Through the decades, historians who have dealt with the Mexican Reform either directly or in passing have formulated a series of generalizations which have come to be accepted as giving an accurate analysis of the movement. The tenor of their writings is that insofar as the economic program of the Liberals was concerned, more harm than good was done. According to the historians, the Reformers generally failed in their attempt to restructure the nation into one of small property owners by making available to the people the real estate held formerly by civil and ecclesiastical corporations. The properties disamortized in 1856 and then nationalized or confiscated in 1859 got into the hands of hacendados and land speculators or enriched corrupt politicians and military commanders. Indian communities were despoiled of their communal lands. The Church continued secretly to control a great portion of the property through simulated sales in which devout Catholics opposed to the Reform bought the properties of the Church and held the real estate until times became more settled and the ecclesiastical authorities could reclaim the patrimony. The common man derived little benefit from the forced redistribution of property; rather the wealthy landowners became wealthier. In political terms, the historians have considered the Reform as much more successful because the Liberals emerged victorious after twelve years marked by civil war and foreign intervention in Mexican affairs, and by their triumph broke the power of the conservative forces which would never again control the destiny of the nation. These historians have never offered much in the way of concrete proof to support their widely accepted and often repeated generalizations.

In early 1515, a small Spanish expedition set sail for the province of Cumaná, located along the coast of what was then called Tierra Firme (an area spanning much of present-day Central and South America). Nominally, the squadron, led by Spanish scribe Gomez de Ribera, was sent to punish a group of “Carib” Indians who had recently attacked and killed two Spaniards on the small island of San Vicente. Once caught, these “Caribs” would be enslaved and sold in the markets of Española, Puerto Rico, or Cuba. Caribs, though speakers of the Arawakan language, were inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles and were likely culturally and politically distinct from the Taíno of the Greater Antilles. Inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles first received the ethnic label of Carib during Christopher Columbus's second voyage in 1493. Over time, Europeans exacerbated the pre-Columbian divide between Caribs and Taínos, creating a colonial dichotomy that helped the Spanish to expand the indigenous slave trade. By the third decade of colonization, or the time of Ribera's expedition, the Spanish had begun labeling all rebellious Indians as Caribs or cannibals so as to legally enslave them.

The influenza of 1918, the disastrous global pandemic known to many as the Spanish Flu, could not have come at a worse time for Mexico. The nation was eight years into its decade-long revolutionary struggle, a conflict that claimed the lives of well over a million citizens. Of those lost, several hundred thousand perished due to the influenza alone, usually from secondary complications such as pneumonia or bronchitis. Along with exposure, famine, and a myriad of other wartime ailments, the 1918 flu ranked as one of the leading causes of death in the Revolution, far surpassing combat casualties.

In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal anticlericalism. He had sought and obtained a special dispensation from Pope Pius IX for all Mexicans to participate in a “spiritual pilgrimage,” a month-long exercise of mental travel, prayer, and contemplation that would figuratively transport the faithful out of Mexico's anticlerical milieu and into the purified air of Jerusalem, Rome, and other Old World holy sites, where they would pray for divine intercession on behalf of the embattled Church. The practice had been inaugurated a year earlier by lay Catholics in Bologna, as a response to the prohibition of mass pilgrimages in the flesh in the former Papal States. Labastida y Dávalos felt that spiritual pilgrimage could be especially effective in Mexico, where the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada had embarked on a radical program of secularization. In fact, the recently codified Laws of Reform had likewise prohibited acts of public religiosity in Mexico, attempting thus to suppress the myriad local processions and mass pilgrimages that helped to define Mexican Catholicism.

Historical demography—the study of the growth, decline, and movement of past populations—has played a critical role in efforts to reconstruct the historical experiences of native peoples during New World colonization. The subject of historical demography has been of interest because it is closely connected to a wide range of still significant issues, including the nature of prehispanic Indian societies, the brutality of conquest, and the degree of disruption wrought by colonization. Nonetheless, scholars have yet to calculate a measurement of the precolonial New World population that meets with general acceptance.

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the colonial policy devised by the Hapsburgs to govern Spanish holdings in America was the system of intervention, checks, balances, and overlapping authority. Many modern students express impatient disapproval of this system, assuming that it resulted in governmental inefficiency if not complete stagnation. By applying a different set of criteria, however, and one which was certainly more in the minds of those who fashioned the Spanish colonial structure, intervention, checks and balances may be judged a brilliantly conceived means of maintaining under colonial status a vast overseas empire. Considered in these terms, it is the opinion of the writer that nowhere was the success of this system more evident than on the level of local administration in the “ Indies,” where it served to prevent the rise of an unchecked spirit of local autonomy while tending to preserve sentiments of loyalty to the crown.

