“If the charity that one practices for adults honors and gratifies, that which one engages in for children redeems and glorifies,” wrote Juan de Dios Peza, poet and playwright, in his journalistic chronicle of public welfare under the government of Porfirio Díaz. Peza elaborated: “If charity is beautiful when exercised in favor of adults, it is a divine reflection, a smile of God, when given to children.” Peza's imagery evoked religious charity of the colonial era, when giving alms and pious bequests earned the salvation of the donor. But Peza wrote in 1881 to celebrate the achievements of General Porfirio Díaz's first presidential term in the realm of public welfare, principally bringing welfare administration under federal jurisdiction.

On March 8, 1679, Polonia de Ribas entered her last will and testament into record at the offices of Alonso de Neira Claver, the royal notary public of Xalapa. The will included information about Polonia's family, possessions, debts to be collected, and how she wanted her estate distributed after her passing. She was well acquainted with the appropriate processes and venues to ensure that such matters were officially acknowledged. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Polonia demonstrated her legal acumen by documenting half a dozen transactions with the notary public in Xalapa.

On the afternoon of June 15, 1574, the conflict between the Franciscan Order and the local governor of the province of Yucatán intensified. A heated controversy had emerged between the recently appointed bishop of Yucatán, Fray Diego de Landa, and the provincial governor, Francisco Velázquez de Gijón. On that afternoon, the dean of the cathedral of Mérida, Licenciado Cristobal de Miranda, went to the home of the provincial governor with a message from the bishop. The governor had recently received an order of excommunication issued by the bishop for his actions against several Franciscan friars.

Fundamental to the establishment of Spanish colonial power in America was the formation of a system of laws and the invention or extension of institutions needed to implement them. In Peru, a more systematic imposition of Spanish regulation began in the 1540s with the introduction of the New Laws (1542), which were directed to the west coast of South America in 1543 by the first appointed Viceroy, the ill-fated peninsular noble, the caballero (gentleman) Blasco Nuñez Vela.

Ella impulsó a su hermano a la pelea,
ella siguió a sus hijos al combate…
En medio de la noche, su silueta
se destacó en el campo funerario de la
batalla, pues buscaba, inquieta
el cuerpo de su amor entre el osario.

E igual que con su esposo compartiera
el tálamo nupcial en la morada,
con su esposo cayó, fiel compañera, en el lecho mortal de la jornada.

She encouraged her brother to fight
she followed her children into combat…
In middle of the night, her silhouette
stood out in the funeral battlefield
for she was restlessly searching for
the body of her love in the burial grounds.

And just as she had shared the nuptial bed
with her husband in the shelter of their home,
with her husband, she fell, faithful companion,
on the death bed of the day's journey.

From “La mujer paraguaya,” written in 1899 by a Paraguayan poet, Ignacio A. Pane.

Mexico's transition from a colonial society to an independent nation was extremely difficult and civil war seemed to threaten at every turn during the first half of the nineteenth century. Independence required the creation of a new republican order to replace the colonial system of corporate identities and racial domination. The creation of a new liberal order based on individual citizenship was a contested process where competing political actors sought to preserve colonial privileges even as they used the new constitutional system to their advantage. The indigenous communities, the majority of the population at independence, posed a challenge to the new society of citizens. The objective of this paper is to explore the fate of indigenous communities under the new system and how Indians manipulated it in order to survive. The following pages discuss how independence affected villagers by first describing what the change to a new liberal order meant for local town governments. Then using case studies from the gulf region of Mexico, the paper will draw connections between indigenous village politics and the pronunciamientos that frequently destabilized the national government. Pronunciamientos in the provinces had a profound effect that over time tended to create more opportunities for discontented villagers to enter politics. Finally, the paper will discuss how these political divisions played out in the series of rebellions of the late 1840s known as “caste war of the Huasteca.”

The participants in the festivals of the rosary in Minas Gerais tell a story about the beginning of the devotion of the blacks to Our Lady of the Rosary. In the story, a black slave sees Our Lady of the Rosary out in the sea rocking on top of the waves. When he tells his master, the master and the priests rush down to the water, but are unable to coax her to come to shore. In frustration, they leave the task to the blacks. Blacks from different African nations, or different groups of congados in the vernacular, go one by one to the edge of the sea (or a river) and play their instruments, dance and sing to try to convince Our Lady of the Rosary to come ashore. Their efforts only become successful when the most traditional group goes to the shore and begins to play their music. Even this most traditional group has no success, however, until all the other groups return and join them to sing together. Only then does Our Lady of the Rosary come to the shore and sit on the largest drum, showing her acceptance of the devotion of the blacks. Even when the whites take her to their own chapel and lock the door, she escapes and returns to the sea, waiting for the blacks to call her out again and put her in their own chapel.

So many Indian men had moved, fled or died because of the labor draft to the silver mines of Potosí that only women were left to govern in some Andean communities. Or so the rumor went. In 1682, the cabildo of the imperial mining capital informed the king that such reports were greatly exaggerated. “This could not be true, even in the case where not one male Indian was left in the entire Kingdom,” its statement reads. “Although the pueblos have been depopulated, there are still more than enough [men] to fill offices in conformity with cabildo ordinances.”

