From the arrival of the conquistadores in the fifteenth century to the spread of the Pentecostal movement today, Christianity has moulded, coerced, refashioned, and enriched Latin America. Likewise, Christianity has been changed, criticized, and renewed as it crossed the Atlantic. These changes now affect its practice and understanding, not only in South and Central America and the Caribbean, but also - through immigration and global communication - around the world. Focusing on this mutually constitutive relationship, Christianity in Latin America presents the important encounters between people, ideas, and events of this large, heterogeneous subject. In doing so, it takes readers on a fascinating journey of explorers, missionaries, farmers, mystics, charlatans, evangelists, dictators, and martyrs. This book offers an accessible and engaging review of the history of Christianity in Latin America with a widely ecumenical focus to foster understanding of the various forces shaping both Christianity and the region.

From the arrival of the conquistadores in the fifteenth century to the spread of the Pentecostal movement today, Christianity has moulded, coerced, refashioned, and enriched Latin America. Likewise, Christianity has been changed, criticized, and renewed as it crossed the Atlantic. These changes now affect its practice and understanding, not only in South and Central America and the Caribbean, but also - through immigration and global communication - around the world. Focusing on this mutually constitutive relationship, Christianity in Latin America presents the important encounters between people, ideas, and events of this large, heterogeneous subject. In doing so, it takes readers on a fascinating journey of explorers, missionaries, farmers, mystics, charlatans, evangelists, dictators, and martyrs. This book offers an accessible and engaging review of the history of Christianity in Latin America with a widely ecumenical focus to foster understanding of the various forces shaping both Christianity and the region.

From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Spain and Portugal raised and nurtured vast American empires, both metaphorically and literally. From the very beginning, conquerors and settler elites engaged in colonial enterprises as they considered the New World through traditional Iberian ideas about childhood and as they established institutions for educating youths, sheltering infants, and extracting labor from children. Inevitably, Iberian concepts of childhood were transformed by everyday confrontations with the practices and norms of indigenous, African, and mixed-race inhabitants, and as new generations of truly colonial children were born.

"Raising an Empire" takes readers on a journey into the world of children and childhood in early modern Ibero-America. Its contributors enter a vibrant new field of study in the region and challenge the conventional notion that children are invisible in the historical record. Employing diverse methods to decode a wide variety of sources, these essays present their small subjects--elite maidens, abandoned babies, Indian servants, slave apprentices--through their lives and times.

"Contributors"
Isabel dos Guimar??es S??, history, Universidade de Minho, Portugal
Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Latin American history and director of the Center of Latin American Studies, University of Kansas
Jorge Rojas Flores, history and social sciences, Universidad de Talca and Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales, Chile
Laura Shelton, history, Georgia Southern University
Valentina Tikoff, history, DePaul University, Chicago
Ann Twinam, history, University of Texas, Austin
Teresa Vergara, history Ph.D. student, University of Connecticut at Storrs