<i>Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two Impostors in Late Colonial Mexico</i>, by William B. Taylor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most historians have a pocketful of questions that lie waiting, often for decades, for the opportunity for elaboration. William Taylor’s latest monograph is a return to his roots as a ‘novice historian’ captivated by Norman Martin’s Los Vagabundos en la Nueva España (1957), a study of vagabondage and its significance in New Spain’s early colonial society. Finding insufficient documentation on the intriguing vagabonds themselves, the budding historian Taylor moved on to better-documented topics. Most readers will know the happy result: a succession of stellar (and increasingly lengthy) monographs, each of them rooted in a vast evidentiary base, and each a classic across a wide variety of subfields summarised by Taylor as ‘land systems, social and political life of colonial Indian villages, priests in their parishes, shrines, the material culture of devotion’ (p. ix). As the subtitle of Taylor’s newest book suggests, Fugitive Freedom is considerably narrower than his past offerings, with its focus on only two ‘restless, self-centered young men’ (p. 4), the priest-impersonators Joseph Aguayo (b. 1747) and Juan Atondo (b. 1783). Its source base is also smaller, comprising the relevant trial records of the Mexican Holy Office. Since Aguayo was processed three times over more than two decades, these records are voluminous, if closely focused. Atondo’s record is more ‘compact’ (p. 39), covering the three years he was in custody, but containing a vivid thirty-page confession written by the accused. What the sources lack in breadth, therefore, they make up in richness. And their backdrop is grand indeed: not just the final decades of the Spanish colony, but also broader concerns about mobility, identity, fraud and vagabondage characteristic of the entire early modern period. In addition, a whole chapter on the literary picaresque and its circulation in Mexico suggests the circulation of the pícaro as a cultural type with reciprocal influences from and upon men such as Aguayo and Atondo.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".