On a three-year rotation, the Association offers a prize for the best dissertation, the best early career article, and best first book. The 2021 competition is for best early career article, the 2022 competition will be for best first book, and the 2023 prize will go to the best dissertation. Submissions will only be accepted from those who are active members at the time of submission.
2021 Best Early Career Article
This year’s award goes to “The Pinzones and the coup of the acedares: fishing and colonization in the fifteenth-century Atlantic,” by Gabriel de Aviles Rocha who is currently Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor in History at Brown University. “The Pinzones and the coup of the acedares,” Colonial Latin American Review, Volume 28, no. 4 (2019), 427-449, sheds light on the activities of the Andalusian mariner Martín Alonso Pinzón and his family prior to joining Christopher Columbus on his maiden transatlantic voyage of 1492, and builds upon previously unknown archival fragments and administrative records in order to piece together the role Pinzón and his relatives played in Portuguese and Atlantic fisheries in the 1480s. In the process, we acquaint ourselves with how Andalusian and Portuguese fishers, fishmongers, tax collectors, and other officials interacted along maritime corridors. In Professor Aviles Rocha’s own words, “[b]etter understanding the Pinzón family’s path to collaborating with Columbus allows us to more adequately situate the role of fishing amidst the array of other types of enterprises—from slaving and plunder to captive-taking and trade—that characterized Iberian patterns of colonization in Atlantic Africa and the Caribbean in the late fifteenth century (427).”
The committee considered Aviles Rocha’s article to be ambitious in its careful attention to the historical context of fishing, plunder, trade and slaving, all parallel and coextensive in the late fifteenth century; accomplished in the deft deployment of an embarrassment of rich details on habits and technological applications of mariners at this time; and bold for sharing insight into a heretofore unstudied process of how local success in fisheries facilitated Martín Alonso’s and his family’s participation in longer-distance fishing, trading, and slaving ventures up and down Atlantic Africa at the moment when transatlantic voyages were set to take off with increasing frequency.
The committee has identified two other articles worthy of an honorable mention in this competition (runners-up, if you will). The first of these is “Colonial Economic Improvement: How Spain Created New Consulados to Preserve and Develop Its American Empire, 1778–1795” by Queens College of City University of New York Assistant Professor Fidel Tavarez, which was published in Hispanic American Historical Review, Volume 98, no. 4 (2018), 605-634. Tavarez seeks to reconstruct the history of the Spanish Crown’s creation of multiple new colonial consulados (chambers of commerce) in the 1790s, some years after the Crown set up metropolitan consulados in the 1780s, and argues that the lag was tied to the death of Minister of the Indies José Gálvez in 1787. Tavarez maintains that Gálvez’s commitment to an extractive system of imperialism was replaced by a distinct kind of soft imperialism, which held the empire’s survival depended on stimulating colonial economic growth while promoting reciprocal bonds among all Spanish subjects. The committee found Tavares to be admirable in his effort to gracefully, never brashly, correct the historiography of the consulados, and thereby expand our understanding of the Bourbon reforms.
The other honorable mention goes to “Converting Portraits: Repainting as Art Making in the Early Modern Hispanic World,” by Assistant Professor in Art History at Southern Methodist University Adam Jasienski, which was published in The Art Bulletin, Volume 102, no. 1 (2020), 7-30. Jasienski examines the relation between certain kinds of repainting, such as that which infused an image with new, symbolically charged meanings, and portraiture in the early modern Hispanic world. Paying special attention to the context of a number of portrait repaintings, including Philip IV’s purportedly adding of the Cross of the Order of Santiago on Diego de Velásquez’s Las Meninas, Jasienski offered an imaginative and compelling analysis of how early modern individuals lived with artistic images, especially early modern portraiture, its malleability, and capacity to convey presence, authenticity, and likeness, and its liminal place between the distinctly secular and its persistence in the sphere of the sacred.
2020 prize winner (Best Dissertation): Mónica García Fernández
“‘Dos en una sola carne’. Matrimonio, amor y sexualidad en el franquismo (1939-1975)” (Universidad de Oviedo, 2019).
