Third Sergeant Wenceslau Martins Leal may have misunderstood his orders for 18 July 1888 but his greater mistake was, in fact, carrying them out too well. With his patrol from the Sixteenth Infantry Battalion, he reported to the police subdelegate of Salvador’s São Pedro parish at 7:00 p.m. and received orders to arrest and take to the fort “all the vagrants that he could find, for the time had come for impressment [recrutamento forçado].” Because the subdelegate did not limit the number of men to be impressed and pointed out the best places to find such “vagabonds”—Dois de Julho Square and the nearby alleys—Leal concluded that he had unlimited authority to put his ten men to work on this “arduous task.” It only took an hour. In a first sweep, they picked up thirty-five men; in a second, seventeen more. Two resisted “tenaciously” and had to be forcibly subdued. By 8:00, the duty officer had developed serious misgivings about the large number of prisoners arriving at the fort. He checked with the subdelegate who denied having given such orders in the first place and released the detainees. An indignant Leal justified his actions on the grounds that he had merely followed orders to the best of his ability.

Among other treasures, the tidy, compact municipal archive of Pátzcuaro houses a document of genuine antiquarian interest: the will of Juan José Codallos, recorded on July 9, 1831, just two days before he was executed for his role as the instigator and chief caudillo in Michoacán of the War of the South. Codallos began by stating that he was 41 years old, the son of Felipe Codallos and Andrea de Ponce; that he was in good health (considering that he was condemned to die); that he was married to a woman named Dolores Domínguez, with whom he had four children (the oldest was seven; the youngest, one); and that his worldly goods consisted of his clothes, two horses, a fancy saddle, and a silver-trimmed bridle. [“peno” is bridle? I have been unable to confirm this translation]

On 14 July 1786, representatives of the Kings of Spain and England signed the Convention of London by which His Britannick Majesty undertook to evacuate all British subjects from the northern coast of Central America, thereby putting an end to over a half-century of conflict in that remote corner of the Caribbean.

Although Article I of the Convention referred to the territory to be evacuated simply as “the Country of the MOSQUITOS …,” the intention was to secure the removal of a string of small British settlements extending from sixty miles east of Trujillo in what is now Honduras along some 550 miles of coast to Cape Gracias a Dios, and then south and east to Nicaragua’s San Juan River. The area was called then, as now, the Mosquito Shore, and had been a British sphere of influence since the 1730s.

On 18 May 1911, the indigenous Mixtec peasants of Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca, rose up against the local cacique and ranchers who had dispossessed them of their ancient communal lands. Thus began not only the lone agrarian rebellion in the state of Oaxaca but also the only attempt to revive a pre-Columbian indigenous empire during the Mexican Revolution. The study of this remarkable episode situates Oaxaca, a state previously thought to be peripheral to this major social upheaval, within the main currents of revolutionary activity.

As in the case of other revolutionary movements, the arrival of Maderista revolutionaries from a neighboring state, in this case Guerrero, triggered the peasant mobilization in Pinotepa Nacional, unleashing social tensions in the area. Although an overwhelmingly rural state in 1910, the Revolution in Oaxaca has generally been characterized by the absence of agrarian protest. Recent studies have found the precursor and Maderista movements in Oaxaca to be predominantly middle class, either urban or rural, seeking social mobility, wider political participation, and greater local autonomy. Nevertheless, the study of the events of May 1911 on the Oaxacan coast reveals a struggle that pitted an agrarian, indigenous movement against a middle class, rancher-style revolution.