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.

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.

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:

Yerba mate, a primitive forest industry, demonstrates the interaction of private and state enterprise in nineteenth century Paraguay. A low capital investment industry based upon utilizing seasonal and unskilled labor, yerba mate was financed, collected, and sold by the private entrepreneur and the state. Demand for yerba in both internal and external markets assured satisfactory profits for businessmen, above average wages for laborers, and necessary revenues for government. As a major export of Paraguay from the end of the seventeenth century until the War of the Triple Alliance, The Great War of 1864-1870, yerba mate provides insight into government regulations, taxation, price controls, and foreign trade policies. Because of the significance of yerba mate for the Paraguayan economy, the state was involved in both production and trade, although government interest primarily assured revenues rather than state control. A description of the organization of the yerba mate industry and an analysis of government policies supports revisionist studies that the governments of José Gaspar de Francia, 1811-1840, Carlos Antonio López, 1844-1862, and Francisco Solano López, 1862-1870 were pragmatic and rational rather than dictatorial and monopolistic.

Seaborne commerce, communication, and transportation to a great extent defined and enabled the Spanish enterprise in the Caribbean from the time Europeans first arrived in the islands. With the exception of a minority of towns such as Concepción de la Vega in Española that were established in the interiors of the islands to provide access to gold mines and the indigenous labor to exploit them, the majority of new towns and cities were located on the coasts. Although Santo Domingo, San Juan, and eventually Havana emerged as the principal ports and administrative capitals of the large islands of the northern Caribbean in the first half of the sixteenth century, many secondary and small port towns played essential roles in the rapid development of systems of local and regional exchange, indigenous slave raiding, and transatlantic commerce that linked the islands to Seville, the Canaries and other islands of the Atlantic and the southern Caribbean. Allowing island residents to take advantage of waterborne transportation often via indigenous-built canoes, linking the islands to one another and the circum-Caribbean mainland, and serving as staging grounds for slave-raiding and other expeditions that radiated out from the islands, these towns helped to forge a diverse and dynamic region that was closely tied both to Spain and later to the developing societies of Spanish America.

The Relación De Las Ceremonías Y Ritos Y Población Y Gobernación De Los Indios De La Provincia De Michoacán is a complex, and beautiful, colonial text. We know that it was compiled by a Franciscan missionary, most probably Fray Jerónimo de Alcalá, although we cannot state his identity with complete certainty. We also know that it was based on the testimony of Michoacán's indigenous elite. Beyond that, however, it is not possible to obtain specific information about the text. For example, we do not know how or when the indigenous testimonies were collected, except that it was during the first twenty years after the Conquest (1519). The indigenous elite informants, with one exception, are also unknown.

The Subject of this Study lends itself to a threefold interpretation: it can refer to the books which Zumárraga himself wrote, or to the books which he edited and published, or to those which made up his library, in all probability the first library that existed in New Spain. However it be taken, a study of “The Books of Zumárraga” will give us a glimpse of one of the objects of the invincible zeal that inspired him in his broad vision of his duties as bishop and missionary, as the guide of souls and the father of his flock, occupied with all the necessities of the natives that dwelt within the immense territories comprised in his diocese.

In fact, the constitutive elements of his diocese were two: the conquerors and the conquered. The former, as was to be expected, had their full share of the spiritual defects which the lower nature of any army on active service seems all too prone to exhibit. These faults became even worse among the conquistadores of Mexico when their active service was done and they began to lead a soft, idle life that in many cases incited all their concupiscences.

Scholars have frequently argued about the nature and extent of British participation in the economic and political life of the countries which emerged during the nineteenth century. Historians who seek to disprove general or specific theses concerning British imperialism in the nineteenth century, often focus their discussions on the doctrines of “Free Trade” and “Laissez-Faire” and their impact on the formulation and implementation of British official policy. They note that Britain refused any opportunity to attain formal special status and demanded that it have only equal opportunities for trade.

At the closing years of the nineteenth century the Philippine Islands became a territorial part of the United States. For this “imperialist” domination of another people, the latter government, being based on the principle of popular sovereignty, had to find a justification. It found reason in the contention that it was helping the Filipino people achieve their independence from the despotism of Spanish rule; after that, the United States Government felt obliged to provide a stable government in the islands in place of the former colonial government. For the benefit of the American people, most of whom had only then heard of the Philippines, scores of articles were written on this Far Eastern country. In line with the government's position—that of posing as the “ savior ” of an oppressed people—and influenced by the revolutionary propaganda which had characterized the period of struggle for independence, these writers tended to paint a more or less dark picture of the Philippine Archipelago as it stood in the last century of Spanish colonization. What really was the state of the Philippines in the nineteenth century has remained a question of great interest and undiminished historical importance. Another Philippine affair was met with equal interest in this country: the friar-problem.

