At the end of the eighteenth century, the economic position of the church in New Spain appeared to be secure and prosperous. Although the crown had restricted many of the financial and legal prerogatives of the church in the second half of this century, it had not restricted the basic right of the church to hold property or invest its money in mortgages or loans to lay citizens or to the government. On the contrary, in order to solve its own financial problems, the crown had increasingly relied upon loans from corporations such as the Tribunales de Minería, Consulado, and the church itself. The Minería and Consulado had provided the bulk of such loans after 1780, but these corporations had, in turn, sought loans from ecclesiastical institutions in order to fulfill their promises to the crown. Nunneries in New Spain had made considerable contributions to these loans which appeared as safe investments for these communities. Otherwise, the increasing political and financial entanglements of the mother country in Europe at the end of the century did not mean much for the nunneries. Professions continued to take place, a few new convents were founded prior to 1810, and up to 1805 loans and pious funds continued to be raised and invested in the traditional manner.

Were one to sit down to compile a list of the great cities of the African diaspora, Montevideo, Uruguay, would not be one of the first names to come to mind. Yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of Africans arrived in the city, brought on slaving vessels from Africa and Brazil. By 1810, the population both of Montevideo (9,400) and the larger colony of the Banda Oriental (an estimated 30,000) was one-third black and mulatto. Two centuries later, as a result of large-scale European immigration during the 1800s and early 1900s that proportion had fallen to 6 percent, with Afro-Uruguayans numbering approximately 180,000 people in a national population of 3 million.

In the Andes, the pastoral visitation of Indian parishes usually evokes the idea of a strongly oppositional relationship between the Church and local society. This vision, lacking in nuance, has been widely disseminated both within the academy and outside it. Although it derives from a serious academic interest in discovering and analyzing the common thread of the Church's evangelization policy in Peru, this stance, centered on the problem of the “extirpation of idolatry,” has been progressively emptied of content and today tends to serve as the standard means of filling gaps in the understanding of the history of Andean peoples during the colonial period.

Students of the hemispheric system have generally neglected the era of World War I, probably because no major inter-American conferences were held between 1910 and 1923. Yet the disparate reactions to the European conflict represented a crisis of “continental solidarity”; World War I gave rise to a potentially important challenge to United States leadership and helped shape future patterns of hemispheric relations. The war called forth two rival blocs—United States-Brazil and Mexico-Argentina. These blocs differed over more than war policy. Their rivalry reflected an inter-American power struggle, each side invoking “continental solidarity” to gain support from other American nations. The impact of World War I upon the inter-American system and, in particular, the Argentine attempt to convene a Latin American congress need fuller examination.

It was in January 1950 that Guatemalan Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a rather unfamiliar figure at the time, headed for El Salvador, giving no sign that he would eventually become one of the most notorious antagonists in the destruction of the 1944-54 Guatemalan Revolution. Late in 1950, he and some 70 compatriots attacked Guatemala City's Base Militar, hoping to overthrow Juan José Arévalo's government and prevent Jacobo Arbenz from assuming the presidency. Though the assault failed and its participants were imprisoned, the dissident bribed his way out of jail and took into exile a newfound reputation as an influential conspirator.

The obrajes of the Sierra and the plantations of the Coast are the poles around which, in different eras, the economy of the Audiencia of Quito seems to revolve. Woolen cloth and cacao are the two products that allowed this territory to participate in regional and international commercial circuits, and have attracted the most attention from historians in the last two decades.

In a region lacking large mining centers, encomenderos were from early times compelled to develop activities that would allow them to move in the Andean colonial sphere, which was dominated by the “Rich Hill” of Potosí, the actual force behind the formation of this great interregional market, as Carlos Sempat Assadourian has demonstrated. The inter-Andean corridor and its plateaus, suitable for the raising of sheep and a source of ready Indian labor, facilitated the development of the obrajes that were set up in Indian communities, on private haciendas, and in urban areas.

Within the scope of Mexican history, the subjects of the Church and the Inquisition have long been the focus of emotion, heated controversy, and misplaced value judgments. As a result, a lack of understanding surrounding these institutions has developed, and to a certain extent still exists today. Many authors have placed a heavy emphasis on the role that the Holy Office of the Inquisition played in the persecution of crypto-Jews, despite the fact that the inquisitors concerned themselves far more with more mundane breaches of faith and morals as blasphemy, bigamy, witchcraft, impersonation of priests, and solicitation of women in the confessional. These same writers demonstrate a certain emotional preoccupation with torture and burnings at the stake, phenomena which, while spectacular, occurred infrequently. The continual preoccupation with the theme of inquisitorial persecution of crypto-Jews, furthermore, seems to obscure other important areas of research in colonial Mexican history.

