The “colonial loyalties” María Soledad Barbón examines in her new book are far more complex than the public expression of allegiance to the Spanish crown in the viceregal capital of Peru. This study is an outstanding contribution to the burgeoning field of festival studies, and it shows just how rich the colonial Latin American context is for exploring some of the main issues that animate the field, in particular how different groups and individuals use public festivities to display or gain power, status, and wealth. To this interdisciplinary field, Barbón brings an approach grounded in (but not limited to) literary analysis, highlighting not only the texts that recorded public celebrations but also those produced for those occasions, to illuminate the varying agendas of Spanish, creole, and indigenous residents of colonial Lima.

Though the chapters are organized thematically, the book covers a broad chronological range from the royal and viceregal celebrations at the beginning of the Bourbon reign, considered in Chapter 1, to public ceremonies at the dawn of independence in the nineteenth century, treated in the epilogue. Chapter 1, “The Politics of Praise,” focuses on a tripartite corpus of panegyric texts: laudatory speeches and announcements of poetic competitions, celebratory poetry, and festival accounts. Barbón foregrounds the ambiguous and performative dimensions of praise in each genre, which contribute to a gradual shift in emphasis from the figures of authority who are being praised to the colonial subjects who do the praising.

A key text in this shift is Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo's Jubileos de Lima (1723), which became a model for subsequent festival accounts and is the point of departure for Chapter 2, “Discourses of Loyalty.” This chapter highlights the “economy of favor” (an expression Barbón borrows from Alejandro Cañeque) between sovereign and subjects, according to which festival accounts functioned like petitions for rewards based on loyalty rituals such as public processions and oaths of allegiance. Chapter 3, “Staging the Incas,” also uses Peralta Barnuevo's Jubileos de Lima as a point of departure for its description of the first fiesta de los naturales, the procession of Inca kings impersonated by Amerindian nobles that became a common (though not unchanging) feature of Lima's festivals through most of the century.

Barbón takes us behind the scenes at city council deliberations about its inclusion in the 1790 celebrations for the coronation of Charles IV, revealing the increased wariness with which Spanish and creole authorities viewed such celebrations following the Túpac Amaru Rebellion, and at the same time foregrounding the role of the indigenous patron Bartolomé de Mesa Túpac Yupanqui, who sponsored a poetic account of the festival, El sol en el medio día (1790). Juxtaposing a close reading of the poem with a consideration of Mesa's portrait in the work, as well as the petitions he wrote asking for royal recognition of his services, Barbón effectively uses this case study to elucidate how indigenous subjects appropriated the “Creole discourse of loyalty and used it for their own ends” (176).

The study of ephemeral celebrations in the eighteenth century is conditioned by the archival, visual, and textual evidence that remains of them. Barbón points this out in the introduction by acknowledging that the festival participation of Afro-descendant subjects, despite their constituting a large percentage of Lima's population in the eighteenth century, is virtually absent from the record. Yet, the extant corpus for Spanish, creole, and indigenous celebrants in Lima is broad and diverse, as Barbón shows in this book, and she mines it brilliantly. The book strikes the right balance between attention to the continuities in festive practices and discourses and an analysis of how they evolved. Through this careful historicization, combined with equally fine-grained readings, Barbón illuminates what is distinctive about festivals in Lima vis-à-vis those of other colonial Latin American cities and provides a model for the study of celebrations in earlier historical periods elsewhere.