In the spring of 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I and adopted universal, male, military conscription, American war resisters and draft dodgers known at the time as “the slackers” began to arrive in Mexico. Senator Albert Bacon Fall claimed there were 30,000 slackers hiding out in Mexico, and slacker Linn A.E. Gale agreed with him. When American adventurer, reporter and writer Harry L. Foster passed through Mexico City in 1919, he noted that there were hundreds of Americans, many of them slackers, loitering in the city’s parks and plazas.

In 2006, the Newberry Library in Chicago announced its digitization of the ancient Maya-K’iche’ myth, the Popol Vuh. While digitization ensures the preservation of the document and easier access for researchers, it is also significant in that it marks a new stage in the long historical trajectory of the manuscript itself. The Popol Vuh, or “Maya Bible,” is the most studied indigenous document of Mesoamerica. Contemporary scholarship has considered it, among all the early colonial documents, to best reflect a pre-Hispanic native voice. It provides a breadth and depth of detail concerning Maya religion, cosmology, and society, and its contents have been generalized to apply to virtually all of the ancient Maya religions. Additionally, the text has been used as a source for numerous ethnohistorical studies, and its mythological context has profoundly influenced most Guatemalan literature from the early nineteenth century to the present. More important, the Popol Vuh has become a symbol of Guatemalan national “indigenousness” and was officially declared Guatemala’s national book in 1971.

In the introduction to his The Jews in the Canary Islands, Lucien Wolf wrote almost a half-century ago that “The work of the… branches of the Holy Office in America has only been made known to us piecemeal… For social data relating to the great body of Marranos the records have not hitherto been studied.” These records of the trial proceedings, called procesos, still constitute a fairly virgin field of social, religious and economic Latin American history in general and specifically for the history of Jews and Judaism.

A few have written articles about Mexican Jews in colonial times after a cursory study of a few documents and several acclaimed texts. It is, therefore, not surprising that the results are superficial and often suffused with errors. The foregoing may be illustrated by statements in an article published in the American Jewish Historical Quarterly. Among the numerous errors that appeared therein are “among 2,281 trials of the Mexican Holy Office, 351 concerned crypto-Jews…” and that “By the end of the seventeenth century, the whole crypto-Jewish community had been destroyed.”

Alfredo Méndez Medina, writing from Belgium in January 1911, was possessed by the idea that Mexico's social and economic organization required radical change. Méndez Medina, a Mexican Jesuit priest and developing labor activist, had spent just a few years in Europe, sent by his superiors to learn the techniques, strategies, and ideology of Catholic social action. What he saw and experienced there helped shape his vision for Mexico and guided his work upon his return in late 1912. In Europe, the young Méndez Medina observed firsthand the Catholic unions, ministries, and propagandists of L'Action Populaire, an influential French social Catholic institution founded by Gustave Desbuquois, S.J. (1869-1959) in Reims. In a few brief notes, Méndez Medina wrote that Desbuquois's earthy, no-nonsense way of speaking to ordinary workers, and his profound spirituality, had impressed him deeply. To Méndez Medina, Desbuquois appeared to link seamlessly his religious faith, his social commitments, his sense of duty, and his politics.

During the century between 1765 and 1865, the double impact of the industrial and agricultural revolutions brought profound change to rural society in Europe and North America. In England, the enclosure movement and the innovations associated with “ high farming ” culminated in the destruction of the English peasantry and the growth of a productive rural capitalism that underlay Victorian industrial development. On the continent new crop rotations and improved animals increased output while political revolution resulted in drastic changes in European agrarian structure and in the lives of lord and peasant. In North America (and in such regions as Australia and New Zealand) wholly new rural societies were created as population grew and rail and steam began to put these peripheral zones within reach of the industrial world.