The Nahua concept of heaven was one of the central issues that the missionary friars confronted as they attempted to reconcile Christian and Nahua thought in the early sixteenth century. The Nahua believed in the existence of both celestial heavens and subterranean hells, as possible destinations for individuals after death. The celestial realms, of which there were thirteen, were in general pleasant places. The subterranean realms were unpleasant. Unfortunately for the friars, the mechanisms whereby one could come to enjoy or suffer in these realms depended not on the quality of one’s life, but rather on the particulars of one’s death, the date of one’s birth, and other features of one’s existence. For instance, those who died by water, or lightening, were consigned to the heaven of the god of rain, Tlaloc. For the Nahua this post-mortem existence was corporeal, although the nature of one’s body might change in the process. The Nahua did not have any easy equivalent for the Christian soul. This essay will look particularly at the Nahuatl word for the sky, ilhuicatl, and how it functioned in both pre-Columbian thought and in the works written after the conquest with greater, or lesser, degrees of Christian input.

Father José María Luis Mora, infamous as an advocate for political liberalism during inchoate Mexico’s struggle for nationhood, worked through a myriad of channels to bring about change in his country. Educated and ordained as a secular priest, he was both professor and librarian at the prestigious Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City, but found time to author five volumes of collected essays and edit three periodicals. His national acclaim rests with his career as lawyer, politician, and political theorist. Not all of his contemporaries recognized that he also became a Bible merchant during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

By 1820, much of Spanish South America had achieved independence, and Spain was on the defensive in those areas where her flag still flew. Amongst the countries that gained their independence in this period was Chile, which after the battle of Maipú in April 1818, faced no further threats to its existence from Spain. For many of the new nations, the period immediately after independence was one of political instability, shading into civil war, and Chile was no exception. However, in comparison with many of its neighbors, the period of instability was short, and the physical destruction not great.

Despite the fact that the conquest of Spanish America had been primarily a military undertaking, during two centuries of Hapsburg rule the army played a secondary role, with real power and authority being vested in a pervasive civil bureaucracy. The armed groups of adelantados who had initially conquered Peru lacked the objectives and organizational structure of true militaries. Fighters rather than soldiers, their social positions defined more through the possession of encomiendas than by military functions, they cannot be ragarded as constituting a true army. In 1615, Viceroy Montesclaros informed the Crown that in any other area these soldados would be regarded as dangerous vagabonds who posed a threat to public safety.

In 1586, the royal audiencia of Quito received a letter from a fugitive African slave written with the aid of an itinerant Spanish missionary. The judges were dismayed by what they read. The African, Alonso de Illescas, head of one of the maroon communities that had been flourishing on the coast of Esmeraldas since 1553, petitioned the court with a proposition and a veiled threat. The proposal implored the judges to honor an earlier promise giving Illescas political authority over Esmeraldas, the coastal province comprising the maroons’ homeland, and to desist in their plans to establish Spanish settlers in the region.

In March 1855, a literary newspaper in Rio de Janeiro printed the first installment of Nísia Floresta's “Páginas de uma vida obscura,” a serialized short story inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Seven more chapters followed, keeping “Páginas” in the public eye for months. The Jornal do Commercio, arguably the national paper of record, mentioned the story in its announcements. Floresta (pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto, 1810–1885) centered her storyline on the Congo-born Domingos, the “Brazilian Tom,” who exemplified the attributes of Christian virtuosity and resignation found in Stowe's internationally famous novel. Set in the nineteenth century, “Páginas” begins with the ten-year-old Domingos's enslavement on the African coast, and highlights the human devastation of the internal slave trade through his movements across Minas Gerais and on to Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. It ends with Domingos's death, at age 54, grief-stricken over his son's recent passing. In part, Floresta's “Páginas” emerged from the Brazilian schoolteacher's longstanding critiques of patriarchy, nation, and education. Twenty years earlier, Floresta had drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to write Direito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (1832), a book that went through three editions in its first decade. More directly though, Floresta had connected to the so-called “Tom mania” while living in Paris in 1852. The following year, back in Rio, she wrote a pamphlet on women's education—Opúsculo humanitário (1853)—that parsed key aspects of Uncle Tom's Cabin, among a larger discussion of women's achievements internationally. Two Rio newspapers excerpted the pamphlet, and, boldly, published the chapters focused on Uncle Tom. This attention in the press raised the profile of a book the public already knew to be controversial, as newspapers had earlier carried reports of port authorities seizing shipments of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Rio, Salvador, and Fortaleza. In writing “Páginas,” then, two years after the Opúsculo, Floresta not only carried forward her literary dialogue with Stowe, but also posed the work as a challenge to the status quo. “Páginas” was necessary, she explained, because “slavery is not an issue of concern in the press.” If overstated, given that the topic of slavery was quite prevalent in public discourse, Floresta's assertion nonetheless signals an opportunity for scholars to probe further into the relationship between slavery and the public sphere in the mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it suggests connections to be explored between the press and the early reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Brazil, and, more broadly, connections between the representations of slavery in the press, and the institution's enduring legitimacy.