On February 26, 1794, Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières arrived at the port of Norfolk, Virginia, from Le Havre on the coast of France. His journey had not been an easy one. Shortly after leaving France, the ship carrying Baudry, his wife, their 13-year-old daughter, and a Norman servant girl was caught in a terrible storm. The family endured a harrowing four-month Atlantic crossing, but they had experienced far worse. Just two years earlier, Baudry had discovered his wife and daughter “wandering in the woods” of St. Domingue, after rebels had forced them to abandon their home in the early days of the Haitian Revolution. Baudry, a distinguished French military officer, had himself been wounded fighting the insurgents near Léogane, and the majority of the soldiers under his command had been slaughtered. Fearing for his life, Baudry fled the colony in March 1792. In Paris, he briefly reunited with his more famous brother-in-law, the lawyer and writer Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry. However, both were soon forced into exile, and he eventually settled in Philadelphia. There, Baudry worked as a clerk, bookseller, and editor. He also used his exile as an opportunity to travel North America, spending time with his wife and in-laws in New Orleans. Eventually, Baudry presented himself as an expert on the natural history of the French colonies, delivering lectures to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and publishing several articles on “scientific” topics.

By the turn of the seventeenth century a generation of Andean natives, both Inca and aboriginal, had made lifelong homes within the strongholds of the European invaders. As they entered old age they inhabited an urban landscape whose “Indian” sector had become very diverse. In Quito and other colonial cities some of them dwelled in old pre-hispanic settlements whose closeness to new Hispanic centers had turned them into multiethnic “Indian” ghettos. Quito's Añaquito and Machángara are examples. Many others had settled illegally but permanently inside the Spanish nuclear city, so much so that in the 1580s Spaniards remarked on the growth of a “big shanty town” in its midst. Notarial records show, too, that center city streets housed colonies of “Indian” artisans specializing in European arts like iron working, embroidery, and tailoring. Rich enclaves of Inca and aboriginal nobles lived close to Spanish clerics and officials. Specialist traders delegated by native lords, and native entrepreneurs in the Spanish economy, rented permanent workplaces and dwellings downtown. Finally a large contingent, especially of women, lived as servants or concubines in Spanish houses or had usufruct of separate urban houses. In 1600 there were probably more different ways to be an urban Indian than there are today.

In Brazil hyphenated identities are very real in spite of the fact that elite culture aggressively rejects such social constructions. Thus, while there are no linguistic categories that acknowledge hyphenated ethnicity (a third generation Brazilian of Japanese descent remains “Japanese” while a fourth generation Brazilian of Lebanese descent may become a “turco,” an “árabe,” a “sírio” or a “sírio-libanese”), in fact immigrant communities aggressively tried to negotiate a status that allowed for both Brazilian nationality and ethnic difference. Immigrant groups in Brazil often did this by claiming a more “original” or “authentic” Brazilianess than members of the European descended elite, often via active constructions of social myths specific to the Brazilian milieu (see “The Legend of the Town of Marataize” above). This is possible since immigrant ethnicity is not some “immutable primordial indentit(ies)” but rather, as Anthony Cohen and others have suggested, a self-conscious and symbolic means by which boundaries were built.

The historiography of the book in the age of Spanish imperial expansionism has traditionally viewed printed works as repressive instruments of colonial domination that forcefully supplanted the native Americans' non-alphabetic vehicles of memory and communication. Accounts of the Europeans' wholesale destruction of native holy objects and material forms of expression bespeak the undisputable role of books in the Spanish colonization of indigenous memory and symbolizing practices. But the existence of colonial-era writings that testify to the resiliency of native technologies poses still-unanswered questions about the mechanisms by which this colonization took place and the ultimate reach of print culture in local native communities removed from the urban centers where, as Ángel Rama has suggested, written documents held sway. To what extent did native methods of communication endure under Spanish rule? What might the documentary traces of their use reveal about how they were transformed as a result of European contact? Can we tie their survival to concrete means by which native peoples withstood or adjusted to the Europeans' written culture and colonizing institutions? I would like to attempt to answer these questions by focusing on missionary uses of Andean khipus: the knotted cords used by the Inca for the purposes of accounting and historical record keeping, which native parishioners employed in colonial times for learning Christian doctrine and recalling sins prior to confession.

In April 1975, indigenous youth in Mexico occupied regional development centers throughout the southern state of Oaxaca. From the Sierra Sur town of Miahuatlán, to the arid highlands of the Mixteca Alta, to the valley of the Papaloapan Dam project, these youth took control of Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) coordinating centers and held them for more than a month. Trained as promotores bilingües (bilingual agents of education and development projects) by a separate regional development agency (the Instituto de Investigación y Integración Social del Estado de Oaxaca, or IIISEO), they demanded professional training and the creation of positions for themselves as federal teachers. Their banners accused the Mexican government of ethnocide against native peoples, denouncing the government's celebration of indigenous culture as a mask for continued exploitation.

