This book is a turning point in the history of the Portuguese in colonial Lima. Previous historiography had concentrated on the small group of New Christian rich merchants, who had been involved in the so-called “great complicity” of 1635–39, being persecuted by the tribunal of the Inquisition under the accusation of Judaism. From the master work by Toribio Medina on the Inquisition of Lima, in which he dedicated a chapter to “The Portuguese Owners of Lima’s Trade,” to the massive work of Maria da Graça Mateus Ventura on this targeted elite, the vision of the Portuguese in Lima was shaped by this episode. According to this vision, based on trials of the Inquisition and information collected by the tribunal of faith on confiscation of property, inventories of possessions, merchants’ account books, and correspondence between merchants, the Portuguese community was composed of New Christians who dominated trade, especially the slave trade from Africa to Spanish America. They were seen as endogamous, relatively detached from local society, which would explain their vulnerability to the Inquisition (an argument difficult to sustain).

This vision is challenged by Sullón Barreto. She decides to look at other archival sources in order to reconstitute the Portuguese community in Lima from 1570 to 1680 in a much broader way. The chosen dates are important because they allow the author to extend the inquiry beyond the 1630s, spanning from the period before the Union of Crowns in 1580 and after the Portuguese restoration of independence in 1640. These traditional political dates prove to be important but do not represent a dramatic change. Moreover, the shift of attention to records of notaries, wills, contracts of weddings, inventories postmortem, inheritance, and records of confraternities, consulted in different archives of Peru and Spain, indicates a much more socially diversified and (probably) mixed community of New and Old Christians. Anyway, the work shows that the vast majority belonged to the middle class, not to the New Christian trading elite. They were rooted in daily life, located in different neighborhoods, and joining dozens of confraternities, with numerous professional, family, and personal relations with local society. They were not endogamous or segregated.

Sullón Barreto identifies 196 Portuguese from the 1570s to the 1670s, who established residence in Lima and offered the possibility of collecting a significant number of documents in order to analyze their activities, families, and social relations. She engages with prosopography, which focuses on individual daily life and interactions with the wider society, in order to clarify assimilation, networks, identities, and religion, the chosen four angles of analysis. Very few of this list were persecuted by the Inquisition. It is a vivid and solid study of a community of foreigners (a probable average of 500 in a city that grew from 12,500 to 30,000 inhabitants), which responds to the main question: how did they manage to establish strong links with local society under permanent suspicion from the fiscal authorities that they had arrived without license from the king?

The only problem not solved by this study is related to the nature of the sources: there are no genealogies in these documents and the ethnic/religious identification of the individuals selected is not possible in most cases. That many left part of their inheritance to the church does not make them Old Christians; we know that many New Christians were members of confraternities and also wrote pious wills. In any case, this is an excellent study that shows diversity, fluidity, and flexible solutions in daily life, depicting a new vision of the Portuguese community in Lima, certainly not a homogeneous block, contrary to previous assumptions.