The European practice of conceptualizing their enemies so that they could dispose of them in ways that were not in accord with their own Christian principles is well documented. In the Americas, this began with Columbus's designation of certain Indians as man-eaters and was continued by those Spanish who also wished to enslave the natives or eliminate them altogether. The word “cannibal” was invented to describe such people, and the Spanish were legally free to treat cannibals in ways that were forbidden to them in their relations with other people. By the late fifteenth century the word cannibal had assumed a place in the languages of Europe as the latest concept by which Europeans sought to categorize the “other.” As David Gordon White has shown, by the time the Spanish discovered America, barbarians were an established component of European mythology, history and theology as well as popular thought, and the categories Europeans employed to describe outsiders date as far back as the Greeks and the Egyptians before them. Therefore, it is not surprising that when they reached Mexico the Spanish easily adopted a word from Nahuatl to describe the Indian peoples of the north whom they believed to be barbarians. This word, chichimeca, which both designated and defined in a very particular way the native peoples of the north Mexican frontier, assumed in Spanish the credibility of longstanding native use, although as we shall see, this was not entirely justified.

The persistent desire to find the Northwest Passage and its resultant route to India and the Spice Islands soon led the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Central America to look to the north as the new field of their activity. Their achievements to the south had already convinced them that the realization of their great hope could not lie in that direction. Additional motives which attracted their attention northward, beyond their already enormous possessions, were their natural quest for imperial expansion, the acquisition of still more resources, and the spiritual salvation of the inhabitants of those unclaimed regions.

One of the most important native industries in New Spain, allowed to flourish because of its rational necessity, and given exemptions from restrictive mercantile prohibitions was the obraje, or colonial textile factory. This institution had its origins in the tribute and labor policies of the quasi-feudal economic system imposed by the Spaniard in the decades after the conquests in the Caribbean and on the American mainland. For almost three hundred years clerics and humanitarians protested, viceroys raged, monarchs threatened, a plethora of regulations was issued, inspections were conducted, trials held, fines levied, obrajes were closed, and yet the obraje as an institution survived, and the inhuman conditions of the worker remained unchanged. While the Mexican encomienda system was being shorn of its abuses and gradually deemphasized by the crown, and while the repartimiento system of forced labor for wages was subordinated to a policy of conservation of human resources in the face of a shortage of Indian labor, the Mexican colony was becoming each decade more dependent on the locally-produced textiles, especially the commercial, non-luxury fabrics in everyday use. These were produced in the obrajes.

The first years of independence in Bolivia, as in all of the nations born of the Latin American wars of independence, were times of significant and often accelerated political, social and economic change. The republic created in 1825 in what was known in colonial times as Upper Peru participated fully in this important transformation. During the administration of Bolivia's first president, Antonio José de Sucre, (1825-1828) a program of ecclesiastical reform, educational and social innovation, and economic reorganization of far-reaching implications was undertaken. Upper Peru's chronic poverty, the concentration on silver mining and subsistence agriculture, excessive military expenses, hostility from neighboring countries, and the unbridled political ambitions of the military and civilians resulted in the failure of most of the reforms which might have radically altered the course of Bolivian history.

A theme common to all regions of the Portuguese seaborne empire was dependency on non-Europeans for the creation, consolidation and survival of empire: for defense, labor, construction of towns and forts, transportation, production of raw materials, sexual gratification and, in the case of the Estado da India (Portuguese forts, towns, cities and factories from the Swahili coast to Japan and Timor), on merchants, brokers and interpreters to provide access to suppliers, distributors, commercial networks, and even vessels and capital. Through conversion, peoples from Japan to Africa and America, contributed to the flock of the church militant and, in some more limited cases, as missionaries, catechists, and secular priests. One exception was Brazil where Amerindians were not admitted into the regular or secular clergy. The one area in which the Portuguese crown was not willing to countenance indigenous participation was appointment to public office, be this in the imperial bureaucracy, or election to city or town councils other than in Cape Verde and São Tomé. In Asia and Angola persons other than of exclusively European parentage on both sides and even New Christians may have served on town councils, and some non-Europeans held clerical positions, but the policy forbidding persons of African descent to hold office in church or state was adhered to in practice. Brazil was unique in at least two regards. First, perhaps in no other European colony was dispossession (from an indigenous perspective) so complete. The Portuguese assumed sovereignty over indigenous peoples and their territories and saw Brazil as a tabula rasa where the Portuguese were free to establish cities, institutions, governance, commercial practices, and to implant their religious beliefs, writing and numeracy systems, values, and mores. Secondly, among European overseas colonies in the early modern period, Brazil was unique in that by the end of the colonial period (1822), a transplanted population of African-born and their American-born descendants comprised a demographic majority which exceeded the indigenous population and persons of European origin or descent.

