Traditional interpretations of Spanish imperial consolidation in the 16th-century Atlantic place heavy emphasis on official maritime structures regulated by authorities based in Seville. But despite their central position in Caribbean historiographies, the Indies fleets and slave trade asientos accommodated multiple agendas -- including some that worked against the priorities of the Spanish crown and House of Trade -- and appear far less monolithic if viewed within a broader context that includes regional traffic, voyages from the Canaries, and commonplace arribadas or "emergency landings." This presentation provides an overview of maritime traffic arriving in selected Caribbean ports, with several illustrative examples of individual travelers and itineraries drawn from notarial records in the Canary Islands. It argues for the utility of viewing early Iberian settlements in the Caribbean and off the coasts of western Africa not merely as way stations or stepping stones for Iberian "expansion," but as polyvalent hubs for migration and trade within, across, and beyond ostensible imperial boundaries.

David Wheat, associate professor of history at Michigan State University, received his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2009. His book Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (2016) was awarded the Omohundro Institute's Jamestown Prize, the Lapidus Center's Harriet Tubman Prize, and the American Historical Association's James A. Rawley Prize. His essays have appeared in Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire; the American Historical Review; the Journal of African History; Slavery & Abolition, the Journal of Early Modern History, and in several edited collections. He recently co-edited two volumes of essays: The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, co-edited with Ida Altman (2019), and From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas, co-edited with Alex Borucki and David Eltis (2020).

Is it possible to motivate front-line bureaucrats to exert effort in their work without relying on traditional punitive forms of oversight? We examine the motivation and performance of school principals in their administration of a free meal program targeted at school children in an Argentine province. We work with the provincial auditing body to implement an encouragement design in which some principals are offered the opportunity to volunteer for an audit. We expect that volunteering will increase intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as well as school-level outcomes. Preliminary results suggest that the intervention increased principals’ intrinsic motivation with respect to the meal program and increased the likelihood principals report that the opinion of the auditing office is important to them. We find no effect on extrinsic motivation or self-reported hours worked.

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Her research explores sources of variation in the quality of representation, government accountability to citizens, and public opinion in lower and middle-income democracies. Her book, "Curbing Clientelism in Argentina: Politics, Poverty, and Social Policy" was published with Cambridge University Press (2014) and received the Donna Lee Van Cott Award from the Political Institutions Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Politics in Latin America, and elsewhere. Current projects include a field experiment on bureaucratic oversight in Argentina,
large surveys on citizen oversight of corruption, and a conceptual and empirical project on political knowledge and access to state services.