For the study of Spanish Florida's missions and natives the 1630 memorial by Fray Francisco Alonso de Jesus is a most important document that, strangely, has been little used to date. It ranks in significance with the 1675 letter of Bishop Gabriel Díaz Vara Calderón covering his pastoral visitation of Florida, published in 1936 by the Smithsonian Institution Press in a translation by Lucy N. Wenhold. Fray Alonso's memorial covers some of the same ground as the bishop's letter, but contains additional information dating from almost a half century earlier just before the beginning of the formal evangelization of the province of Apalachee. Fray Alonso covers topics such as the characteristics of the land, its trees and plants and minerals, its Indians and their customs, appearance, clothing, houses, council house, languages, government, inheritance system, tribute payment to native leaders, games, music, and dance, burial practices in heathen times, heathens who were clamoring for baptism in 1630, the number of doctrinas and villages and places belonging to the doctrinas, the number of Christians and catechumens, and the manner of construction of the churches.

Between 1722 and 1779, the Bourbon kings managed to achieve financial stability without broadening the tax base or borrowing on a large scale. The incorporation of Aragon's territories under the crown of Castile, the Bourbon administrative reforms, sustained population and economic growth during the first half of the eighteenth century, added to the silver coming from the Americas, explain the general increase in income within the existing fiscal constitution. The revenues extracted from the American possessions, in particular from New Spain, were essential in keeping the metropolitan budget balanced. However, from the 1790s onwards, constant international warfare made ordinary revenues collected in the Americas insufficient for financing deficit spending in Spain. To meet shortfalls, the crown implemented extraordinary measures including the collection of loans, donativos, ecclesiastical subsidies, and the enforcement of the Decreto de Consolidación de vales reales in 1804. These measures demonstrate that the Spanish crown increasingly relied on its imperial financial network to balance its budget, and simultaneously postponed the politically costly implementation of a thorough fiscal reform in the metropolis.

In 1886 the Argentine Congress adopted a new penal code for the country which replaced the existing, and often contradictory, maze of colonial laws and local bandos—ad hoc decrees—that had hitherto regulated criminal procedure. Although it is worth examining the provisions of the Código Penal as a fruitful indication of nineteenth-century legal development that witnessed an increasing centralization of power by the Argentine state, scholars have completely ignored one momentous omission in the code. As it quickly becomes apparent after perusing its pages, the new penal code had no provision regulating consensual sodomy, a practice that until then had been severely punished and was considered second in gravity only to heresy and treason. Indeed, the utter silence concerning consensual sodomy in the code effectively decriminalized it. Sodomy shifted from a crime punishable by death to a lawful activity between consenting adults in private. This sudden legal change raises a variety of questions that bear on the process of Argentine state formation and illuminate the connection between sexuality and nation building.

On 14 July 1786, representatives of the Kings of Spain and England signed the Convention of London by which His Britannick Majesty undertook to evacuate all British subjects from the northern coast of Central America, thereby putting an end to over a half-century of conflict in that remote corner of the Caribbean.

Although Article I of the Convention referred to the territory to be evacuated simply as “the Country of the MOSQUITOS …,” the intention was to secure the removal of a string of small British settlements extending from sixty miles east of Trujillo in what is now Honduras along some 550 miles of coast to Cape Gracias a Dios, and then south and east to Nicaragua’s San Juan River. The area was called then, as now, the Mosquito Shore, and had been a British sphere of influence since the 1730s.

Students of the Mission History of colonial Spanish America are aware of the importance played by the Apostolic Colleges in the expansion and development of the Indian mission field. The labors of the Fernandinos, Zacatecans and Queretarans, for example, have been heralded in the chronicles of the Colleges, in the extant documents pertaining to the respective mission fields, and in the histories, both Spanish and English, which describe the endeavors of the friars in behalf of Christianity and civilization on the frontier.

Between 1683 and 1814, seven of these Colleges were founded in New Spain alone: Santa Cruz, Querétaro; Cristo Crucificado, Guatemala; Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Zacatecas; San Fernando, Mexico City; San Francisco, Pachuca; San José, Orizaba; and Nuestra Señora de Zapopan, Guadalajara. Querétaro, Zacatecas and San Fernando are the best-known to American students, because of their influence on the Borderlands from Texas to California. San Fernando was responsible for the great development between 1769 and 1833 in the entire territory of Alta California, and in the southern portion between 1833 and 1853. Studies on this mission field are numerous and detailed, but there is a gap which should be filled with a study on the College itself. For such a study, we are dependent on the official documents of the regime, once—before the confiscation period in Mexican history—very numerous. Though various students have declared that most of the documents have been lost, the present writer may announce, with confidence, that while certain ones evidently have been lost, a great body of them does still exist; and from these it is possible to study various aspects of the College’s life. San Fernando has been chosen for study in this article, both because it was the mother house of the California missions, and because a considerable number of pertinent documents have been brought to light in recent years.

