los jóvenes en el siglo XVIII a través de un estudio de más de trescientas causas criminales del cabildo, y de los discursos intelectuales sobre la juventud y el crimen urbano. La juventud era codificada legalmente como una etapa de la vida en la cual los individuos merecían la protección especial por parte de las cortes. A la vez, el Estado era responsable del castigo de los crim…
From the Pockets of Women: The Gendering of the Mita, Migration and Tribute in Colonial Chucuito, Peru
So many Indian men had moved, fled or died because of the labor draft to the silver mines of Potosí that only women were left to govern in some Andean communities. Or so the rumor went. In 1682, the cabildo of the imperial mining capital informed the king that such reports were greatly exaggerated. “This could not be true, even in the case where not one male Indian was left in the entire Kingdom,” its statement reads. “Although the pueblos have b…
An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America
There exists a long-standing historiographical mystery concerning the legal origins of the practice of Spanish American slaves suing their masters for freedom in royal courts. This essay highlights the importance of working judges' judicial philosophy in the formulation of this customary 'right'. A close reading of two rare eighteenth-century judicial opinions from Lima, Peru, exposes the rationale of the judges, particularly the Creole judges, w…
Before the Law: Women's Petitions in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
At first glance, there is nothing unusual about the fact that, in 1790, a woman went to a magistrate in Mexico City to request money from her husband while their divorce case was pending. Everything about the lawsuit seems ordinary, even down to the litigant's name, Doña María García. Decades of historical scholarship on gender have familiarized us with women just like her, women who tactically employed the courts of the Spanish empire in the lar…
From the Pockets of Women: The Gendering of the Mita, Migration and Tribute in Colonial Chucuito, Peru
So many Indian men had moved, fled or died because of the labor draft to the silver mines of Potosí that only women were left to govern in some Andean communities. Or so the rumor went. In 1682, the cabildo of the imperial mining capital informed the king that such reports were greatly exaggerated. “This could not be true, even in the case where not one male Indian was left in the entire Kingdom,” its statement reads. “Although the pueblos have b…
Custom Today: Temporality, Customary Law, and Indigenous Enlightenment
This article draws comparatively from civil disputes over community authority in eighteenth-century Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as Lima and Trujillo, Peru, to spotlight a turning point within a longer history of the invocation and invention of indigenous legal custom. Early modern Spanish notions of legal custom had two temporal trajectories, one harkening back to a “time immemorial,” the other pointing to repeated community practice. In the late eig…
Misunderstood Love’: Children and Wet Nurses, Creoles and Kings in Lima's Enlightenment1
‘The creole,’ Juan Pablo Viscado y Guzman wrote in a 1781 letter, ‘far from being abhorred’ by the non-white majority of the New World, ‘is respected, and what is more even loved ... Born among India
On Currents and Comparisons: Gender and the Atlantic ‘Turn’ in Spanish America
This article is part of a History Compass cluster on ‘Rethinking Gender, Family and Sexuality in the Early Modern Atlantic World’. The cluster is made up of the following articles: ‘On Currents and Comparisons: Gender and the Atlantic ‘Turn’ in Spanish America’, Bianca Premo, History Compass 8.3 (2010): 223–237, doi: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2009.00658.x ‘Women and Families in Early (North) America and the Wider (Atlantic) World’, Karin Wulf, History …
Felipa's Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca
This article reassesses the notions of culture that are tied up with our understandings of gender and ethnicity in colonial Oaxaca. It examines the lawsuits indigenous women leveled against husbands and lovers in the eighteenth century to revisit some canonical scholarly claims about gender culture among the region's inhabitants. Traditional scholarship has approached such cases as evidence of women's assertion of agency in their relationships wi…
Familiar: Thinking beyond Lineage and across Race in Spanish Atlantic Family History
Bianca Premo, Familiar: Thinking beyond Lineage and across Race in Spanish Atlantic Family History, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2, Centering Families in Atlantic Histories (April 2013), pp. 295-316
Pena y protección: Delincuencia juvenil y minoridad legal en Lima virreinal, siglo XVIII
Este artículo analiza las interacciones entre el Estado colonial y los jóvenes en el siglo XVIII a través de un estudio de más de trescientas causas criminales del cabildo, y de los discursos intelectuales sobre la juventud y el crimen urbano. La juventud era codificada legalmente como una etapa de la vida en la cual los individuos merecían la protección especial por parte de las cortes. A la vez, el Estado era responsable del castigo de los crim…
Pena y protección: Delincuencia juvenil y minoridad legal en Lima virreinal, siglo XVIII
