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Author Taylor, William B., author.

Title Fugitive freedom : the improbable lives of two impostors in late colonial Mexico / William B. Taylor
Published Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021]

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Description 1 online resource : maps
Contents Joseph Lucas Aguayo y Herrera, escape artist -- Juan Atondo's vagrant heart -- Protean pícaros -- Aguayo and Atondo, pícaros after all?
Summary "Cut loose from their ancestral communities by wars, natural disasters, and the great systemic changes of an expanding Europe, vagabond strangers and others out of place are often lost from the turbulent history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. As shadowy characters inspiring deep suspicion, fascination, and sometimes charity, they prompted a stream of decrees and administrative measures that treated them as nameless threats to good order and public morals. The vagabonds and impostors of colonial Mexico are as elusive in the written record as they were on the ground, and the administrative record offers little more than commonplaces about them. Fugitive Freedom locates two of these suspect strangers, Joseph Aguayo and Juan Atondo, both priest impersonators and petty villains in central Mexico during the last years of Spanish rule. Displacement brought pícaros to the forefront of Spanish literature and popular culture-a protean assortment of low life characters, seen as treacherous but not usually violent, shadowed by poverty, on the move and on the make in selfish, sometimes clever ways as they navigated a hostile, sinful world. What to make of those aspects of the lives and longings of Aguayo and Atondo, which resemble one or another literary pícaro? Did they imagine themselves in literary terms, as heroes of a certain kind of story? Could impostors like these have become fixtures in everyday life with neither a receptive audience nor permissive institutions? With Fugitive Freedom, William B. Taylor provides a rare opportunity to examine the social histories and inner lives of two individuals at the margins of an unfinished colonial order coming apart as it was coming together"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on February 23, 2021)
Subject Aguayo y Herrera, Joseph Lucas, 1747-
Atondo, Juan, 1783?-
Catholic Church -- Mexico -- History -- 18th century
Catholic Church -- History -- 18th century.
SUBJECT Catholic Church fast
Subject Impostors and imposture -- Mexico -- 18th century
Church and state -- Mexico -- History -- 18th century
HISTORY -- Latin America -- Mexico.
Church and state
Impostors and imposture
SUBJECT Mexico -- Church history -- 18th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85084544
Subject Mexico
Genre/Form Church history
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2020025988
ISBN 9780520976146
0520976142