The study of slave mortality and morbidity in Brazil has been very difficult because of the extreme paucity of sources. Techniques which have been useful in studying the lives of free men and women seldom are useful for analyzing their slaves. The use of parish records such as baptism and death registers is not possible because of the custom of listing only the slave's first name and the unimaginative choice of names which resulted in large numbers of Joãos, Josés, Manuels, Antônios, Antonias, Joanas, and, of course, Marias. Equally important, the types of plantation records available to students of U.S. slavery have seldom been found for Brazil.

This essay is an examination of an isolated slave register, which, for a series of idiosyncratic reasons, provides information permitting a glimpse at mortality and morbidity in a distinct and carefully controlled slave population. Because the slaves involved were used in diamond mining under horrendous conditions it is probable that the conclusions reached in this essay represent a worst case scenario. Rather than typical, this is a special case where work and living conditions were probably worse than in plantation zones and certainly worse than in urban areas. It is this situation which makes the conclusions of this essay quite startling.

“The most noble and most faithful city of St. Francis of Quito”, capital of the republic of Ecuador and formerly capital of the Audiencia of the same name, was founded upon the ruins of the capital of Atahualpa by the Spanish conqueror, D. Sebastián de Belalcázar y Medrano, on December 6, 1534. On January 25, 1535, the noble Flemish Franciscan, Fray Jodoco Ricke de Marselaer, assisted by two other Franciscans, placed the first stone of the building which was to become the first Franciscan monastery in South America. As was the custom, the patron of the new building was the saint of the day. In this case, the feast of the day was the Conversion of St. Paul and by this name was the new friary known.

Starting in the early twentieth century, Latin American physicians organized expeditions to study remote rural populations living in their own countries. These expeditions usually aimed to solve scientific mysteries, spread western medicine, protect urban populations from epidemic diseases coming from the countryside and increase the productivity of new areas of economic exploitation. They also produced fascinating knowledge, images and stereotypes on individuals and diseases considered rare in Latin American cities.

In this paper I will analyze a similar case: the medical dimension of an effort to “colonize” or modernize the Peruvian Amazon during the 1940s. This region, an expanse of more than 500 square kilometers, was—according to a prominent Peruvian economist—“territorio inculto” scarcely populated by primitive tribes. Economic, nationalistic and political motivations coincided in the term Colonización de la Amazonía used by governmental and international agencies. Its meaning included diverse proposals such as: to encourage the migration of Andean peasants, the implementation of scientific agriculture, the creation of rural schools and military posts, the “civilization” of local natives—a process developed by religious orders in the nineteenth century—and the construction of roads to facilitate access to urban markets.

In 1958, Roque Dalton, a young poet affiliated with the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), won the first prize in a poetry contest at the University of El Salvador. A few days later, members of Salvadoran Catholic University Action, a student organization known as ACUS or simply Catholic Action, published a demolishing but carelessly written critique of Dalton. The anonymous writer of an article titled Under the Empire of Vulgarity turned his disgust with the poem written by Dalton into a diatribe against Dalton's political persona. Dalton's raw allusions to double standards in the sexual morality of priests and his remarks about the Catholic practice of fasting seem to have especially upset the leaders of ACUS. A month later, ACUS published a rejoinder written by Dalton, along with excerpts of the controversial poem. In his retort, Dalton stated that ACUS dodged debates on substantial political and aesthetic issues by engaging in insults, quick and facile judgments, and rude pigeon-holing that closes all means of intellectual comprehension.

In 1549, after 11 years of slavery, and exile, an indigenous woman made it home to her people. In the time of her captivity, she became one of the most geopolitically important and well-traveled indigenous women in the Spanish Empire. Her name—or the name Spanish society gave her—was Madalena, and she returned home to Tocobaga, in what is now Tampa Bay. From bondage in Havana, she was taken to be the translator for a missionary expedition that sought to peacefully convert her people into citizens of the imagined Spanish colony of Florida. That mission, like every other European attempt to settle the region up to the nineteenth century, would fail, but this latest failure of Spanish colonialism meant that Madalena could return to life among her own people, unlike most indigenous slaves of the sixteenth century.

In 1825, a Maxakali Indian and soldier named Inocencio walked several hundred miles from northeastern Minas Gerais to the royal court in Rio de Janeiro, seeking an audience with Emperor Dom Pedro I. Accompanying him were 14 Indians from the vicinity of Belmonte, a town located on the border of Bahia and Minas Gerais. The journey, requiring several weeks, took Inocencio through thickly forested hilly terrain with few established roads.