Is love a modern invention? This question is perhaps not quite as ludicrous as it might appear. For nearly three decades scholars have been exploring whether contemporary ideas about love are in fact as ancient as we might believe. As a result of these investigations, some historians have concluded that our current attitudes towards love date from no earlier than the seventeenth century. This opinion was expressed most forcefully by Lawrence Stone in his 1977 The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. In this path-breaking study Stone argued that recognizably modern ideas about marriage did not emerge in England until the seventeenth century. Only then did what he called “companionate marriage” develop. “Companionate marriage,” as described by Stone, was characterized by certain distinguishing features.

The interim years between the two world wars in Peru witnessed a proliferation of original ideas among Peruvian leftists on the relationship between religion and revolutionary change as a result of their efforts to re-examine national realities and bring about a radical change in Peruvian society. Young social thinkers and protesters such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Luís Valcárcel and others felt that the new Peru must incorporate and synthesize the best elements of Peru's past and present with the best ideas emanating from revolutionary Russia and Mexico. In their quest to construct a program of action for a revolutionary Peru, the generation of the twenties and thirties realized the necessity of going beyond the literary liberalism of the grand master of Peruvian anti-clericalism, Manual González Prada. They endeavored to propose a new, positive program which would neither discard nor neglect such an integral part of national life as the Roman Catholicism of the majority of Peruvians. Even more, they consciously explored ways by which the popular Catholicism of the Peruvian lower classes might be converted into a source of energy for the coming revolution.

In this essay I describe some often ignored North American modes of perceiving Latin Americans; and I suggest that a change in these modes contributed to the Good Neighbor era (1933-1945). I do not presume to argue that shifting attitudes and perceptions should be seen as the principal factors in shaping the Good Neighbor policy. Anyone concerned with the primary determinants of that policy must turn to security and economic considerations. Still, an intellectual—and, really, a psychological—phenomenon of shifting perceptions and stereotypes among North Americans accounted for some of the enthusiasm with which they greeted what they took to be a new approach to Latin America.

In its central thrust this essay suggests that in hemispheric relations, seen from the north-of-the-Rio-Grande perspective, the United States stands generally for culture and Latin America for nature. Symbolizing the capitalist culture of the Yankees, shaped by their struggle to subdue wilderness and nature, has been the white male, often portrayed by Uncle Sam. In contrast, Latin America has been symbolized by Indians, blacks, women, children, and also the idle poor: people assumed to lack the capitalist urge constantly to tame, dominate, and uplift nature.

Within recent years, Spanish American historical studies have gained in depth and understanding. One area which has witnessed relatively little progress, however, is the clergy. While European scholars have been busy in the investigation of many aspects of the life and work of the clergy, Latin Americanists have done little or nothing. It is a pleasure to be able to present a study on the pastors of the Lima archdiocese in an effort to help fill an evident need.

“ A few days ago,” reported the newspaper El Bien Público (Quezaltenango), “in the town of San Juan Ixcoy…the Indians rose up, killing the ladinos, including several habilitadores (labor recruiters)”. As first news of this soon-to-be famous massacre filtered out of the Cuchumatán mountains, it became clear that some of the country's highland Indians had struck back, as many ladinos long had feared they might, against the intrusions of the rapidly expanding coffee economy. The sanjuaneros' tumulto was, in fact, simply a particularly dramatic instance of a struggle played out in various forms throughout the western highlands of Guatemala in the one hundred years after 1850. With the onset of the new crop of coffee, export monoculture threatened the integrity of Indian peasant agriculture as no crop before had done. If, in this case, the immediate target of the Indians' wrath was a hapless group of habilitadores, the more serious underlying problem for the indigenous population was access to and control of land. It is on land, and particularly on the land of San Juan Ixcoy as an example of the struggle, that this paper will concentrate.

On 6 March 1701, the municipal government of Puebla de los Angeles received a cédula commanding the performance of an oath ceremony, or jura del rey, for the new Bourbon monarch, Philip V. Twelve days later, a second cédula arrived, ordering the celebration of royal funerary honors, or exequias reales, for the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II. Puebla's municipal leaders, or regidores, attributed great importance to public ceremony and began planning for the events immediately upon receiving Queen Mariana's instructions. Like the political elites of many early modern cities, Puebla's councilmen consistently dedicated a significant share of the city's resources to mount spectacles to commemorate such events as viceregal entrances, patron saints’ days, royal births and marriages, and Spanish military victories. These occasions provided local leaders with opportunities to instruct the populace in the authority of the king's primary representative, the primacy of the Catholic faith, the power of the city's leaders, the importance of hierarchy in colonial society, and the loyalty due the royal family and the Spanish Empire.