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This book project focuses on public festivals in the colonial mining boom towns of South America: Potosi in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, and the various municipalities of Minas Gerais, Brazil. These towns enjoyed, for a time, both spectacular wealth and a wealth of spectacles. As a result of the mineral riches, both areas developed an elaborate festive culture that involved the participation of those who profited from the mines as well as those forced to work in them (principally Amerindians in Potosi and blacks in Minas Gerais). This project examines the performance of different cultural identities and strategies of self-promotion in the festivals as well as in the writing and publication of festival texts. The book will offer, for the first time, a comparative study of the principal mining towns of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, through an analysis of the competing agendas and performances of their diverse constituent communities in festivals and festival accounts.