Basques and Vicu?as at the Mouth of Hell: A Documentary History of Potos? in the Early 1620s

In June 1622, the silver mining metropolis of Potos?, Bolivia, erupted in gangland violence, only halted three years later by a viceroy's blanket amnesty. Basque immigrants were at the center of the controversy, squaring off against nearly a dozen other nations known collectively as Vicu?as. At stake were the world's richest silver mines, a means to wealth and power in the Americas, Europe, and beyond.

As mines flooded and Indigenous workers died or fled, the city descended into a maelstrom of swordfights, gun battles, ambushes, sniper attacks, and summary executions. Though its roots were economic, the Basque-Vicu?a conflict strained the sinews of Habsburg global governance even as it exposed festering local tensions, only some of which were unique to Potos?.

This rich collection of original sources, all of them archival documents housed in Bolivia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, consists of contemporary eyewitness accounts from several perspectives, allowing readers to play historian. All sources have been expertly translated and carefully annotated in a manner that will engage students and scholars alike. Basques and Vicu?as at the Mouth of Hell includes an extensive introduction, seven vital documents in translation, and appendices on everyday life in 1620s Potos? and on the historiography of this watershed episode of colonial violence.


Author: Kris Lane
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Published: 11/07/2024
Pages: 472
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.46lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.40w x 1.12d
ISBN: 9781647791384

About the Author
Kris Lane holds the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of Pandemic in Potosí Fear, Loathing, and Public Piety in a Colonial Mining Metropolis; Potosí The Silver City that Changed the World, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750; Colour of Paradise: Columbian Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires; and Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition. Lane is currently writing a history of the great Potosí mint fraud of the 1640s.

Timothy F. Johnson is Associate Professor of Spanish at Central College. His research centers on the early modern connections between literature and warfare, and he has translated several colonial texts in collaboration with Kris Lane, including The Indian Militia and Description of the Indies and Defending the Conquest: Bernardo de Vargas Machuca's Defense and Discourse of the Western Conquests.