The Year 1949 is the two hundredth anniversary of the leave-taking from their native land for American missionary endeavors, of the Mallorquin Franciscans, Junípero Serra, Francisco Palóu, and Juan Crespí. They were, however, but a threesome among the thirty-three who comprised the entire group or “mission” that sailed from Cádiz in the latter part of 1749. The coming anniversary, therefore, suggests the proper occasion to study from the original sources, the methods, chronology, and personalities involved in that great missionary enterprize that meant so much for the Americas. The greater part of the material of this article is based on the expediente, No. 5546, of Contratación, located in the Archivo de Indias, Sevilla, Spain. It is entitled: “Mission de Sn. Franco, para el Collegio de Sn. Fernando de Mexico. Año de 1749.” The writer found it at Sevilla in the fall of 1946.

A recent edited study of U.S. ambassadors assigned to Latin American countries beset by economic and political crises assesses the importance of individuals as determinants of U.S. foreign policy. Although the authors differed in their conclusions, two in particular suggested that even ambassadors who enjoyed great operational independence rarely disagreed with the ideological premises of their superiors in Washington. Historian Louis A. Pérez, for example, portrayed U.S. ambassador to Cuba Sumner Welles as “an active powerbroker” who “operated out of a defined ideological framework, a world view that allowed him to recognize social forces as potential friend or likely foe to U.S. interests.” Welles's attempt in 1933 to remove Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martin, who had abrogated the Platt Amendment, coincided with the State Department's policy of keeping Cuba favorable to U.S. economic and strategic interests. Scholar Jan Knippers Black came to a similar conclusion about the role of Ambassador Lincoln Gordon in the 1964 overthrow of leftist Brazilian President João Goulart. Black found it “extremely difficult to isolate his [Gordon's] imprint on more fundamental aspects of policy … it seems unlikely that U.S. policies and actions would have differed in any significant way, had some other individual been serving at that time and place as ambassador.”

THE SPANISH AMERICAN WARS for independence abounded in events of which novels are born. Among them is the heroic and herculean crossing of the southern Andes by the Argentine general, José de San Martín, and his army to crush Spanish rule in Chile. San Martín’s preparations in Mendoza on the eastern side of the Andes in present Argentina, in which almost insurmountable obstacles had to be overcome, merit in themselves much more attention than they have received from historians.

The purpose of this article is to briefly describe the background and content of a philosophical work from 17th-century Peru: the logic of Juan de Espinoza Medrano, “ el Lunarejo ” (1632?- 1688), published in Rome in 1688. It is hoped that the examination of this writing, which is similar to other philosophical treatises of the period, will show that colonial philosophy in Latin America attained a respectable technical level and that many criticisms often made of it must be reconsidered.

A nation's image of its past helps to determine its conduct through continuing history. When this image is particularly sharp, it becomes a sacred reference for the formulation of policy. A national image is a melange of fact, fancy, and fiction. Carefully preserved in folklore and enthroned as tradition, this image can be invoked for political purposes that transcend party and class factionalism, and serve to unite the nation in a supreme sacrifice for national purpose.

Paraguay has such an image. In its past the Paraguay of 1928 saw a peaceful, progressive people who had been plunged into a war of extermination. “Veneer ó morir!” was no idle slogan of another era. It was a destroyed, shattered Paraguay that died with the Marshal on the banks of the Aquidabán. From the terrible conflict of 1864-1870, Paraguay emerged with large areas of its claimed territory forever lost, and with much of the rest in jeopardy. The arbitration of 1878, which eliminated one greedy enemy, was still fresh in Paraguayan memories when the Vanguardia incident of 1928 once more sounded the alarm. In the intervening years an image of the Paraguayan War had taken shape.

A Survey of the history of the Franciscan Provinces and Mission Colleges of Hispanic America, particularly of the colonial period, it seems to the writer, will be a contribution to historical scholarship inasmuch as it will point the way for further investigations by those who are devoting or who wish to devote themselves to historical research.

To many others who perhaps have heard only of the Franciscan Missions of California, such an outline will convey a faint idea at least of the magnitude and extent of the missionary work which has been carried on by the sons of St. Francis in the vast Spanish and Portuguese portions of the New World.