Este artículo analiza las interacciones entre el Estado colonial y los jóvenes en el siglo XVIII a través de un estudio de más de trescientas causas criminales del cabildo, y de los discursos intelectuales sobre la juventud y el crimen urbano. La juventud era codificada legalmente como una etapa de la vida en la cual los individuos merecían la protección especial por parte de las cortes. A la vez, el Estado era responsable del castigo de los crim…
From the Pockets of Women: The Gendering of the Mita, Migration and Tribute in Colonial Chucuito, Peru
So many Indian men had moved, fled or died because of the labor draft to the silver mines of Potosí that only women were left to govern in some Andean communities. Or so the rumor went. In 1682, the cabildo of the imperial mining capital informed the king that such reports were greatly exaggerated. “This could not be true, even in the case where not one male Indian was left in the entire Kingdom,” its statement reads. “Although the pueblos have b…
Misunderstood Love’: Children and Wet Nurses, Creoles and Kings in Lima's Enlightenment1
‘The creole,’ Juan Pablo Viscado y Guzman wrote in a 1781 letter, ‘far from being abhorred’ by the non-white majority of the New World, ‘is respected, and what is more even loved ... Born among India
With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550 - 1700
Considering that their traces are so faint in traditional historical sources, colonial Andean women certainly have fascinated modern historians. Even in the earliest days of Andean ethnohistory, women sparked enduring scholarly debates concerning religion and resistance and the role of gender and class in state formation. Karen Graubart’s book brings colonial Andean women into the twenty-first century. She joins a new generation interested in the…
The Maidens, the Monks, and Their Mothers: Patriarchal Authority and Holy Vows in Colonial Lima, 1650–1715
On Currents and Comparisons: Gender and the Atlantic ‘Turn’ in Spanish America
This article is part of a History Compass cluster on ‘Rethinking Gender, Family and Sexuality in the Early Modern Atlantic World’. The cluster is made up of the following articles: ‘On Currents and Comparisons: Gender and the Atlantic ‘Turn’ in Spanish America’, Bianca Premo, History Compass 8.3 (2010): 223–237, doi: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2009.00658.x ‘Women and Families in Early (North) America and the Wider (Atlantic) World’, Karin Wulf, History …
Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930
Book Review| March 01 2011 Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 Nara B. Milanich Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009 xv + 355 pp., $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper) Bianca Premo Bianca Premo Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2011) 8 (1): 138–140. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2010-059 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon…
An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America
There exists a long-standing historiographical mystery concerning the legal origins of the practice of Spanish American slaves suing their masters for freedom in royal courts. This essay highlights the importance of working judges' judicial philosophy in the formulation of this customary 'right'. A close reading of two rare eighteenth-century judicial opinions from Lima, Peru, exposes the rationale of the judges, particularly the Creole judges, w…
Before the Law: Women's Petitions in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire
At first glance, there is nothing unusual about the fact that, in 1790, a woman went to a magistrate in Mexico City to request money from her husband while their divorce case was pending. Everything about the lawsuit seems ordinary, even down to the litigant's name, Doña María García. Decades of historical scholarship on gender have familiarized us with women just like her, women who tactically employed the courts of the Spanish empire in the lar…
The Limits of Gender Domination: Women, the Law, and Political Crisis in Quito, 1765-1830
This book is a delightfully provocative, if ultimately problematic, contribution to the historiography of women and the law in Spanish America. The author emerges from the judicial archives of late colonial and early republican Quito with an account that places the political history of the city and its environs next to the gendered legal practices of its inhabitants. Demonstrating that women in colonial Quito possessed a fair amount of legal auto…
Familiar: Thinking beyond Lineage and across Race in Spanish Atlantic Family History
Bianca Premo, Familiar: Thinking beyond Lineage and across Race in Spanish Atlantic Family History, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2, Centering Families in Atlantic Histories (April 2013), pp. 295-316
Custom Today: Temporality, Customary Law, and Indigenous Enlightenment
This article draws comparatively from civil disputes over community authority in eighteenth-century Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as Lima and Trujillo, Peru, to spotlight a turning point within a longer history of the invocation and invention of indigenous legal custom. Early modern Spanish notions of legal custom had two temporal trajectories, one harkening back to a “time immemorial,” the other pointing to repeated community practice. In the late eig…