La medicina científica was a popular journal read by Mexican doctors at the end of the nineteenth century. Each edition contained articles on the latest research and developments in the profession and also medical news from around the world of potential interest to subscribers. An excerpt from a February 1889 entry noted that Carolina Schultze had recently passed her medical oral exams in France. One of the evaluators acknowledged her obvious skill and “the great service she will perform to society.” But the article's focus, and the probable reason for its inclusion in this Mexican journal, quickly turned to whether or not other women could match her talent. The author presumed that she was, in fact, unique. “The female doctor,” he said, “neither has been nor is nor ever will be more than an exception, as there are exceptional women in all fields of knowledge, art, science, and literature.” Even more suggestive about late nineteenth-century bias were the reasons why he thought that female doctors, if they must exist, should only specialize in the illnesses of women and children: “when women enter into the practice of a profession appropriate only to the strong sex, they are never satisfied with a secondary role and always want to shine in the front row.”

When the Portuguese Inquisition officially began in the year 1536, Brazil inhabited only the extreme margins of the Portuguese Empire and elicited little concern from the Inquisitors in Lisbon. Royal authority only became permanently established in 1549 in the person of Tomé de Sousa as governor-general of Brazil. The establishment of ecclesiastical authority over Brazil occurred about the same time through the padroado real, or royal patronage. The Order of Christ (whose grand master was the king himself) and the Mesa da Consciência e Ordens administered the royal patronage in the colony. The Church in Brazil remained directly subordinate to the archbishopric of Funchal on Madeira until the first diocese was established in Bahia in 1551. Pernambuco did not become a diocese until 1676 when Bahia became an archbishopric. Throughout the entire colonial period Bahia remained the only archbishopric in Brazil, although six bishoprics were eventually established. For Pernambuco, this meant that until 1676 the highest local ecclesiastical officials were the vicars general, the rectors of the Jesuit College, and the priors of the Benedictine, Franciscan, and Carmelite convents.

During the second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth century relaxation of the morals of religious orders, especially the masculine ones, and of the priesthood was notable in Spain and her American dominions. That this situation also existed in New Spain was reported in detail by several contemporary Viceroys in the Instrucciones to their successors. This relaxation also extended to feminine orders, though in their case it did not lead to a similar moral looseness, but to a lack of proper observance of their Rules and Constitutions. Among the main charges against nunneries were: the possession of large numbers of servants; the constant demands made upon the families of nuns for money to be spent on the needs of convents; quarrels, both among members of communities and with their Superiors, leading to appeals to civil authorities and frequent contacts with the outer world, which deteriorated the spiritual character of these institutions.

In the hours before dawn on September 15, 1961, various groups of men armed with machetes, pistols and rifles attempted to take over military posts, police stations and municipal offices throughout Mexico, proclaiming “justice for the poor.” The uprising of the so-called Federacionistas Leales was part of a strategy coordinated by an old revolutionary general, Celestino Gasca Villaseñor, who planned to take power in order to carry out a new agrarian program to benefit the campesinos of Mexico.

The epic struggles between Mexicans and the Apaches and Comanches in the far northern reaches of the Spanish empire and the conflict between gauchos and Araucanians in the pampas in the far south are the images the mind conjures up when thinking of Latin American frontiers. We must now add for the twentieth century the dense Amazon jungle as one of the last frontiers in popular (and scholarly) minds. However, these images ignore the eastern Andean and Chaco frontier area, one of the most vital and important frontier regions in Latin America since colonial times, today divided up into three different countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay) in the heart of the South American continent. This frontier region has not received sufficient attention from scholars despite its importance in at least three different aspects: First, the indigenous peoples were able to remain independent of the Creole states much longer than elsewhere other than the Amazon. Secondly, indigenous labor proved to be vitally important to the economic development along the fringes, and thirdly, a disastrous war was fought over the region in the 1930s by Bolivia and Paraguay. This essay provides an overview based on primary and secondary sources of the history of the eastern Andean frontier and compares it to other frontiers in Latin America. It thus endeavors to contribute to frontier studies by creating categories of analysis that make possible the comparisons between different frontiers in Latin America and placing within the scholarly discussion the eastern Andean region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The strategic location of the Isthmus of Panama within the commercial network of the Spanish Empire and the need to defend it has greatly influenced historical writing on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Panama. Most studies have emphasized military and economic history and with few exceptions, have shown little interest in other aspects of Panamanian life. An excellent review of the historical literature on colonial Panama can be found in Christopher Ward, Imperial Panama: Commerce and Conflict in Isthmian America, 1550-1800 (Albuquerque, 1993). Despite a continuing emphasis on the usual themes of trade and defense, there is a growing trend to focus on other topics such as population movements and social classes. One of the areas still awaiting further investigation and study is the history of the cimarrons of Panama. The two principal primary sources for the role of the cimarrons are the collections of documents from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville published by Irene Wright and Carol F. Jopling, respectively. Wright's Documents Concerning the English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569-1580 (London, 1932) contains the correspondence of Spanish officials on the Isthmus to the king relating to the activities of the English pirates and their alliance with the cimarrons.