Argentina, and Buenos Aires in particular, was a preferred South Americandestination for great numbers of European immigrants who crossed theAtlantic beginning in the late nineteenth century in search of newopportunities. Most Latin American governments, from the early days of theirnations' independence, sought to attract European workers. These newlyfounded countries considered immigration an essential element for creating asociety that would become economically, politically, and socially modern.They hoped to attract mainly foreigners from Northern Europe, among them theBritish, whom they considered to have superior labor skills and to beaccustomed to the habits of order and work the new nation required.

Treason during wartime inspires some of the worst features in the human character. Not only does the traitor besmirch his own reputation in the eyes of his countrymen, but those near him are frequently polluted by association. Worst of all, the desire for vengeance that is unleashed through treasonous acts frequently brings excesses that dwarf the original crime. It is for this reason that magistrates and systems of law in Western democracies have traditionally tried to leech the passion out of individual cases of treason as they attempt to render equitable and just decisions.

On January 14, 1982, residents of Tula, Hidalgo, discovered the bodies of nine murdered men floating in a sewage drain emanating from Mexico City. All bore signs of gruesome torture. Red Cross workers soon located three more bodies, leading one reporter to describe the homicides as “the crime of the century.” Detectives initially asserted that the victims were drug traffickers who had been murdered by a rival gang. Manuel Buendía, in his weekday political column Red Privada, described the scene as “bloodcurdling,” employing his signature hard-boiled prose. Yet, the nation's most prominent journalist was referring not only to the gore, but also to his suspicions that police had committed the crime.

In 1650, a Nahua noble named don Martín Cerón y Alvarado set down his last wishes in a codicil. Eminent but now elderly and frail, don Martin had served many times as governor of the central Mexican altepetl (ethnic state) of Xochimilco. Located by the lakes to the south of Mexico City, Xochimilco was a prominent and populous polity, renowned for its bountiful wetland agriculture. Such was its size and economic vitality that Spanish authorities, under King Philip II, decided to award it superior municipal status as a city—one of just four such designations in the basin of Mexico. In keeping with his position as the dynastic ruler of a prestigious alteped, don Martin was a lord of the highest social rank. He could trace his exalted lineage back to Acamapichtli, the Mexica forebear of the Aztec emperor Moteuhcçoma Xocoyotzin. By 1650, though, don Martin was the last of his kind. No person in Xochimilco would again hold his honorific title, tlatoani (dynastic ruler). His codicil and an earlier will and testament, both written in Nahuatl, marked the passing of an era.

A significant segment of the Argentine intelligentsia experienced the Revolution of September 1955, which overthrew General Juan Domingo Perón, as a moment of liberation. With some exceptions, such as Arturo Jauretche and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz among others, the cultural politics of Peronism had not managed to gain many followers in the course of its ten-year experiment. During the two consecutive Perón governments (1946-1955) the often implicit, and occasionally explicit, opposition between intellectuals and Peronism only intensified. I contend that an analysis of this opposition is indispensable for understanding the redrawing of crucial definitions within the intellectual field at that time. Due to its profound social and cultural impact, the experience of Peronism compelled Argentine intellectuals, whether or not it was their original intention, to enter the political arena, not so much because their interests shifted from culture to politics, but rather because they came to conceive the cultural world as political.

This article aims to analyze traces of Aztec cultural memory recorded in sixteenth-century cultural sources of Central Mexico. It is a study of the particular case of an Aztec hero named Tlacahuepan, whose glorious death was commemorated in many songs and chronicles. The texts in question reveal highly symbolic language, as well as clearly established narrative patterns. The study of their discursive tools can cast considerable light on the ideological background that underlies the oral tradition on which these stories have been based. It can also contribute to a better understanding of the methods and strategies employed by the Aztecs to memorize the past and explain the present.

As the globally eventful year of 1968 drew to a close, Brazilian university students living in what was then a four-year-old dictatorship faced two new challenges that would profoundly alter student politics and resistance on campuses in the coming decade. The more infamous was Ato Institucional 5 (Institutional Act No. 5, or AI-5), which Brazil's military regime decreed on December 13, 1968 (a Friday). History and historiography have rightfully acknowledged AI-5 as ushering in the most repressive and authoritarian phase of Brazil's military dictatorship, with the regime closing the national congress and dramatically escalating state-sponsored violence and political silencing in ways that exponentially intensified earlier forms of repression and censorship.