Art work throughout almost the entire history of the Church has been primarily didactic. Man was taught through the arts of sculpture, painting, mosaic, and stained glass, all that he should know of the creation of the world, the dogmas of religion, the virtues, the hero-saints, and during the middle ages especially, the range of the sciences, the arts and crafts. Thus, in the latter half of the eighteenth century when the Franciscans came to the remote outposts in California, they brought with them the pictures and statues by which the simple and ignorant Indian might learn, through his eyes, much of what he was to know of his new faith. “Through the medium of art the highest conceptions of theologian and scholar penetrated to some extent the minds of even the humblest of the people.”

For the last several decades, scholars concerned with America's foreign relations have paid increasing attention to public opinion, to national images, to the ties between domestic politics and international events. And because contemporary American diplomacy seems entangled in webs of mass behavior, the same wisdom has been applied to earlier times to investigate the way foreign policy has sometimes been an extension of passions and forces from the country's street corners, kitchen tables, and church pews. In this regard, great attention has lately been paid to American stereotypes of the Orient, as sages attempt to find in age-old popular attitudes the reasons for enduring problems of statecraft. Inasmuch as public interest shifts from one area of crisis to the next with each morning's headlines, it should be useful to examine, for areas other than the Far East, how the methods and goals of American diplomacy have been influenced or shaped, sometimes thwarted or transformed, by a kind of people's diplomacy growing out of the limited knowledge and unrestrained emotions of the man in the street.

AS A MAN’S SPEECH MIRRORS HIS THOUGHTS, so do a people’s proverbs reflect dominant attitudes and cultural patterns. Many observers have felt that the enormous store of Spanish proverbs should afford great insight into the Spanish way of life. Yet, to the writer’s knowledge, no one has attempted systematically to demonstrate or to reject this notion. The purpose of this paper is to arrange into an over-all picture certain prevalent attitudes and cultural patterns suggested in Spanish proverbs. The original proverbs supporting these patterns are quoted in footnotes. Examples are suggestive, but no means exhaustive, since in many cases the list would number several hundred items.

Georges Baudot has written a lengthy book (554 pages) which bears a beautiful and suggestive title: Utopia and History in Mexico. In publishing this work, he seems to have had two very clear purposes in mind. The first is to fill an enormous gap since “strange as it may seem, the authentic sources for most of our knowledge about pre-Columbian civilization in central Mexico have never been studied.” (p. ix) The second, is to demonstrate the grandeur of the Franciscan work in the sixteenth century, impelled by millenarian fervor.

With respect to the manner in which Baudot fulfills his first and commendable purpose, there is nothing more to be said after the two articles Dr. Edmundo O'Gorman has published in Historia Mexicana. With regard to the second, I must admit that the reading of the book provoked in me, in almost equal measures, amazement and envy. I will explain. It amazes me (and not just a little) that an author who confronts what is for me, at least, such a difficult topic as Franciscan millenarianism can establish the antecedents of this tendency in only twenty pages (71-90) and utilize for it only a single biblical citation (p. 78, note 14: Revelations XX:4-6). Envy presents itself after concluding that such frugality must be due to the vast culture of the French public to whom the work is addressed.

The roots of Spain’s policy of attempted exclusion of the foreigner from her New World possessions, whether in trade or in immigration, reach deep into the Iberian religious consciousness of the fifteenth century. The religious pulse of the Catholic Kings was beating strongly and quickly as a result of the coincidence of the momentous events of the year 1492: expulsion of the Jews, conquest of Granada from the Moors, and the discovery of the New World. It is not surprising that the Spanish conception of religiosity should have been linked inseparably with the attitude of exclusion of the foreigner. Expulsion of the hated infidel-foreigner Moor from Spain was integrally associated with the Jews, since the latter had often been in close cooperation with the former (The fact that they had also cooperated with their rulers in Christian-held parts of Spain was swept aside in wake of the religious zeal of the Reconquista.). On the one hand, there was the religious cause of Catholic Christianity to be served, and, on the other, the secular goal of the consolidation of Castilian rule throughout the Spanish portion of the Iberian Peninsula.

Although ninety per cent of the documentation of the Mexican Holy Office of the Inquisition is to be found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, a critical group of manuscripts must be consulted in Spain if the researcher is to study the Mexican institution effectively. These records are contained in the archive of the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición and in the plethora of royal documents emanating from and arriving in the Council of the Indies. Unfortunately the manuscripts are scattered among the three great archives in the Iberian peninsula: Archivo de Simancas at Valladolid, Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, and Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla. The Simancas and Sevilla documents on the Mexican Inquisition are relatively sparse; but the AHN houses the extant archive of the Suprema and is a required visit for any investigator in Mexican Inquisition materials from 1571 to 1820.

