Colonial latin America

In 1968 José Costa Pôrto completed Nos tempos do Visitador, an important social history of the earliest permanent Portuguese colony in Brazil in Pernambuco and Bahia, analyzing a broad range of political, cultural, religious, and administrative structures of this formative world. In addition to correspondence and governmental archival material, the study utilizes the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition that was established soon after the permanent settlement of Brazil. He argues that inquisitional material can elucidate cultural history found ‘between the lines, on the fringes, in marginal aspects’ of documentary material.¹ A great deal has changed since 1968, and for our purposes, the notion that one might write a history ‘between the lines’ and on the ‘fringes’ is especially important. After all, homosexuality in the early modern Hispanic world was always considered deviant and marginal. In the three decades since the appearance of Costa Pôrto’s work, a nascent historiography of male friendship and homosexuality in early modern Latin America has emerged.