This article explores the vision, process, and reaction to the privatization of Mapuche lands in Araucanía, Chile, from 1871 to 1916. It shows how politicians developed a racial vision for Araucanía between 1871 and 1882 during the final battle with independent Mapuche forces. Chilean government officials and elite societies created land policies that targeted the removal of indigenous populations from fertile lands to expand industrial agriculture by favoring large Chilean-owned estates and partitioning small to medium-sized plots to European settler-farmers. From 1883 to 1896, the Chilean government put its vision into practice, investing in the recruitment of European farmers and reconsidering new laws regarding colonization, land rights, and indigenous settlements. However, after the 1891 civil war, the government retreated from expensive state-building projects. From 1896 to 1916, Chilean small farmers intensified land grabs and, in response, indigenous communities formed organizations to defend their lands. At the core of the conflict were the issues of land and racialized policies that defined land access. By examining laws, government reports, missionary chronicles, and indigenous writings, this article demonstrates the progression of a racialized language that excluded indigenous peoples from their lands, founded in the desire to privatize native lands and accelerate the making of a modern Europeanized nation.

The performance of the Chilean economy during the period between 1830 and 1879 can best be described as a case of “export-led growth.” For those fifty years, exports of raw materials and foodstuffs to North Atlantic markets, especially Britain, rose dramatically. Between 1844 and 1878 the value of exports increased five-fold from $6,087,023 (about £1.2 million) to $31,695,859. This represents an average annual rate of growth of five percent. During the same period annual fiscal income, largely generated by exports, grew from $3.3 million to $15.4 million. Mining products dominated the export sector and constituted between one-half and two-thirds of the total value of Chilean production during this period. The export of copper bars and ingots was particularly dynamic. It increased ten-fold from $1.2 million in 1844 to $13.0 million in 1878 growing, on average, at an annual rate of 7.2 percent. Expansion in the export of copper bars and ingots was especially significant between 1844 and 50. This was due to a series of technological innovations, market conditions, and fiscal measures including the introduction of new smelting methods using coal instead of firewood, state incentives to Chilean copper smelting, extremely low prices for copper ores in the British and Chilean markets, and the formation of large copper smelting companies in Chile.

The extraordinary demand for luxury clothes in XVIth Century New Spain, especially for silks and velvets, has been well documented. For example, Archbishop Zumárraga, writing to the King, observed that “silks are so common here (in Mexico) that low-class journeymen and servants of both sexes as well as lovers and unmarried girls go about laden with silken capes, tunics, petticoats and mantles. … ”, while the royal accountant Rodrigo de Albornoz, also writing to His Majesty, stated that “tradespeople's wives and prostitutes wear more clothes of silk than a nobleman in Castile.” And although edicts repeatedly prohibited such luxurious dress, these edicts would only be obeyed for a brief time.

San Antonio, Texas, was founded in 1718, and this year is celebrating its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the event, we would like to publish two documents concerning early San Antonio, one dating from 1716 and the other from 1740.

Spain and Portugal during the eighteenth century made two attempts to establish official boundaries between their possessions in America. Through the treaties of 1750 and 1777 joint commissions were appointed by these powers to procede with the task of determining lines of demarcation, in the Amazon region as well as in other parts of the South American domain. Neither of these two undertakings was successful. In spite of the preliminary treaties, the expeditions, the explorations, the reports, and the maps that had been made, the commissioners of Spain and Portugal could never agree upon a common boundary satisfactory to their conflicting claims. At the close of the century, therefore, the problem of the Amazon boundaries, which had so long remained a point of contention between the two Iberian nations, was still unsolved.

In response to an anti-Federalist insurgency within the province of Córdoba in 1840, Manuel López, the governor (r. 1835-1852) and staunchally to Juan Manuel de Rosas, issued a directive to all provincial judges to round up all suspected Unitarians and their families, seize their property, and strip them of their citizenship. In following these orders, Pedro José García, the local juez de paz (Justice of the Peace), the principle law enforcement body of Pueblo de la Toma in the heart of Córdoba province, proceeded to the farmhouse of Faustino Avalo, who had recently been “classified” as a “savage Unitarian,” a political label describing any person opposing Federalist rule. García charged Avalos with secretly aiding and abetting Unitarian armies, which had passed through the province during the anti-Federalist uprisings in the previous year. As evidence of his guilt, according to the confiscation order, Avalos went missing for weeks and was nowhere to be found. Indeed, when García arrived, only Avalos's wife, María Juana Villafáñez, and their ten children remained. Nevertheless, García, along with two other “trusted” witnesses, read the order and confiscated the entire family's property. Villafáñez and her children could only watch helplessly as their clothes, toys, furniture, and livestock were taken away in wagons and their house boarded up. Yet, García did not arrest nor imprison Villafáñez and her children; instead, they were allowed to stay with her brother, Gervasio, a well-known Federalist and one of the “trusted” witnesses to his sister's material loss and public humiliation.

