In 1787, a group of Indians from the town of Almoloya, part of Apan in the Intendancy of Mexico, aired their grievances against several prominent local leaders. The petitioners claimed that their predominantly Indian community was plagued by a group of free-colored people who were masquerading as Indian nobles, or caciques, and enjoying privileges to which only those with noble lineage were entitled. One of these was exemption from the economically onerous and socially stigmatized royal tribute that had symbolized the relationship between the Spanish monarch and free-colored subjects since the sixteenth century.

The year 1577 was a watershed for linguistic politics in Mexico. After more than five decades in Mexico, the Spanish crown signaled a break from its previous tolerance of the use of indigenous language in catechesis and doctrinal publications. The landmark case is the crown's confiscation of Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia General in 1577. Simultaneously, the Mexican Inquisition pursued an assault on vernacular Scripture, confiscating dozens of Spanish scriptural editions, and culminating in the Inquisition's prohibition of Nahuatl and other indigenous-language translations of Scripture, in particular Ecclesiastes and the Epístolas y Evangelios (Epistles and Gospels). Also central was the second trial of a noted Erasmian, Alonso Cabello, who had spent much of the same year in house arrest in Tlatelolco. All this came on the heels of the establishment of the Holy Office in Mexico in November 1571 and its first full-scale purge of prohibited books, including well over 200 editions of Scripture—dozens of them in Spanish and a few in Nahuatl—that had circulated freely in Mexico. Prior to the 1570s exico had witnessed intense debates about the role of language in missionary projects, in catechesis, and in the education of indigenous Mexicans, alongside those regarding the proper language for Scripture and devotional works.

The centennial of the founding of the Brazilian Republic, which coincides with the bicentennial of France's republican revolution of 1789, has not aroused the same debates as the French Revolution. The extent to which France's eruption represented a bourgeois revolution has been much questioned. Indeed, bourgeois revolutions everywhere have been subject to greater scrutiny and skepticism. This debate has excited much less passion in Brazil.

Most historians have viewed the Brazilian Republic's birth as a rather unimportant event—and a failure. It was neither bourgeois nor a revolution. Rather, the overthrow of the Emperor on November 15, 1889 was a palace coup that replaced one authoritarian rural regime with another. According to this interpretation, no social change occurred as the population stood by “beastlike.” Historians often argue that although the army, which launched the coup, was able to maintain some autonomy in policy formulation for five years, it soon succumbed to the revived agrarian export elite, leaving behind few positive achievements. Yet at the time, the London Statesman declared that the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy to be the world's most significant event in a very busy 1889. Historians are now starting to echo this sentiment, reasserting the importance of the early 1890s. Décio Saes, for instance, asserts that the 1889-1891 period marked the advent of the “bourgeois state” which confirmed on the political level the transformation set into motion by the emancipation of slaves in 1888.

The field of Latin American Studies owes much to Professor Howard J. Wiarda, whose pioneering work on “corporatism” and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped establish a new conceptual paradigm for interpreting the persistence of corporately defined, institutional identities throughout Latin America, despite the purported triumph of the “Liberal Tradition.” A child of Dutch parents, his early travels throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America sparked a keen interest in the question of “third world development.” Entering graduate school in the early 1960s, Professor Wiarda gravitated to the newly emergent field of modernization studies at the University of Florida, where he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Latin American politics. It was a time of tremendous social ferment in Latin America and his early fieldwork took him to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil, among other places. In each instance, he found recognizable patterns that transcended geographic locations, patterns that seemed to directly challenge the predominant arguments set forth in the modernization literature at the time.

How religion became a tool for integrating women into the modernization process in mid-nineteenth century Chile is the subject of this essay. The intense liberal assault on tradition in nineteenth century Latin America resulted in cultural warfare that benefited women as the abandonment of the Church in record numbers by men created opportunities for both religious and lay women to assume leadership roles. Perhaps for the only time in its history, the Roman Catholic Church identified religious women as a specie of clergy and actively encouraged their female apostolates to preserve the faith of women and children. In Chile this tension between traditional Hispanic and competing bourgeois values had a female dimension because included among the indicators of modernity was the social role of woman. Traditional Hispanic culture cloistered woman in the convent or home; she was a private person who left the public sphere to her male relatives. Independence, however, introduced the idea of republican motherhood and the notion became more pronounced when travelers to the United States and Europe noted the freedom and social contributions of women thereby giving credence to the new concept. Female apostolates provided women with the bridge to the modern age and provided a “feminine ideal of self-sacrificing women [to balance] Adam Smith's masculine gospel of enlightened self-interest.”

