When in 1984 I accepted an invitation from editor Frank Smith at Cambridge University Press to collaborate in a new “Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas,” I was naive and somewhat unaware of the potential intellectual dangers and pitfalls involved in what seemed to me, at that time, to be a challenging and worthwhile project. Now, eighteen years later, and having been recently been denounced as the Americanist equivalent of a Holocaust Revisionist by no less than Claude Lévi-Strauss, the grand figure of structural anthropology and arguably the most distinguished scholar in his field in the late Twentieth Century, I am forced to question myself and the whole enterprise of trying to write such as history. Lévi-Strauss's critique was published in the French anthropology journal L'Homme. It was a thunderbolt cast from Olympus— a place which as Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta has recently reminded us, is located roughly between the Rue des Ecoles and the Boulevard St. Michel—and I find it particularly discouraging since its author was one of my intellectual heroes and Tristes tropiques one of the formative books of my own education. To be accused by him of editing a volume that is “politically correct,” and “post-modernist” I find slightly amusing. [I carry a copy of the review to show my graduate students whose characterizations of me tend to run in quite the opposite direction]. Why a Lévi-Strauss should use the analogy of holocaust denial to criticize a work edited by two guys named Salomon and Schwartz is itself worthy of consideration, but it is not what concerns me in these remarks.

This article analyses the character of local religious practice in the archdiocese of Michoacán during Mexico's cristero rebellion, and explores the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ religion under persecution. In particular, it shows how the Catholic clergy and laity reconstructed the religious life at parish level in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the revolutionary state's campaigns against the Church. For a variety of reasons, the significance of such passive resistance to the state, and the complexity of the interaction between the ecclesiastical elite and the Catholic laity, tend to be downplayed in many existing accounts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many historians see cristero violence as the most important response to religious persecution, and therefore study it to the exclusion of alternative, less visible, modes of resistance. As for the Church, the hierarchy's wranglings with the regime similarly tend to overshadow the labours of priests and their parishioners under persecution. But the full range of popular experiences has also been deliberately compressed for ideological reasons. Many Catholic writers, for instance, seek to exalt the Church by describing a persecution of mythical ferocity. While Calles is likened to Herod, Nero, or Diocletian, the clergy and laity comprise a uniform Church of martyrs designate in revolt against a godless state. To achieve this instructive vision, however, a few exemplary martyrs—such as Father Pro and Anacleto González Flores—are allowed to stand for the whole mass of priests and believers, in the same way that Edmund Campion is revered as the protomartyr of the Elizabethan persecution in England. As a result, a stereotypical but politically serviceable image of a monolithic Church is perpetuated, an image which was recently institutionalised by the canonisation of 25 ‘cristero’ martyrs in May 2000.

The epic struggles between Mexicans and the Apaches and Comanches in the far northern reaches of the Spanish empire and the conflict between gauchos and Araucanians in the pampas in the far south are the images the mind conjures up when thinking of Latin American frontiers. We must now add for the twentieth century the dense Amazon jungle as one of the last frontiers in popular (and scholarly) minds. However, these images ignore the eastern Andean and Chaco frontier area, one of the most vital and important frontier regions in Latin America since colonial times, today divided up into three different countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay) in the heart of the South American continent. This frontier region has not received sufficient attention from scholars despite its importance in at least three different aspects: First, the indigenous peoples were able to remain independent of the Creole states much longer than elsewhere other than the Amazon. Secondly, indigenous labor proved to be vitally important to the economic development along the fringes, and thirdly, a disastrous war was fought over the region in the 1930s by Bolivia and Paraguay. This essay provides an overview based on primary and secondary sources of the history of the eastern Andean frontier and compares it to other frontiers in Latin America. It thus endeavors to contribute to frontier studies by creating categories of analysis that make possible the comparisons between different frontiers in Latin America and placing within the scholarly discussion the eastern Andean region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Throughout the era of the Mexican Revolution, the United States provided sanctuary for thousands of political exiles who opposed the regimes of Porfirio Díaz, Francisco Madero, Victoriano Huerta, and Venustiano Carranza. Persecuted enemies of Don Porfirio and losers in the bloody war of factions that followed the ouster of the old regime continued their struggle for power from bases of operation north of the international boundary in such places as San Francisco, Los Angeles, El Paso, San Antonio, New Orleans, and New York. As a consequence, Mexican regimes were compelled not only to combat their enemies on domestic battlefields but also to wage more subtle campaigns against their adversaries north of the Río Bravo. The weapons in this shadowy war included general intelligence gathering, surveillance, espionage, counter-espionage, and propaganda; the agency most responsible for these activities was the Mexican Secret Service.

This essay uses court disputes over indigenous widows’ land rights to examine the impact of an expanding national state on indigenous peasant interpersonal relations in late nineteenth-century Ecuador. In doing so, it offers a response to historian Carmen Ramos Escandón's recent call for historical studies of changing family life in order “to know how this domestic web is related to social processes in a broader sense and how the organization of the family contradicts or reflects society's structures.” Specifically, the confrontations under scrutiny reveal the extent to which indigenous peasants’ notions of marriage and widowhood rights adhered to, diverged from, or were influenced by state views of gender relations. Most court cases from the central highland province of Chimborazo in this period uncover parallels between indigenous and state views of marriage and widowhood; yet the three focal cases here, in which widows’ privileges came under question, highlight differences between indigenous and state understandings of gender relations. In the first case, an Indian woman's father-in-law recognized her right as a widow to inherit a portion of her former mother-in-law's lands; court officials, however, decided to uphold patriarchal legal standards when they granted the land in question to the woman's second husband rather than to her. In two other cases, widows’ claims were undermined not by state authorities themselves, but by Indian men in their own communities. Calling upon patriarchal notions that were at the center of the state's marriage laws, these men wrested control of property from women whose customary claims to it were stronger than theirs. Though cases like these rarely appeared in the court data from Chimborazo, they are illuminating because they promote an exploration of the relevance of ethnically distinct gender ideologies.