For Mexico the years 1861 to 1867, encompassing the United States Civil War and French intervention, were violent, tumultuous years, and Mexico was already exhausted by five decades of revolution, war, civil disorder and banditry. The last years of the 1850's had witnessed the guerra de la reforma, an intense, bitter civil war. Not only was Mexico politically exhausted, she was also economically in bad need of peace to permit regeneration. The war with France, beginning in late 1861, was, however, to continue the economic as well as political strain upon Mexican society. Still, the United States Civil War, for all its tragic course north of the Rio Grande, was apparently to have a beneficial effect upon the Mexican economy in several aspects.

Interest in the nature of Brazilian slavery has increased dramatically during the last ten years. In part this interest has been stimulated by the desire of North American social scientists to examine what was initially viewed to be the striking differences between patterns of race relations and slavery as they developed in the United States and Brazil. Among Brazilians the interest in slavery is older, beginning as an aspect of the larger evolution of cultural nationalism which sought to demonstrate the unique nature of the Brazilian solution to a multiracial society. Among both North American and Brazilian writers the initial tendency was to emphasize the more “humane” nature of slavery in Brazil. This was attributed to a number of factors of which the Portuguese concept of the slave as a human being based on cultural and religious traits was paramount. Increasingly this view has been subjected to intense criticism and recent works have focused on the harshness of Brazilian slavery and have sought to stress the similarities between the two systems.

On March 30, 1973, three weeks after Hctor Cmpora won the first presidential elections in which candidates on a Peronist ticket could run since 1955, rock producer Jorge lvarez, himself a sympathizer of left-wing Peronism, carried out a peculiar celebration. Convinced that Cmpora's triumph had been propelled by young people's zeal—as expressed in their increasing affiliation with the Juventud Peronista (Peronist Youth, or JP), an organization linked to the Montoneros—he convened a rock festival, at which the most prominent bands and singers of what journalists had begun to dub rock nacional went onstage. Among them were La Pesada del Rock- 'n'Roll, the duo Sui Gneris, and Luis Alberto Spinetta with Pescado Rabioso. In spite of the rain, 20,000 people attended the Festival of Liberation, mostly muchachos from every working- and middle-class corner of Buenos Aires, as one journalist depicted them, also noting that while the JP tried to raise chants from the audience, the boys acted as if they were untouched by the political overtones of the festival.

To one who studies the career of Fray Isidro Félix de Espinosa, the strangest fact of all lies in finding that so little was known of him for a century and a half after his death. When Don José Beristain y Souza finally issued his Biblioteca Hispano Americana Setentrional in 1819, all his knowledge of Fray Isidro was summed up in these few lines:

Espinosa (Fr. Isidro Félix)—Native of the city of Querétaro, of the Province of S. Peter and S. Paul of Michoacán, of the Order of S. Francis. Preacher, missionary apostolic, guardian, and chronicler of the College de Propaganda Fide of the Holy Cross of Querétaro; censor of books for the Tribunal of the Inquisition. He was as tireless in his preaching of the Divine Word as he was in perpetuating the apostolic deeds of his brethren; and due to that fact was worthy of being termed “the Julius Caesar of the Gospel in New Spain.” For, like that Roman, he fought by day (though better battles) and wrote by night.

Seldom has a literary device had such international political resonance as the famous Ariel-Caliban contraposition of José Enrique Rodó's essay. In the decades immediately following its publication in 1900 Ariel was an exceptionally valued credo for Spanish American youth, not only for its intrinsic grace, but also because it provided a timely answer to a widespread need. To a generation depressed by the frequently pessimistic conclusions of racist doctrines and an uneasy sense of inferiority, and irked by the admonitions of ninteenthcentury “Nordomaniacs,” Ariel offered in sonorous periods a set of values assumed to be peculiarly Latin and therefore the patrimony of Latin America. As Alberto Zum Felde says, “It was the longed-for reply of this weak backward America to the Titanic potentiality of the North: its self-justification, its compensation, its retaliation.” Luis Alberto Sánchez's generation must have derived, as he says he did, its primary image of the United States from Ariel. Arturo Torres-Ríoseco describes it as “the ethical gospel of the Spanish-speaking world.”