As she lay bleeding to death from an accidental knife wound, María Josefa Vargas said to her husband: “Look what the Devil has done (Mira lo que hace el diablo).” María Josefa and her husband, José Rosario, were both indigenous, natives of Almoloya and Tenancingo respectively, and at the time living in Malinalco in the Valley of Mexico. They had been fighting playfully over some meat that María Josefa had bought to make cecina Mock anger and a very sharp knife made for bad companions, and José Rosario accidentally cut María Josefa in the leg.

María Josefa's words are one of those elusive examples of the key place occupied by the Devil in Mexican popular culture in the late eighteenth century. By the late colonial period the Devil seems to have become more of a concern for rural Mexicans, particularly within indigenous communities, than he had been before. Once a European import, the Devil had become a more evident part of the symbols used by Indians in the countryside. He had become less of a concern to Church and State authorities and was rather used to explain accidents, such as the one cited above, but more frequently as an excuse or a reason for unacceptable conduct, such as violence or illicit sexuality.

In 1808, confronted with the latest in a lengthy series of legal challenges to its corporate landholdings, the municipal council of the Indian town of San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala, in the northeastern province of Coahuila in New Spain, dispatched a blistering note to its counterpart in the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo. The question of the moment concerned the right of Saltillo residents José Miguel and Juan González to route water they claimed in one place to property San Esteban had earlier allowed them to farm in another. But to do so meant that the water would be directed across lands belonging to San Esteban. When the Indian town denied them this right, the brothers protested vigorously. They contended that agriculture was, after all, the mainstay of the local economy. It benefited the public, the king, the church, and particularly the families of the pueblo itself. To deny these two farmers access to their water was to jeopardize agricultural production in the area. Further, they argued, San Esteban possessed much uncultivated arid land; perhaps the pueblo should consider renting some of the Gonzálezes' water as it flowed across the town's properties. Implicit in this suggestion was the assumption that San Esteban residents could not deal with what they had, that they were wasteful in utilizing their resources, and that Spaniards, in this particular case the brothers González, were better equipped to exploit the resources of the community.

Captain Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, whose proud boast it was (as he never tires of reminding us) that he was the great-great-grandson of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in his erratic, rambling, and frequently delightful Recordación Florida (c. 1690), has this to say about the ancient town that will be the subject of this article:

The massive efforts of the Bourbon monarchs of the late colonial period to give their Spanish-American empire a modern state apparatus, extract more revenues from it, and defend it effectively from foreign interlopers involved an unprecedented assertion of royal authority at all levels of government, including the local one. Municipal government throughout the Americas became both an object of reform and one of the chief instruments of Bourbon reorganization at ground level. All the major activities and changes that required direct contact with the general population, from the taking of censuses and the establishment of militia units to the imposition of new taxes and the reorganization of the colonial financial structure, depended on municipal governments for their effective implementation. When the world wars for empires among Britain, France, and Spain reached a crisis stage for the Bourbons with Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, the municipal governments became even more vital to the maintenance of the viceroyalties and the survival of the Spanish monarchy.

In the eyes of many North Americans, Mexico is above all a country of immigration from which hundreds of thousands hope to pass across the border to find the promised land in the United States. What these North Americans do not realize is that for thousands of Latin Americans and for many U.S. intellectuals, Mexico after the revolution of 1910-1920 constituted the promised land. People persecuted for their political or religious beliefs—radicals, revolutionaries but liberals as well—could find refuge in Mexico when repressive regimes took over their country.

In the 1920s such radical leaders as Víctor Raúl Haya De La Torre, César Augusto Sandino and Julio Antonio Mella found refuge in Mexico. This policy continued for many years even after the Mexican government turned to the right. Thousands of refugees from Latin American military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay fled to Mexico. The history of that policy of the Mexican government has not yet been written.