Throughout the centuries of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, Africans and their descendants struggled against a social system that sought to reduce them to chattel. They found that their struggle was to continue, albeit in different forms, long after abolition. In Brazil, emancipation in 1888 was followed the next year by the demise of imperial government and the installation of the First Republic. This created a new political and legal framework for Afro-Brazilians to negotiate positions in society. Racial relations in former slave societies are not the simple result of imposed identities and social spaces by a dominant group upon an oppressed group. They evolve from a dialectical power struggle in which blacks as well as whites affect the outcome.

To observe that events are determined by historical antecedents is hardly informative. What is difficult about history is that it is rarely equally easy to find out how the past shapes the future. Central America presents an interesting case in which indigenous cultures and Spanish conquest have succeeded in reproducing old geographical patterns while the cultures and societies therein have changed in extraordinary ways. The present paper suggests how it is that some of these cultural and social relational continuities, perhaps difficult to understand apart from this long tradition, may have continued down from the pre-Columbian period to the present. A key element in the process seems to lie in the ethnic relations, those relations that have been retained between Ladinos and the state on the one hand, and the highly populous Indian population of Guatemala.

Since early times civil and religious authorities of New Spain showed considerable interest in population statistics of New Mexico. Such an interest was directly related to the peculiarities of settlement in the province since the Reconquest, fourteen years after the bloody Indian uprising of 1680. From then on, control over New Mexico could only be sustained with great difficulty—final pacification could not be achieved until the late eighteenth century—for a purely geopolitical reason: keeping New Mexico for the Crown as a defensive bulwark in the northern approaches of New Spain against the penetration of hostile Indians and foreigners. In that sense, the Franciscan missions performed a decisive role in affirming the Spanish occupation of the territory.

Just as the Nazi destruction of European Jewry during World War II led to the dramatic dissemination of the realities of genocide in the 1940s, so a painful corollary to the more recent breakdown of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has been the all too familiar newsworthiness of the concept of ethnic cleansing, i.e., the forcible and unheroic eviction of undesired groups. The practice of applying varying degrees of coercion and/or violence to purge national, religious and other minorities, though, is far older than the inception of either of the aforementioned multiethnic states, let alone their disintegration, and it is not limited to these particular countries. Such a dilemma—the presence of implacable competitors for political supremacy over the same territory—is a position with certain similarities to that of Palestine and early Israel in the first half of this century, especially after binational and other minimalist solutions were deemed irrelevant by the respective mainstreams of the Jewish and Palestinian national movements.

The demographic configuration of Brazil during the colonial period is known only in its general outlines. To a large degree this is due to the unavailability of census data for most of the colonial period as well as to a general reluctance on the part of historians to resort to the laborious process of systematically using parish records or census tracts. This essay is an effort to present detailed information on a colonial Brazilian urban center in the hope that it will provide some insights into the structure of colonial society while at the same time providing material from which comparisons can be drawn with other parts of the world for which the demographic picture is clearer. Because of the paucity of comparable studies for other areas of Brazil no claim is made, at this time, concerning the generalizability of the conclusions reached from the Vila Rica data.

Abolition forced planters in the post-Civil War US South to consider new sources and forms of labor. Some looked to Spanish America for answers. Cuba had long played a prominent role in the American imagination because of its proximity, geostrategic location, and potential as a slave state prior to the Civil War. Even as the United States embraced abolition and Cuba maintained slavery, the island presented Southern planters with potential labor solutions. Cuban elites had been using male Chinese indentured workers (“coolies” or colonos asiáticos) to supplement slave labor and delay the rise of free labor since 1847. Planters in coastal Peru similarly embraced Chinese indentured labor in 1849 as abolition neared. Before the Civil War, Southerners generally had noted these developments with anxiety, fearing that coolies were morally corrupt and detrimental to slavery. However, for many, these concerns receded once legal slavery ended. Planters wanted cheap exploitable labor, which coolies appeared to offer. Thus, during Reconstruction, Southern elites, especially in Louisiana, attempted to use Chinese indentured workers to minimize changes in labor relations.

