I am deeply honored to be asked to address the Conference on Latin American History, especially on the topic of gay/lesbian studies. As a way of discussing gay studies in Latin America, let me reflect on my ethnographic research on gender and sexuality in Nicaragua. Because I am an anthropologist, I will focus on problems of ethnographic representation. But ultimately and, I think, logically, these problems open to historical questions as well. First, then, a brief reprise of my arguments about male same-sex relations, as developed in Life is Hard and elsewhere.

No clearer testimony evidenced the social upheaval and shifting political landscape in Guatemala in February 1838 than the graphic narrative by the traveling United States' diplomat, John Lloyd Stephens. Recently arrived in the capital for the first time, Stephens witnessed the insurrectionary triumph of the military caudillo, Rafael Carrera, and his “tumultuous mass of half-naked savages, men, women, and children, estimated at ten or twelve thousand.” Stephens described how Carrera's indigenous followers, upon entering the abandoned plaza and within earshot of the terrified white elite shouted “Long live religion and death to foreigners!” Carrera's political uprising incited by religious concerns had laid siege to the power structure inherited from colonial times.

The most important public ritual to arise from the experience of Mexico's Revolution of 1910 came to be held on November 20—“Revolution Day.” The date commemorates Francisco I. Madero's famous call to arms: on November 20 all towns in Mexico were to rise up against the 34-year rule of Porfirio Díaz. Although Madero was forced to take action before the appointed date and the Revolution got off to a premature start, November 20 has generally been accepted as the inception of the violent phase of the revolutionary struggle.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Spanish Crown issued a Real Cédula (Royal Decree) authorizing the administration of public education in Cuba to an elite Creole group of twenty-seven large landholders known as the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País. The Real Cédula provided for the expansion and secularization of primary education in Cuba. The Sociedad embodied the elite planter Creole class whose influence had increased in Cuba steadily during the second half of the eighteenth century with the initial development of a slave-labor plantation economy. During the nineteenth century, their power and strength grew rapidly with the proliferation of sugar cultivation, culminating in the 1840s when Cuba became the world's primary producer. The Real Cédula entrusting the Sociedad with education recognized the emergence of the Creole planter class as a major influence in Cuban society. Just as the Creoles increasingly wielded more influence economically and politically in determining the future of the island, their control over the administration of public education allowed them to articulate their vision for the cultural and intellectual development of Cuba. The promotion of public education provided an essential medium to express the Sociedad's vision of Cubanidad (Cubanness), precisely at the time when the racial composition of the population was changing dramatically through the massive importation of African slave labor.

I am of two minds in regard to a response to the reviews of Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico. Although I am gratified by the attention that it has received, I have been disinclined to engage in a debate about its merits and defects. Ultimately a book must stand on its own. Some will find that Economic Growth and Change makes a plausible case, and others will say that it does not. That is how it should be. I have no interest in rewriting those sections of Economic Growth and Change that miss the mark. Still, the invitation to write a reply does allow me the opportunity to re-examine some of the most controversial issues with an eye toward how scholars might move ahead with the agenda on the reconstruction of Latin America's colonial economic history.