In 1519 Spanish conquistadors arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica under the leadership of Hernando Cortés. Following the defeat of Mexico-Tenochtidan, the Aztec capital, Cortés requested that members of the Franciscan order be sent from Spain to lead the conversion effort. In 1523 the first three Franciscans arrived, among them fray Pedro de Gante. One year later another 12 Franciscans made the journey. They established themselves in the southeastern portion of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and under their direction Nahua laborers built the principal Franciscan religious compound, San Francisco, and the first indigenous chapel in New Spain, San Josef de los Naturales. Together this friary and chapel served as the main point of interaction for Franciscan conversion efforts within the altepetl, ethnic state, of Mexico-Tenochtidan. In the courtyard of San Francisco, next to the indigenous chapel, fray Pedro established an indigenous school aimed at the indoctrination of the Nahua peoples of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and other outlying altepetl. Although its students were primarily members of indigenous nobility, other promising Nahuas received an education there as well.

To Study Separately each of those elements which the Portuguese, with instinctive genius, used for their expansion throughout the world, is a task to which every student of the Portuguese colonization-effort must devote his attention if he is to make any contribution, how small soever, to that history. Convinced that the negro was among the most telling and effective elements which were used for the colonization of Brazil, we propose here to study him in one of his most significant revolts against his masters. That revolt, on the part of some, stemmed from the desire of freeing themselves from slavery and domination; on the part of others, from the wish of civilizing, colonizing and taking part in the march of progress.

After Spain’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1757-1763), when the British had occupied Havana and Manila, a series of territorial, commercial, and tax reforms brought significant change to the viceroyalty of Peru. Their economic effects have been matters for debate ever since. Some historians have emphasized their positive effects. Following promulgation of the Reglamento de comercio libre of 1778, the volume and value of European manufactures exported to the Pacific coast of Spanish South America increased. Lima and its port city, Callao, remained important as commercial centers of Spanish South America. But others suggest that the viceregal capital—home to a powerful mercantile elite, the magnates of the consulado (merchant guild) of Lima—suffered a decline in its economic fortunes, as did the entire viceroyalty. Support for this point of view was widespread in late colonial Peru. In spite of the evidence for growth, a rising chorus of complaint bemoaned the increasing poverty of the viceroyalty in general and Lima in particular. How can we account for this discrepancy?

The relations between the Chilean Movimiento Nacional Socialista (MNS, or Nacismo) and the German-Chilean community, i.e., Chilean citizens of German origin, as well as the attitude of the former towards the Third Reich are still largely unexplored topics. Despite the growing number of studies on the nacista movement since the late 1980s, which rounded off and partly corrected earlier studies, and thereby substantially increased our knowledge of its ideology, political activities and leader, Jorge González von Marées, they have received little scholarly attention so far. In general, and this reservation applies to earlier as well as more recent publications, authors only briefly refer to the similarities between Chilean Nacismo and German Nazism, and either note the important role German-Chileans played in the organization or state that they were insignificant for its overall development. The only partial exceptions to this rule are Olaf Gaudig and Peter Veit’s as well as Jiirgen Muller’s works, which provide some information about these issues, and especially the relationships between the Chilean fascists and the German-Chileans.

In the vast panorama of colonial American government, Martín Enríquez de Almansa, Señor de Valderrábano, must be ranked among the most effective, intelligent, and conscientious governors sent to this hemisphere by Spanish monarchs. As fourth viceroy of Mexico (1568–1580) and sixth of Peru (1581–1583), Enríquez was of that distinguished official company—Mendoza, La Gasca, Toledo—which consolidated the loyalty of Spain’s Indies during a critical period of separatist pressures. Though often damned as a cantankerous character and handicapped by advanced age and poor health, Martín Enríquez firmly grasped and stubbornly held the reins of monarchical prestige, giving a restive Mexico twelve years of solid training in toeing the mark of viceregal authority. His twenty-two months in Lima, with death at his elbow, can be considered, at the least, a valuable “breather” which helped lessen irritations growing out of Toledo’s dynamic performance. And it was no small achievement that Martín Enríquez stayed in viceregal office so long during such critical years; this in itself points to an unusual personality, meriting investigation. But there is, of course, much more in the Enríquez story.