THE elite of seventeenth century Caracas manifests characteristics which can be related to the colonial nature of the society. Under conditions of imperialism centers of economic and political power are far removed from the local community. The elite in this situation must serve a dual role—it must face inward to master and develop the economic and political resources of the colony and at the same time it must face outward to exchange these resources with the metropole on which it is dependent. In an examination of the colonial society as a whole it appears that the elite is one monolithic group of men performing both these functions. But a study of the internal operation and structure of colonial elites may produce a schema of multiple character types—patrons, brokers and clients. In an environment which favors the operation of patron-clientelism as described in my previous article, “Patrons, Clients and Kin in Seventeenth Century Caracas,” the dual role of the colonial elite may distinguish patrons and brokers. Patrons may control the resources to which the community gives value while brokers transfer the valued resources which they do not control between the local dependency and the imperial system.

No more Cubas!” For a quarter of a century, that slogan has propelled American intervention into Latin America. President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was designed to head off more Castro-type revolutions in the region. In 1965, President Johnson crushed a revolution in the Dominican Republic, declaring that “another Cuba in this hemisphere would be unacceptable.” And the Nixon plan for subverting the Chilean government in the early 1970s was motivated, in Henry Kissinger's words, by fear of Allende's “patent intention to create another Cuba.”

During the conquest of New Spain the Tarascan kingdom of Michoacán was one of the richest areas to submit to Spanish control without significant resistance. Shortly after the capitulation of Tenochtitlán the native king of Michoacán, called the Cazonci, exchanged ambassadors of peace and friendship with Henando Cortés. The Spanish commander gladly accepted the submission of this strong Indian nation which had repelled all attempts at conquest by the Mexican Empire.

After the coup d'etat which established the Estado Nôvo, Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas gradually destroyed two organizations that had helped to create the excited atmosphere in which the events of November 10, 1937 occurred: the Brazilian branch of the German National Socialist Party (NSDAP) and the Ação Integralista Brasileira. Vargas eliminated the first because it was a threat to Brazilian security and sovereignty, the second because it was a danger to his regime. Though apparently Vargas was never serious in his flirtation with the greenshirted Integralistas, he did welcome their support of his government until he consolidated control. Integralista sympathy for and possible connection with Nazi Germany precluded Getúlio's allying himself with the greenshirts but not from using them. He attacked the Nazi Party because it tended to preserve German nationalism among German immigrants and hindered their Brazilianization.

The article analyzes political conflict in Mexico through a powerful social movement that erupted in the massive shantytown of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl between 1969 and 1973. In the summer of 1969, after decades of abysmal living conditions, the residents of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (Neza) launched a payment strike to demand the federal government expropriate the land from private land developers, with the intent to gain urban infrastructure and formal property titles. The rebellion that plunged Ciudad Neza into a state of perpetual strife reflects a juncture in Mexican history when the urban shantytown emerged as a distinct and influential site for mass politics. This article historicizes Mexico's urban shantytown as a political space where the ruling party's entrenched clientelism contended with embryonic forms of local democracy. Revealing numerous contradictions, this case study is emblematic of how the urban periphery was a precursor to the vibrant yet incomplete democratization that would come to define national politics in Mexico and much of Latin America in the 1980s.

This article analyzes the impact that religion had on the act of lynching and its legitimation in postrevolutionary Mexico. Basing its argument on the examination of several cases of lynching that took place after the religiously motivated Cristero War had ended, the article argues that the profanation of religious objects and precincts revered by Catholics, the propagation of conservative and reactionary ideologies among Catholic believers, and parish priests’ implicit or explicit endorsement of belligerent forms of Catholic activism all contributed to the perpetuation of lynching from the 1930s through the 1950s. Taking together, these three factors point at the relationship between violence and the material, symbolic, and political dimensions of Catholics’ religious experience in postrevolutionary Mexico. The fact that lynching continued well into the 1940s and 1950s, when Mexican authorities and the Catholic hierarchy reached a closer, even collaborative relationship, shows the modus vivendi between state and Church did not bring an end to religious violence in Mexico. This continuity in lynching also illuminates the centrality that popular – as opposed to official or institutional - strands of Catholicism had in construing the use of violence as a legitimate means to defend religious beliefs and symbols, and protect the social and political orders associated with Catholic religion at the local level. Victims of religiously motivated lynchings included blasphemous and anticlerical individuals, people that endorsed socialist and communist ideas, as well as people that professed Protestant beliefs and practices.

The seventeenth century opened with a bang, literally. In the year 1600, on the first Friday in the season of Lent, sometime between noon and 3:00 PM (that is, at the hour of the accustomed Lenten penitential processions), the Peruvian volcano of Huaynapudna began a protracted series of explosions and eruptions. It was the largest recorded volcanic eruption in the Western Hemisphere, greater by far than that of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, or Mount St. Helens in 1980, and only slightly smaller than the colossal eruption of Krakatoa, Indonesia, in 1883. The event sent both Christian Spaniards and neo-Christian Indians searching for answers to apocalyptic questions. On that same Friday, February 18, 1600, several other violent earthquakes leveled buildings nearby.