This short essay, prepared on the occasion of the conferral of the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History, uses various examples to illustrate the pleasure to be drawn from the day-to-day work of academic history. It opens with reflections on the practice of transcription, the act of bringing recognizable syllables and words out of the often baffling strokes of the pen that have left ink on paper. Although the wave of digitization has increased the sum total of material easily available to us, it is when we do the work of paleography, reducing the continuous lines of manuscript to something close to the discontinuities of type, that we find that our brains can hold on to the words and carry the interpretation forward. After transcription often comes translation, converting the formulas, idioms, and idiosyncrasies of past speech into language intelligible to our readers. As we translate, we are forced to acknowledge our own uncertainties about the meaning of texts, and to make the provisional choices that resolve ambiguity. Across both of these tasks we are nourished by collaboration, the talking and writing together that makes the study of the past into a social activity. Eager collaboration turns the practice of history into a double dialogue, with the documents and with our colleagues, engaging the mind and the spirit and bringing what can only be called joy.

This article analyzes the meanings and uses of crosses in the interactions among diverse indigenous groups and colonizers in the Sonoran frontier of northern New Spain during the eighteenth century and beyond. By showing that colonial expansion was a process that included persuasion within a context of violence, it highlights diplomacy through exchanges facilitated by cultural parallels and hybridity between Christian and precontact Amerindian symbols and rituals. This approach illustrates that the sign of the cross became a widespread mechanism for initiating peaceful interactions. The emphasis on the hybrid use of crosses provides insight into the fluid interactions among Natives and colonizers through the adoption of this symbol and the role these Native groups had in implanting colonial culture in their societies. Ultimately, it shows the indigenous peoples’ reactions and strategies under colonial presence.

This article explores the phenomenon of the sedition trial in the early history of the Spanish American republics, focusing on sedition trials that occurred in Santiago de Chile from the late 1820s to the early 1850s. Sedition trials were governed by laws enacted in the wake of Chile's political independence to protect and regulate the freedom of the press. Because of the way press laws were written, sedition trials were conducted in front of juries composed of active citizens. As such, they constituted a dramatic break with the judicial tradition of Spanish colonial rule. The article argues that sedition trials were instrumental in the dynamics of political conflict, but only when the national government allowed them to operate without interference, which was not always the case. When sedition trials had integrity, as they did for a period in the 1840s, they became a public space in which citizen-journalists and publishers participated in establishing the boundaries of political speech. However, as one might expect, government officials also used the charge of sedition to silence their opponents. Sedition trials can thus be seen as a form of political warfare that has not been fully appreciated by scholars.

The First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas, held in Cali, Colombia, in August 1977 and organized by Afro-Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella, was the first Pan-Africanist conference held in Latin America. This paper examines the obstacles Afro-Latin American activists faced in organizing a racially defined event and analyzes how they articulated their own interpretations of black radical politics. It shows that a Pan-Africanist event in Latin America had to account for ideologies of racial harmony and mixture. Observers throughout the region mobilized these ideas to discredit the First Congress as a racist and illegitimate threat to mestizo nationhood. Afro-Latin American activists used it as a platform to debate and denounce ideologies of racial harmony and mixture which many argued cloaked racism and impeded black mobilization. However, for many of the delegates engaging with black radical politics did not imply an absolute rejection of these ideas, but instead highlighted the varying ways in which Afro-Latin American activists understood and contested these concepts in the 1970s. Many Afro-Latin American delegates, even those who were openly critical of ideologies of racial harmony, called for multiracial forms of solidarity and expressed support for culturally mixed visions of the nation-state.

This article examines the life and career of Alejandro Lipschütz, Chile's most accomplished indigenista, to investigate his influence on the scientific and political discourse about the role of indigenous peoples in modern American states, known as indigenismo. Trained as an experimental biologist, Lipschütz criticized prevailing views of race in the Americas, arguing for a social interpretation and analysis of racial categories that defined indigeneity. Lipschütz then promoted the creation of an indigenous institute within the Chilean state and advocated on behalf of the Mapuche people. Because indigenous leaders themselves developed a strong political movement in the mid twentieth century, transnational indigenismo failed to produce meaningful or lasting progress in Chile. That failure convinced Lipschütz that indigenous peoples should preserve and strengthen traditional communities and seek political autonomy. This analysis joins a growing body of scholarship that challenges conventional views of indigenismo, which characterize it as a repressive ideology used by paternalistic states. This study of Alejandro Lipschütz prefigures the shift toward acknowledging the greater indigenous agency that accompanied identity-based social movements emerging in the 1980s.