The civil conflict within Mexico, 1910 to 1911, brought an active intervention from the United States. It was an interference that both elicited a sharp diplomatic exchange, and tested the neutrality statutes of the United States for clarity and sincerity. Among the members of the Taft Cabinet, there was disagreement on the interpretation of these statutes. The state governments, at best, gave official approval to the confused federal policy. American citizens along the Mexican border boldly assisted the revolutionary government of Francisco Madero, while ignoring the neutrality statutes of the United States. The purpose of this paper is to present the various interpretations of neutrality that arose in the State Department’s “Instructions” to its officers, the official correspondence between Cabinet officers, and the formal replies to the protesting Mexican government.

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.

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 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.”

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.

The First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas, held in Cali, Colombia, in August 1977 and organized by Afro-Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella, was the first Pan-Africanist conference held in Latin America. This paper examines the obstacles Afro-Latin American activists faced in organizing a racially defined event and analyzes how they articulated their own interpretations of black radical politics. It shows that a Pan-Africanist event in Latin America had to account for ideologies of racial harmony and mixture. Observers throughout the region mobilized these ideas to discredit the First Congress as a racist and illegitimate threat to mestizo nationhood. Afro-Latin American activists used it as a platform to debate and denounce ideologies of racial harmony and mixture which many argued cloaked racism and impeded black mobilization. However, for many of the delegates engaging with black radical politics did not imply an absolute rejection of these ideas, but instead highlighted the varying ways in which Afro-Latin American activists understood and contested these concepts in the 1970s. Many Afro-Latin American delegates, even those who were openly critical of ideologies of racial harmony, called for multiracial forms of solidarity and expressed support for culturally mixed visions of the nation-state.

This article focuses on the history of an Afro-descendant family over its seven generations in one region of Minas Gerais. Although it is notoriously difficult to trace families founded by slaves, this one is an exception: it has proved possible to trace this family over a century and a half, and with a remarkable level of detail, because its members mostly stayed in one place. The implications of their permanence go beyond mere genealogy or family reconstitution to challenge long-standing historiographical perspectives. Over the years many scholars have agreed that Brazilian colonial and early imperial society was characterized by the near-constant movement of all segments of the population. New frontiers opened by agriculture, ranching, and mining attracted some members of the elite, but also beckoned the less favored with new opportunities. This incessant movement has even been touted as an impediment to the advancement of family history in Brazil.

In 1620, almost a hundred years after the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared to Juan Diego on the Hill of Tepeyac, a small group of Spanish nuns paid a visit to the chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Like many others before and after them they stopped at the shrine on their way to Mexico City. The Franciscan nuns were traveling from Toledo to Manila and were about to cross Mexico to board the yearly Manila Galleon at the port of Acapulco.

At the end of August 1796, Balthasar Ruiz, a weaver from Teotitlán del Valle, departed with his son to sell woven goods in the mountainous region to the south. Over 23 days, he traveled a distance of 45 miles as the crow flies and upon his return was jailed when the boy fell ill with smallpox. The two had made a typical journey in an atypical time: administrators throughout the intendancy of Oaxaca were actively pursuing a program of contagion avoidance as smallpox spread there from Guatemala and Chiapas. What Oaxaca's intendant, Antonio de Mora y Peysal, called the “new project” consisted of regulating travel and commerce and isolating infected residents in casas de curación. In Teotitlan, textile producers found themselves at the outskirts of their village laboring to build a makeshift infirmary for their children and a camposanto, a consecrated field, for burial of smallpox victims. Months later, some from the village would call the regime a violation “like Herod's massacre.” At the time, quarantined in their village without access to markets or crops, there was little else for the men to do.

In the early morning of February 15, 1898, a farmer named Zacarias Navarro found the remains of a newborn infant in a shallow well on the outskirts of Alamos, Sonora, in northwestern Mexico. As caretaker of the well, it was predictable that Navarro would be the first resident to make the grisly discovery. He immediately informed the chief of police, Manuel Vargas, who sent officers to retrieve the infant's body.

The Cartilla para enseñar a leer (1569), attributed to Flemish Franciscan Pedro de Gante, was one of the most important primers from the early years of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Nevertheless, the primer's importance during the process of cultural contact has been largely ignored. As did other primers of the period, the Cartilla contained the most important prayers, but what sets the Cartilla aside is that its selection of prayers is presented in a trilingual version, in Castilian, Latin, and Nahuatl. The content of the Cartilla invites the question as to why Gante, a missionary focused on writing doctrinal works in Nahuatl, would compose a primer that is trilingual, but raises another that is perhaps more perplexing: Why were most of the prayers in Castilian? In this article, I intend to shed a light on Gante's decision to create a complex tool that could be employed by a mixed audience of Castilian, creole, mestizo and Nahua children. By doing this, Gante unwittingly started a process of cultural contact in which language played a pivotal role. The Cartilla thus presents itself as a multifaceted tool that helped shaped the culture of the Basin of Mexico during the early years of the viceroyalty.