Felipa's Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca
This article reassesses the notions of culture that are tied up with our understandings of gender and ethnicity in colonial Oaxaca. It examines the lawsuits indigenous women leveled against husbands and lovers in the eighteenth century to revisit some canonical scholarly claims about gender culture among the region's inhabitants. Traditional scholarship has approached such cases as evidence of women's assertion of agency in their relationships wi…
The Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962
During the Christmas holidays of 1960, some Cuban youths unwrapped gifts of militia field campaign tents or fatigues. Presents such as these might even have been delivered by bearded milicianos playing the Three Kings of the Epiphany, a holiday that the government had begun to promote over the overcommercialized and Americanized Christmas the year before, in the last days of the revolution's first year in power.Such engaging details appear throug…
The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire
The principal protagonists of this history of the Enlightenment are non-literate, poor, and enslaved colonial litigants who began to sue their superiors in the royal courts of the Spanish empire. With comparative data on civil litigation and close readings of the lawsuits, 'The Enlightenment on Trial' explores how ordinary Spanish Americans actively produced modern concepts of law.
Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire
"This is a history of the Enlightenment, the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. But rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, its principal protagonists are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlight…
Being and Becoming
Historians have long noted that a defining feature of Spanish imperial slave law was the right slaves possessed to sue their masters. This chapter historicizes that right in the civil sphere, and dates it to the advent of new jurisprudential ideas and slaves’ increased legal activity beginning in the mid-1700s. Enslaved litigants began to appeal to royal courts over new types of cases, including the right to self-purchase, as well as to reinterpr…
Gender Crossings. Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire / Transatlantic Obligations. Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain
Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700
A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond
Recent global legal histories argue that jurisdictional competition between authorities, often at the edges of territories, ordered empires and nations. But we still need more concrete, grounded understandings of how local actors understood and produced jurisdiction, and we need clearer methodologies for recovering those understandings from archives that privilege imperial, often European concepts of law, authority, and territory. A single case f…
Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating Age in Colonial Spanish American Law
It is easy to presume that age's legal value rests in the autonomy and rights that accrue to the liberal (male, propertied) citizen who has reached the age of majority. But this is not universally so. In Spain's American colonies, legal age talk involved multiplying privileges rather than exclusionary subtraction. Few indigenous peoples, enslaved people of African descent, or members of the free casta poor tallied the years they had lived in a ma…
Half Real: Presence and Absence in Mexico's Juzgado General de Naturales
This article centers on the materiality of Indigenous legal interactions with the viceroy in the special colonial court, the Juzgado General de Naturales, which was located, at least ostensibly, inside the viceregal palace in Mexico City. The partial destruction of the palace during a riot in 1692—a year that roughly bisected Spanish colonial rule in Mexico— serves as a focal point for exploring the dynamic history of personal encounters and phys…
Christoph Rosenmüller. Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755
Journal Article Christoph Rosenmüller. Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755. Get access Christoph Rosenmüller. Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xv, 341. Paper $29.99. Bianca Premo Bianca Premo Florida International University, US Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume …
Birthing a Better Nation
This review, undertaken by students with diverse regional and disciplinary expertise in a graduate seminar at Florida International University, frames these three pathbreaking books on Cuba, Brazil, and Mexico within a burgeoning history of reproductive regimes. The seminar on Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Latin America, led by historian Bianca Premo, included consideration of topics beyond the theme of reproduction, including feminism, t…
Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas
History (18 works) · Political science (16 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Historical Studies in Latin America (13 works) · Colonialism (11 works) · Latin American history and culture (10 works) · History (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works)