In an age of fiscal and administrative reform, the army of New Spain stood out as an irredeemable drain on the treasury as well as a nightmare for bureaucrats and military planners. No knowledgeable observer could possibly advocate a continuation of the haphazard defenses of previous decades, but there were very few other points of agreement. From the perspective of the mother country, Mexicans had to recognize the need to defend themselves. The British conquests of Canada, the Floridas, and the temporary occupation of Havana, underscored the dangers and the possibilities of Mexicans losing their possessions and liberties. Naturally, the full burden of military finance and service would fall upon the residents of the viceroyalty, not to mention the growing costs of the annual subsidies (situados) sent to help pay for the defense of less advantaged possessions in the Caribbean, Central America, and the Philippines. The problem was how to prevent the army of New Spain from becoming a voracious consumer of money without offering much in the way of a standing defense force. In 1762 for example, Viceroy Marqués de Cruillas spent 3,398,471 pesos extraordinary funds without managing to get the fortifications at Vercruz into a state of readiness or a proper force to defend them. Most viceroys, inspectors general, and senior staff officers confronted with the task of having to inspect Mexican units catalogued a long list of failures. They described a history of constnatly changing military policies that achieved little other than to waste hundreds of thousands of pesos each decade while entrenching numerous chronic defects.

Unlike the Latin American policies of his predecessors, that of Woodrow Wilson was an unusual compound of ideals and realities. Wilson himself provided the first ingredient by repudiating the “Big Stick ”diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt and the “Dollar Diplomacy ”of William Howard Taft and promising instead hemispheric friendship based upon mutual respect. Wilson proposed that the United States encourage its neighbors to become strong constitutional and democratic states and then join with it to form a confraternity for peace which the world could see and imitate. As a means to this goal, Wilson formulated a Pan American Pact to provide mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity. Although this pact was to founder upon the rock of Chilean national self-interest, its promise of a hemispheric partnership was an important step towards true Pan-Americanism.

Labor questions put their indelible stamp on colonial life, whether in Brazil, Spanish America, or the North American colonies. Methods of labor recruitment varied among these regions, however, as did the social consequences of enslavement, race mixture, and destruction or modification of native cultures.

The poverty of the Amazon region, the old state of Maranhão e Grão Pará, prevented a system of black slavery such as characterized the Brazilian Northeast. Indians, whether slave, or held as free men in mission villages, dominated the labor market. The perennial lay-ecclesiastical fight for jurisdiction over the Indian has been vividly documented by historians such as Boxer, Kiemen, and Leite. This ground need not be retraced. What may be of interest is to examine the variety of sources from which labor was supplied to the plantations, cities, and fortresses of Maranhão e Grão Pará during the first half of the eighteenth century, just before the disruptions brought by Pombal's reforms.

The Zimmermann telegram of 1917, the attempt of the German government to bring Mexico into World War I on the side of the Central Powers, is a well-known diplomatic episode because it is generally conceded to be one of the series of factors which convinced President Woodrow Wilson of the efficacy of abandoning his policy of neutrality. In return for her co-operation, and upon the successful conclusion of the war, Mexico was to “recover the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” On March 1, 1917, when the incident was recorded in the United States press and before either the State Department or the White House issued a confirmation or a denial, many congressmen and a good percentage of the United States public considered the note to be a brazen forgery and a great hoax. Had they realized that Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann’s proposal to Venustiano Carranza was not a bold and newly devised scheme but rather the climax of several years of intrigue with various Mexican officials and exile groups and had they been aware that the idea of restoring the territory lost in the middle of the nineteenth century was a Mexican rather than a German idea, there would have been but little reason to dispute the validity of the document in question.