The entrance of the Spanish into California and the founding of the Franciscan mission system has been described in many books both by those sympathetic apologists for the missions and the Spanish as bringing “civilization” to barbarous rude savages lacking any knowledge of God (Englehardt 1912, and others) and by those who disapproved of the mission system but approved of the Spanish conquest of California (Bancroft 1884, 1886, and others). The Indian cultures which were destroyed by the Spanish and later American settlers have also been described many times, first by those who unquestioningly accepted the Spanish view of these people as simply taking what nature produced. This viewpoint gives justification to the conquerors because “they could use the land better.” More recently a number of researchers have been reading the Spanish descriptions of what they actually saw and have ignored the Spanish assumptions, but read the descriptions of the environment with the ecological knowledge necessary to recognize the existence of a man-made environment, not a “natural” environment. They have discovered evidence of complex hierarchical stratified social Systems which were ignored because the Spanish assumed they were not present (Kehoe 1981, Shipek 1981a). Others interviewed surviving Indians and have explored areas of Indian knowledge never explored before simply because it was assumed that they had no such knowledge. For example, it has been discovered that all groups had the knowledge of and worshipped a high creator God whose name was so sacred that it must not be mentioned except in the proper sacred areas and during the sacred ceremonies dedicated to the Creator.

From 1810, when the cabildo of Buenos Aires declared itself free from Spain, through the civil and parochial wars of the post independence period Argentina struggled for constitutional order and political unity. The tyranny of Rosas, the promulgation of the Federal Constitution in 1853, and its ultimate acceptance by the Province of Buenos Aires in 1862 highlighted the drama. Hampered by vast distances, primitive transportation facilities, and the presence of nomadic hostile Indians, the drive for national unity seemed to have reached a significant milestone in 1880. That year saw the creation of the Federal District on the heels of the suppression of a serious revolt against the national government by the Province of Buenos Aires. When the port city of Buenos Aires became the capital of the Republic, and the government of the province moved to the new city of La Plata, it must have appeared to casual observers that Argentina had arrived as a modern nation-state.

Indian warfare was general in the Internal Provinces of New Spain in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Spain was militarily weak in these frontier provinces so far from Mexico City and, to make matters even more difficult, the barbarian Indian tribes refused to recognize rules of good conduct in war and peace. Where weakness seemed likely to lead to defeat, the Indians thought nothing of employing abject submission, approaching the Spanish authorities with humble requests for peace, conversion, and a place where they might be permitted to settle into a quiet productive existence. Often the Spanish, either exhausted by combat or hopeful of Indian sincerity in such declarations, convinced themselves that the enemy would settle into a sedentary life under the gentle guidance of the friars. Unfortunately for the success of frontier policy, a treaty was only as valid as the number of presidial troops prepared to enforce it. Without force, the Indians, epecially the Apaches, returned to traditional pursuits of rustling livestock and attacks on weakly defended ranches or travellers. A continual history of incidents of this nature brought Spanish governors and frontier soldiers to a state of complete frustration.

Historians differ over the meaning of the Platt amendment for Cuban independence. Their views upon this subject have relevance not only for other historians but for those who may be interested in the use of power by the United States in world affairs. The historical literature of the Platt amendment depicts the clash between the security and self-determination interests of the United States and Cuba, and provides an instructive phase of the continuing Cuban question that has intermittently agitated public opinion from the days of Thomas Jefferson to those of Fidel Castro.

When smallpox threatened the Mexican province of Guanajuato in October 1797, Juan de Riaño, the Intendant of Guanajuato, instituted a program of inoculation to protect the children of his province against the disease. Realizing that many parents would resist having their children inoculated, he decided to provide an example by having his own six children inoculated first, thereby encouraging other parents to bring their children forward. Accordingly, a physician made deep scratches in the arms of his children, three of whom were under the age of five, and rubbed organic matter containing live smallpox virus into the wounds. Thanking Riaño for this gesture, Dr. Juan de Islas praised him for showing “true mercy for your children, banishing the timidity from the minds of others.” Nor was their timidity entirely unjustified. People occasionally died from inoculation, for inoculation provided immunity by artificially inducing a case of smallpox, but one that was usually benign. The risk of dying from inoculation was much lower than from contracting smallpox naturally. That was the point Riaño was trying to make to the people of Guanajuato.

In the sense that a European culture bordered and penetrated a region of primitive Indian culture, the first significant frontier on this continent was Mexico's “Gran Chichimeca,” during the second half of the sixteenth century. In the plateau between the Mother Sierras, from Querétaro to Durango and from Guadalajara to Saltillo, a Spanish way of life, closely allied with the sedentary peoples subjugated by Cortés, first faced and solved many of the knotty problems in amalgamating civilization and barbarism. In the process, Spanish pioneers, ordinary colonists as well as frontier magnates, found spacious areńas in which to exhibit civilization's manners and techniques before an interested audience of heathen.

Despite the voluminous body of historical literature devoted to the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and U.S.-Mexican diplomatic relations, few works address the subject of revolutionary propaganda. During this tumultuous era, however, factional leaders recognized the importance of justifying their movement, publicizing their activities, and cultivating favorable public opinion for their cause, particularly in the United States. In this regard, Venustiano Carranza was especially energetic. From the inception of his Constitutionalist revolution, Carranza and his adherents persistently attempted to exploit the press to generate support among Mexican expatriates, protect Mexican sovereignty, secure recognition from the administration of Woodrow Wilson, gain the acquiescence–if not the blessing–of key sectors of the North American public for his Constitutionalist program, enhance his personal image, and defend his movement against the criticism and intrigues of his enemies–both Mexican and North American.