When Pero Magalhães de Gândavo returned to Portugal from Brazil in the 1570s, he wrote two accounts about life in Brazil, both of which extol the possibilities for poor Portuguese colonists. In one treatise he proclaims that as soon as a colonist arrives, no matter how poor, if he obtains slaves “he then has the means for sustenance; because some fish and hunt, and the others produce for him maintenance and crops; and so little by little the men become rich and live honorably in the land with more ease than in the Kingdom.” In his history, published in 1576, Gândavo adds that many colonists in Brazil own 200, 300, or even more slaves. Although the Portuguese had pioneered the development of a slave trade from West Africa and despite the fact that the sugar plantations of Bahia and Pernambuco would become vast consumers of slaves from Africa, the vast majority of the slaves that Gândavo refers to were Indian, not African. But, in the 1570s, when Gândavo confidently predicted that even the poor could acquire slaves in Brazil, the reality was that the coastal regions around the Portuguese colonies, with the exception of a few friendly Indian villages, had been left “unpopulated by the natives.” Three powerful factors challenged the future of Indian slavery. One was epidemic disease, such as the smallpox epidemic of 1562 that was described as so terrible that in two or three months 30,000 died. The second was a Jesuit campaign against Indian slavery, which resulted in a new law signed by King Sebastião in 1570 that clearly stated that the Indians of Brazil were free. The third was a rapid increase in the number of slaves arriving in Bahia and Pernambuco from Africa. But while it might seem that high mortality, legal sanctions, and the increase of African slaves would limit the future of Indian slavery, it was not to be so. Instead, Indian slavery expanded dramatically after 1570, due to the emergence of a new, trans-continental, slave trade. Facilitated by mixed-race mamelucos, this trade brought Indians from the sertão (inland wilderness frontier) to the coastal plantations. This is the first manifestation of a phenomenon that would repeat itself in later centuries in São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Amazonia. Known as bandeirismo, it would make Indian slavery an integral part of the colonial Brazilian economy and society. The expeditions from Bahia and Pernambuco from 1570 to 1600 descended thousands of Indians for the sugar plantations of the Bahian Recôncavo, reinforcing Indian slavery in spite of high mortality, royal laws to the contrary, and the increase of African slavery.

‘During World War II, the United States created a political, economic, I land cultural policy aimed at improving hemispheric relations between the U.S. and Latin America. Dubbed the “Good Neighbor Policy,” its objectives were twofold: 1) to insure that nations in Latin America were joined in the Allied war effort and were not associated with the Axis or Communist sympathizers, and 2) to allow the U.S. access to Latin America as a source of raw materials and a market for goods, including films. Because Argentina did not side with the Allies, instead preferring neutrality, it was castigated by an economic boycott. Beginning in 1941, the U.S. sold small rations of raw film stock to Argentina, and over time, refused to sell it all together. The film industry in Argentina, at the time considered the most profitable and advanced in Latin America, began to lose its hold on the Spanish-language market.

The mystical and supernatural experiences that many nuns faced in seventeenth-century convents in Puebla shaped New Spain's spirituality. These experiences and the way they were recounted provided the elements for an archetype of conduct and for socially accepted virtues. Using their imagination, these nuns, servants of God, enlightened and morally exemplary, maintained a direct relationship between the convent, the supernatural world, and colonial society.

Anthropological studies of popular religion have emphasized, almost exclusively, the collective and public aspects of religious expression but have ignored private, individual piety. Yet collective and private religious expressions have been linked throughout history. When individual manifestations of religious expression were socially endorsed, these private forms of piety influenced the creation of identity and models of behavior. Because these archetypes of religious conduct were so important within colonial culture as a whole, it is important to gain an understanding of the events that led to their formation and the way in which they travelled from the culture of the convent to that of the larger society.