When Brazilian troops occupied Asunción on January 1, 1869, the worst war in South American history appeared to be nearing its end. This was a conflict caused by power politics, boundary disputes, and traditional animosities in the Plata basin. In a very real sense, the Paraguayan War was a climactic event in the evolution of nationalism in all of the four countries involved. A fortuitous combination of circumstances found Brazil and Argentina supporting the same party in Uruguay; although still intensely suspicious of each other's intentions, they had come to realize that an independent Uruguay was essential for the maintenance of peace between them. Argentina and Brazil had long sustained territorial disputes with Paraguay; indeed, if their desires had been satisfied, Paraguay would have been reduced to the territory she now has between the Paraná and Paraguay rivers.

As it has been suggested in a previous article, by the middle of the 1830's, the Mexican government had started to put into effect a policy of stricter control over the sources of income of the Church and, at the same time, it had started to tap clerical resources with demands for loans, both forced and voluntary. In addition, Liberal politicians had put forward plans to restrict the political and economic power of the Church, not to mention its more subtle influence on areas such as education. These restrictive policies were embodied in the laws decreed by Vicente Gómez Farías during his ephemeral administration. Although the majority of these laws were later revoked, the ideological challenge of the Liberals remained alive, awaiting more propitious times. In the interim, the Conservative régimes which ruled the country from 1835 to 1855 had to face some of the most difficult political and economic crises experienced by Mexico up to that time. In trying to solve them, the Conservatives, although friendly to the Church, continued attempting to exert some form of control over clerical property, and continued to regard the Church as a source of possible funds.

Among the major sources of conflict between liberals and conservatives in nineteenth-century Latin America was the controversy over the relationship between Church and State and the position of the Church in the newly independent states. Not infrequently the issues occasioned violence and bloodshed and long periods of instability while the conservative defenders of a privileged Church disputed with reforming liberals attempting to enforce their ideas. Such was the case in Colombia and Mexico when liberalism reached its apogee in the middle of the nineteenth century. In both countries there had been many years of conflict between conservatives who were generally pro-clerical and espoused centralist ideas about government and liberals who were anti-clerical and favored federalism. The liberals also believed in legal equality, the sanctity of private property, individualism, laissez faire, and the necessity of limiting the Church to a purely spiritual role in society. Although liberals in both countries had achieved national power prior to the 1850’s, the Mexican Constitution of 1857 and the Colombian Rionegro Constitution of 1863 symbolized the liberals’ victory and enshrined their principles; for years those constitutions provided the rallying point for liberals against the opposition.

Simón Bolívar, soon to become an icon of Latin American independence, wrote a celebrated document, dated from Kingston, his place of temporary exile, on September 6, 1815. Bolívar's document, later known as the Jamaica Letter, made prophesies for Latin America's future, appraised its contemporary political conditions, and justified the region's current rebellions against the Spanish crown. Chief among the justifications for rebellion was the exclusion of American-born Spaniards, or creoles, from administration, government, and politics. Wrote Bolívar:

The transition from slave to free labor in the Americas involved many and varied forms of internal labor and land adjustments which affected slaves, landless farmers, and large scale producers in rural areas. Unlike Haiti and the United States South, the Brazilian process of emancipation was gradual and did not involve violent structural ruptures with the past. The Land Law of 1850, the Law of the Free Womb of 1871 and the 1885 Sexagenarian Law marked fundamental phases in an ongoing process of state participation in the organization of the free labor market, which culminated in Abolition on 13 May 1888, and the onset of the Republic on 15 November of the following year. Current analyses of the late nineteenth century emphasize continuity and define the state as its own agent, embarking on a course of conservative modernization which unfolded during the process of transition from the liberalism of a nineteenth-century empire to the interventionist Republic which was ushered in, in 1889. The planter class, joined with emerging but weak Brazilian industrial and financial sectors and upheld by the military, contributed to an Estado Oligárquico, in Marcelo Carmagnani's terminology, linked by coffee production into the world economy as a flourishing dependent peripheral economy. But the process, which until recently was associated with the coffee export sector and its relation to urbanization and industrialization, has now taken on broader dimensions. A developed domestic economy, composed of a complex and sophisticated internal food supply network, operated alongside the export economy throughout the nineteenth century. Although unstudied from the political perspective of small-scale food producers who were displaced by the coffee economy, the broader issue of food provision could not be dissociated from conservative modernization, the basic issues of which would be carried forth during the course of the First Republic in the form of “Ruralismo.”