Until the 1980s, Catholic elements in Haitian culture tended to be interpreted exclusively in connection to the forced conversion of the enslaved population under French rule. This changed following John Thornton's groundbreaking research into the development of Christianity in early modern Africa—Kongo in particular—and the awareness that a significant number of enslaved Africans already identified as Christian before their arrival in Saint-Domingue. This article's goal is to go beyond Thornton's research by showing that we can acquire a better understanding of Catholic elements in Haitian culture if we start our analysis in late medieval Iberia. To illustrate this, the article focuses on one of Haiti's most enigmatic cultural traditions, known as Chariopié, Lwalwadi, or, most commonly, Rara. Although this performance has received abundant scholarly interest, questions relating to the origin of its Catholic elements have remained largely unanswered. This is regrettable considering that Rara parades follow the liturgical calendar of Lent and intensify in frequency during Holy Week. Moreover, a key element of Rara consists of the destruction of an effigy of Judas Iscariot, in accordance with the Biblical account of the Easter story. Using a comparative analysis, this article presents a number of remarkable parallels between Rara and late medieval Iberian Lent traditions. To explain these parallels, it claims that enslaved Africans who were familiar with Iberian practices prior to their arrival in the Caribbean established, by their own initiative, a network of mutual aid and burial societies modeled on Afro-Iberian Catholic brotherhoods.

Acapulco became a global town during the early seventeenth century, characterized not only by transpacific trade, but also by an increasingly large Afro-Mexican population residing and laboring at the port. A cohort of Afro-Mexican women gained prominence and visibility by delivering accurate predictions on the arrival of galleons to Acapulco. They adapted mixed African and Indigenous divination practices to calm port residents worried about galleon losses on the world's largest ocean. Scholarship on the Spanish Pacific has yet to investigate how the globalization of New Spain through galleon travel affected African and Afro-descendant communities. This article contends that the dangers of Pacific travel, and anxieties about them, frequently exceeded the therapeutic capacities of Catholic dogma. Black women, drawing on the profound West and West Central African estimation of female diviners, practiced clairvoyance to report on the location of galleons and whether they would arrive safely. The confluence of an increasing population of Afro-Mexicans with the economic dynamism of transpacific trade transformed spiritual life at the eastern node of Spain's Pacific empire. Black women positioned themselves at the center of these massive structural transformations and ultimately created new cultures as spiritual authorities in Acapulco.

When King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía of Spain completed a 1978 tour of Mexico, the occasion was naturally marked by sentimental rhetoric. President José Lóopez Portillo launched an official reconciliation when he visited Madrid the year before. Underlying the whole exercise, however, was a deep psychological resistance on the part of most Mexicans. The King attempted to emphasize to Mexicans the Spanish aspect of their heritage, but the history of Mexican-Spanish relations during the Revolution underlines the history of ethnic hostility between both groups during the first decades of the twentieth century. As in 1917, the Mexican government in 1978 decided that economic gains far outweighed whipping up popular resentment against the Spaniards.

A monarchy based on the slave plantation labor of Africans until the late nineteenth century, vast Brazil offered little appeal to European immigrants except in the far south of the country, where smaller plots of arable land became available as the coffee frontier expanded. Facing shortages in slave supply after mid-century, when the British forced the Brazilians to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade, provincial governments attempted to lure European immigrants by granting subsidies to pay for transport and for initial costs of settlements. In 1881, the Imperial government joined in the effort to recruit immigrants who, in addition to providing a replenished work force, could also be counted on to “whiten” the population. Germans predominated among immigrants until 1886, followed by Italians, Poles, and some Japanese until the 1930's, when rising xenophobia led Brazilian officials to curtail immigration and to install a restrictive quota system.

No English reformer of the early nineteenth century was so much admired by his Latin American contemporaries as was Jeremy Bentham, the prolific author of utilitarian treatises on government, economics, and law. The fundamental reasons for the Colombian liberators' interest in Bentham were undoubtedly the attractive manner in which he treated the explosive question of sovereignty, and his demand for a complete reconstruction of all legal systems upon utilitarian principles. It is even more certain that Bentham's most important entrée to the Spanish-American world was afforded by the popularity of his works, many of them published first on the Continent and in the French language, among the Spanish liberals. Yet the story of Bentham's personal contacts with a number of the próceres of Gran Colombia formed a noteworthy chapter in the history of the Bentham vogue in South America, as they sought him out during their journeys to Europe and the British Isles. Bentham himself was more than a passive partner in this exchange. Especially in the case of Bolívar, he pursued his acquaintances rather relentlessly by correspondence in his high-minded efforts to provide men in positions of power with the models for introducing utilitarian reforms.

Among other treasures, the tidy, compact municipal archive of Pátzcuaro houses a document of genuine antiquarian interest: the will of Juan José Codallos, recorded on July 9, 1831, just two days before he was executed for his role as the instigator and chief caudillo in Michoacán of the War of the South. Codallos began by stating that he was 41 years old, the son of Felipe Codallos and Andrea de Ponce; that he was in good health (considering that he was condemned to die); that he was married to a woman named Dolores Domínguez, with whom he had four children (the oldest was seven; the youngest, one); and that his worldly goods consisted of his clothes, two horses, a fancy saddle, and a silver-trimmed bridle. [“peno” is bridle? I have been unable to confirm this translation]

By the end of the nineteenth century the American public, if it had cared to enlarge upon its knowledge of the Empire of Brazil, could easily have done so without even the necessity of learning a foreign language. From 1822 to 1888, beginning with the independence of Brazil from Portugal and ending with the abolition of slavery— a period corresponding almost exactly with the life span of the Brazilian Empire—about twenty books on Brazil were published by Americans. These were obviously not the only books on the subject in the English language because Britishers wrote about Brazil too (indeed they wrote more about it than we did) and these books on Brazil were also available on this side of the Atlantic. The combined output of the two nations was, therefore, considerable, and the curiosity of the Anglo-Saxon mind which it for the most part reflected presented Brazil to the American reader under a great variety of aspects. There were the solid three volumes on the colonial period of Brazilian history by Robert Southey, the poet laureate of England who was much better as a historian, and the two-volume sequel by John Armitage, who was neither a historian nor a poet but a lover of liberty.