The functions of the city are legion; and to a certain extent every city in Latin America performs nearly all of them. Trade and commerce, manufacturing and processing, communication and transportation, government and public administration, educational and cultural activities, religious and ceremonial observances, financial and personal services, servicing and repair, and recreation and welfare work, are a few of the better known categories. This list does not include, however, residence per se which is one of the principal raisons d’etre of cities in general. Moreover, even these better known urban functions can be subdivided into many varieties and classes, without in any way being exhaustive. Familiar examples are wholesale and retail trade; motor, rail, water, and air transportation; light and heavy manufacturing; and national, provincial, and local government and administration. In addition some of them tend to overlap, as in the cases of educational and cultural activities, or government and protection. Finally, the absolute and relative importance of any one of the functions, or of any particular combination of them, varies greatly from one city to another and in the same city from one time to another.

Scholars of the British experience in Latin America have given considerable attention to the adventures of the two Scottish merchants John Parish Robertson and his brother William, who visited Paraguay between 1811 and 1814. The image of the taciturn Dictator José Gaspar de Francia attempting to use the two British subjects to establish commercial links with Europe has appeared in virtually all histories of the period. Francia's failure in this regard, we are frequently told, ushered in a period of self-imposed isolation for Paraguay. Few foreigners, merchants or otherwise, were permitted to breech the barriers set up by the Dictator and Paraguay quickly took on the reputation of an “inland Japan.” That these barriers were not as absolute as the traditional portrayal would suggest has been established only in the last fifteen years. With few exceptions, the historical accounts have assumed that, with the departure of the Robertsons, British merchants lost all interest in Paraguay. In fact, however, a strong desire to “open” the trade of that country characterized the British mercantile community of Buenos Aires throughout the life of the Dictator and, on one occasion at the very end of Dr. Francia's reign, a concerted effort was made by certain Britons to reintroduce British commerce to Paraguay.

Because of the role of the Catholic Church in the history of Spanish America, no thorough or genuine appreciation of the independence era is possible without an understanding of the situation of the episcopacy which is at the center of religious life and growth.

Since the time of Columbus, relations between Church and State in Spanish America became so identified that by 1800 we can speak of one entity, a State-Church, rather than two distinct entities as we find in the separation of Church and State in North America. This point cannot be over emphasized, and it should be understood that it was not the Church which dominated the State, but rather the State which dominated the Church. It was the State, ultimately the king of Spain, which determined when and where a monastery was to be erected. It was the State which sent over missionaries to the New World. It was the State which even decided upon the erection of a new diocese and the nomination of a new bishop.

In February 1948 a spirited presidential race sparked a political powderkeg in normally tranquil Costa Rica. The opposition candidate, Otilio Ulate, unexpectedly defeated former president Rafael Angel Calderón. Calderón's National Republican Party, the Communist Partido Vanguardia Popular (Vanguard), along with incumbent President Teodoro Picado immediately overturned the results. The opposition responded by launching an armed struggle to install Ulate in power. Led by José Figueres, the rebels defeated the government army and its auxiliaries composed primarily of calderonista and vanguardista militiamen. In late April Figueres victoriously entered San José and established a revolutionary junta that ruled the country for eighteen months. At the end of this period, he stepped down and allowed Ulate to serve his full four-year term.

Around the year 1550, an indigenous tlacuilo (painter-scribe-historian) in Tepechpan, a small altepetl north of Mexico City, narrated the tumultuous events through which he had lived. In Figure 1, we see an excerpt of this tlacuilo's contribution to the town's annals, the Tira de Tepechpan, which depicts a sequence of events from 1545 to 1549. On the left, beneath the glyph for the year 1545, the tlacuilo paints a dangling corpse, its arms crossed and eyes shut, with blood spurting from the nose and mouth. Here the tlacuilo is telling us of the 1545 hueycocolixtli, the “great sickness” that killed at least a third of the population, according to conservative estimates. Among the victims was Tepechpan's ruler, the crowned figure wrapped in funeral cloth above the year glyph.

Among the new publications tempting Spanish readers in 1785, alongside a comedy about jealous women, a how-to manual on forensic surgery, and a 600-page translation of the rulings of the Council of Trent, was a modest pamphlet about potatoes. Its author was an expatriate Irishman, Henry (or Enrique) Doyle. Doyle had for some decades resided in Spain, pursuing an undistinguished career in textile manufacturing. He had also drafted several essays on religious themes, with no impact whatsoever on the Spanish reading public. His writings on potatoes, however, were a phenomenal success. The 1785 pamphlet was followed in 1797 by a longer treatise issued with royal approbation at the behest of several important ministers, which was into its fourth edition by 1804. Newspapers and journals hailed Doyle as a patriotic and enlightened contributor to public happiness and seconded his ambition of extending potato cultivation across the length and breadth of Spain.