In his 1927 annual report to the Pernambucan state legislature, Governor Estacio de Albuquerque Coimbra wrote that “the economic, intellectual, moral and civic value of the Nation and the State is shaped, with the expression of human activity, in the excellence of physical and moral robustness of its population.” He believed that government was responsible for improving the condition of its citizens, and that “man, healthy or sick, … ought to fall under the knowing gaze of the Governments, preserving or restoring him to health, to benefit the Nation.” Under Coimbra's administrations, the Pernambucan government inaugurated public health, public assistance, and education programs designed to improve the material and physical well-being of Pernambucan citizens. This was not an easy task; regional economic underdevelopment and perennial budget crises threatened government-sponsored social programs. While public health programs could be implemented and administered with relative ease in the state's capital of Recife, transportation problems and low population density made the extension of such services to the residents of the state's interior almost impossible. Despite these obstacles, public health programs and the physical well-being of the state's populations had become the single most important concern of the Pernambucan government by the mid 1920s, and the expectation of future economic development and social progress was tied to the development of effective public health programs.

On February 1, 1584, Pedro Moya de Contreras, archbishop of Mexico City, dispatched the official summons to the bishops of his ecclesiastical province to attend the Third Mexican Council set for the ninth of December of that same year. At the request of the bishop of the distant diocese of Guatemala, Fray Fernando Gómez de Córdoba, of the Order of St. Jerome, the opening date was postponed to January 20, 1585.

One of the Archbishop's letters of convocation was addressed to the first bishop of the Philippines, Fray Domingo de Salazar, Dominican. From Salazar's reply we know that the Archbishop did not insist on his personal attendance nor did he even suggest that he send a delegate. The purpose of the letter was to inform Salazar of the convocation of the Council and invite him to send a written report on conditions of the Church in the Islands, and propose such problems as he thought the assembled bishop should discuss and strive to solve.

In the early 1620s, D. Luis de Sousa, a former governor-general of Brazil, complained to the Crown about the inhabitants of Pernambuco and their unreliability as witnesses in matters affecting the Albuquerque Coelho family. The colony’s population, he charged, “consists of relatives, friends, followers, and dependents of Duarte de Albuquerque [the fourth donatário or lord-proprietor] and justice officials nominated by him; and because of their land grants and the quitrents they pay to him, they are all his subjects.”

September, 1975 marks the 200th anniversary of the formal opening of the Monte de Piedad, one of the oldest continuously operating social welfare institutions in America. Conceived and endowed by Pedro Romero de Terreros, Count of Regla, the Monte de Piedad represented only one facet, albeit the most important, of the philanthropic contributions of this wealthy miner, merchant and landowner. His benefactions ranged from the small to the grand—the construction of an altar in the church of San Fernando to the gifting of a battleship to the Spanish navy.

In her study of early cinema and modernity in Latin America, Ana López wrote: “Latin American modernity has been a global, intertextual experience, addressing impulses and models from abroad, in which every nation and region created, and creates, its own ways of playing with and at modernity.” Early Uruguayan cinema exemplifies this interaction of global phenomena with local realities and thus provides an instructive window onto some of the ways Latin Americans were “playing with and at modernity” in the early twentieth century. During that era, Uruguay emerged as Latin America’s first welfare state and a model of progressive reform in the region. The complexities of that transition are reflected in so-called cine de beneficencia (beneficent cinema), film made by and for social assistance organizations for fundraising and propaganda purposes. Film historian José Carlos Álvarez identifies beneficent cinema as “something that we think was purely Uruguayan, and specific to this era.”

A surprisingly frank letter from Francisco I. Madero, political figurehead of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, to New York publisher William Randolph Hearst casts new light on the difficult question of when Madero finally opted for revolution to topple the 35-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911).

The letter was dated April 25, 1911, when Madero was with insurrectionary troops fighting at Ciudad Juárez. It contained Madero's responses to some written questions on his role in the Revolution submitted by Hearst through Sonunerfield, an American consular official in Mexico. Madero's answers were to form the basis for a news story in the Hearst newspapers.

The anticlerical attacks of radical nineteenth-century liberals provoked the Church and aided the rise of confessional politics from continental Europe to revolutionary Mexico. In the European case, Stathis Kalyvas has recently proposed that such anticlerical liberalism was often moved by two distinctive motives, one narrow and political, the other broad and institutional. These motives can be associated with the concepts of tactic and strategy as laid out by Michel de Certeau. Working from both conceptual pairings, we can characterize anticlericalism sometimes as a political tactic, responding to conjunctural circumstances, and other times as an institutional strategy, plotting out a terrain and a path on which to forge present and future power relationships. This sort of conceptualization, I believe, is also well-suited to analyses of revolutionary Mexico. Nonetheless, for the distinction between “political-tactical” and “institutional-strategic” to be helpful, historians also need to place anticlericalism within the confusing logic of destruction and reconstruction inherent to Mexico's revolutionary process.

The Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires stands as one of the few truly great opera houses of the world. Completed in 1908 after two decades of intermittent disasters which threatened to leave it a crumbling ruin before it ever opened, it remains unsurpassed as a building for the presentation of operas on a grand scale in an elegant setting. With one of the largest auditoriums of the world's opera houses, it combines splendid acoustics and a stunning exterior. Over 3,500 spectators can be easily accommodated in a seating arrangement which could make room for more were the chairs in parts of the house not so commodious nor so generously spaced. Nearly all the most renowned singers of the twentieth century have performed there and deemed it a signal honor.

The Bravery and Daring of the Portuguese is evident in the history of the discovery, exploration and colonization of Brazil. Many of them sold everything they possessed and then set off across the ocean with their “household and family,” facing storms and the assaults of pirates, and were often shipwrecked or eaten by the cannibalistic Indians on the shores where they expected to be safe.

Upon assuming office in 1784, Viceroy Nicolás del Campo, Marqués de Loreto, observed that ruin threatened the Guaraní missions in the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. Scholars concur that after the Jesuit expulsion in 1768, the missions fell into disrepair and lost their important role in regional affairs. This change marked a significant shift. Until the late eighteenth century, the Guaraní missions attracted the largest indigenous population of all of Spain's Catholic missions and served an important economic and political role in the Río de la Plata region. During the last third of the century, the Guaraní missions declined as a result of Crown reforms that spurred transatlantic trade and reshaped the missions. Expenses far surpassed revenues, buildings and infrastructure deteriorated, distributions of material goods to the Indians decreased, and fewer Guaraní inhabited the missions.

By the late seventeenth century, the cult of San Felipe de Jesús (ca. 1572-97), native of Mexico City and martyr in Japan, had taken a stable form in Mexico City, where he was born. Each year on February 5, the dignitaries of the viceregal capital gathered for a procession through the city center and a liturgical ceremony in the cathedral to praise the saint and his city, but for the rest of the year, residents largely ignored him. A multitude of social interests had led to this less-than-wholehearted embrace, among them rivalry between religious orders, civic self-promotion, and religious beliefs.

On April 17, 1974, and die two days following, a gathering of 16 indigenous participants from nine different indigenous societies was held in Diamantino, Mato Grosso, Brazil. During the three days, vernacular narratives, trivial announcements, and critiques of the government and local ranchers were presented—without any of the participants significantly engaging with one another. Only one primary source on this event, a short, typed document, is available today. The historicity of this “Assembly of Indigenous Chiefs” is granted by both the anthropological and the historical situations of the participating communities. For the first time, individuals from indigenous societies that did not share ethnic borders or history met to advance indigenous rights; for the first time also, these individuals were granted political representation (of their groups), a notion largely foreign to indigenous political traditions. There was a conscious effort to draw chiefs from as many communities as possible and to establish a large, pan-Indian movement.

On January 13, 1803, the French notary Derieux visited the first of several estates owned by Domingo Rodríguez, recently deceased. Rodríguez's property lay in the environs of Santiago de los Caballeros, a town in the north-central valley of Santo Domingo on eastern Hispaniola (today, the Dominican Republic). Over a three-week period, Derieux traveled with a team of witnesses and assessors to properties as far away as coastal Puerto Plata in order to assess the value of Rodríguez's cloth store, home, cabins, pasture land, livestock, cane and foodstuff fields, and sugar-processing equipment. Two of the three plantations also included a different kind of asset. At the sugar estate Gourave, Derieux wrote down the names of the 35 cultivateurs, cultivatrices, and enfants, that is, male and female agricultural workers and their children.

The initial thrust of Spanish conquest and colonization in Northwest Mexico, as throughout the great Chichimec frontier, was centered in the mission. Under the terms of the patronato real, the mission served as an instrument of Spanish imperial policy, aimed to accomplish the pacification and acculturation to Christian and Hispanic norms of society, of the semi-nomadic peoples who occupied the vast regions of mountain barrancas, mesas and valleys, coastal plains and desert lands to the north of the Mesoamerican civilizations.

The mission communities were designed to place the Indians in fixed settlements, thereby preparing the way for civil colonization and further exploitation of the potential riches of these remote dominions of the Kingdom of Castile. The Indians gathered into the missions represented to the Crown a force for productivity as field and mine laborers. Although mission Indians were exempt from tribute, in the Northwest, the surplus produce from mission lands contributed to the economy of the region; and, as early as the seventeenth century, mission Indians appeared in the mines of Sonora and Chihuahua.