Giovanna Montenegro’s fascinating and incredibly well researched book, German Conquistadors in Venezuela: The Welsers’ Colony, Racialized Capitalism, and Cultural Memory (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022) is one of the most recent titles we have indexed at Southwest Humanities. Providing a window into an under-recognized corner of colonial Latin American studies, Montenegro “investigates one of the strangest and often-ignored episodes in the conquest and colonization of the Americas––the governance of the Province of Venezuela by the Welsers, a German banking family from Augsburg in the sixteenth century. Using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book chronicles the Welsers’ business expansion beyond banking to colonization and the slave trade in the Spanish Indies and the eventual failure of the colony.” Through a close reading of a variety of texts (including legal documents, literature, crónicas, and maps), German Conquistadors in Venezuela also examines the violence of African and Indigenous slavery in the colony, as well as how subsequent generations of Germans have preserved and engaged with this colonial past into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A welcome addition to colonial scholarship on Latin America, this book will be of interest to Latin Americanists, Germanists, and early modernists, as well as scholars engaged with postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and memory studies. Scheduled to be published in December 2022, you can find out more information about this title at the publisher’s website here.
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