Before the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, Protestantism and Cuban nationalism coexisted relatively comfortably and even naturally, the function of a Protestant movement under Spanish colonialism that, unlike the rest of Latin America, was run not by North American or English missionaries, but by Cuban ministers. After United States intervention in 1898, U.S. interests were imposed on virtually every sector of Cuban society, including organized Protestantism, influencing Cuba's development for at least the next half-century. Preempted by U.S. intervention, Cuban nationalism, in both its ecclesiastical and secular dimensions, endured and intensified with the deepening of Cubans' dependency on the U.S. Politically, Cuban nationalism was expressed in growing protests and demands for a more genuine independence by abrogating the Platt Amendment and otherwise ending U.S. interventionism. Ecclesiastically, Cubans pushed for a greater role in Protestant church affairs, and toward Cubanization of the Church. Protestant missions thus confronted a rising nationalism within and outside the Church. By 1920, eastern Cuba, the cradle of Cuban independence, became the epicenter of this struggle.

Mexico had many outstanding Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth century. One of the greatest of those was Fray Francisco de Tembleque. A deeply religious man, whose every action was based on charity, Fray Francisco was at the same time a colorful figure and he merits a place of honor in the hearts of men. Little is known about him because liistorians have depicted for us only the salient chapters of his life, leaving the rest obscure. Even the date of his death has not been found in the many chronicles of his day.

As we shall see, he arrived in New Spain around the year 1540. Fr. Jerónimo de Mendieta tells us that “Fr. Francisco de Tembleque, a native of the town of Tembleque, near Toledo, came with Fr. Juan de Romanones from the Province of Castilla. Both were inseparable companions during their sojourn in New Spain. He acquired a sufficient knowledge of the Aztec language to enable him to hear confessions in that tongue. But he never was capable of preaching in that language from memory. He always read his sermons and instructions to the Indians, and that very satisfactorily.” In this regard he was no equal to his talented brother, Fr. Juan de Romanones, who, “having mastered the Mexican language, preached to the natives and labored among them for over 40 years, being an able speaker. He wrote sermons and other works and translated parts of the Holy Bible, a work of invaluable aid to both himself and to other friars in preaching to the Indians. He was one of the best linguists Mexico ever had.”

Enrico Martínez, an important but little known figure in New Spain, was an extremely talented man with a wide range of I interests. Interpreter for the Inquisition, Royal Cosmographer for the Consejo de Indias in Mexico, author, printer and cartographer, Martínez was also the architect and engineer of the drainage system (desagüe) of the Valley of Mexico.

Despite his important governmental positions and the Spanish obsession for record-keeping, Martínez’ national origin remains undetermined. One major documentary source relative to the desagüe states that his true name was Henrí Martin, that he was of French origin and that he later Hispanicized his name to enter Spanish territories legally; however, other sources ascribe his nationality to various other countries. Interested in solving this discrepancy, Joaquín García Icazbalceta stated in a letter to Nicolás León on April 23, 1883, that he had searched for data on Martínez but “was unable to find any material that determined his origin. Nevertheless Francisco de la Maza, author of the introduction to a modern edition of Martínez’ Reportorio de los tiempos e historia natural de Nueva España and his principal biographer, stated that Martínez was definitely German and that his true name was probably Heinrich Martin. According to Maza, Martínez was born in Hamburg between 1550 and 1560 and was probably a Protestant because Hamburg was one of the first German cities to become involved in the Reformation. Martínez spent his first eight years in Hamburg, then journeyed to Sevilla possibly at the request of the Martins, probably German relatives who were printers. Although no definite documentation has been located, it is reasonable to presume that if he were in fact Protestant he must have converted to Catholicism during his stay in Spain, a sine qua non for his immigration to New Spain and for his appointment as translator for the Inquisition in later years. Martínez remained in Sevilla until he was nineteen, returning then to Hamburg for a year and one-half, and at age twenty, he traveled throughout Europe, spent enough time in Paris to graduate with a degree in mathematics, and then traveled on to Poland. From eastern Europe, Martínez returned to Spain where he resided in Madrid, Toledo and Sevilla; and in 1589 he sailed to New Spain on the same fleet as his protector and friend, Luis de Velasco, newly appointed Viceroy of New Spain and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, later author of a comedy entitled, El Semejante a sí mismo which mentions the desagüe of Mexico.

As early as the first decades of the sixteenth century, when English and Dutch corsairs and privateers began to challenge Spain's exclusivist claims to the New World, the struggle for control over the Americas began to be couched in terms of a holy war. The Caribbean, in particular, became the arena in which the commercial, ideological and military forces of Protestant Northern Europe and Catholic Southern Europe clashed. Spanish officials commonly referred to the English and Dutch intruders as “heretics” and “Lutheran corsairs,” while Francis Drake and his fellow Elizabethan sea dogs believed that their penetration of the New World was a crusade against Popery, Catholic fanaticism and idolatry. These rivalries continued for centuries as new actors, the United States in particular, inherited some of the old roles.

Juan Bautista Alberdi is a name not often heard in the United States, even among students of Hispanic-American affairs. Many of his Argentine compatriots and contemporaries are well known to us; we repeat their names as easily as we do those of our own national heroes: Sarmiento, Mitre, Echeverría. Yet the position of Alberdi in the historical development of the Argentine Republic is one of high honor and extreme importance. He is called “The Father of the Argentine Constitution,” and, indeed, such he was. Yet, even more important than this, Alberdi’s arguments in favor of a vast, all-encompassing program of immigration, was the impetus that stimulated his native country and made Argentina the most forward-moving and politically successful nation in Latin America.

This analysis and survey of economic activities in Rio Grande do Sul aim to shed new light on the crucial importance of the southernmost captaincy to overall Brazilian development at the close of the colonial period. Rio Grande do Sul was unique in economic growth, compared to the Center-South, Northeast and North, because the extreme South produced for a variety of markets: the internal Brazilian, the internal Portuguese, the Portuguese reexport to Europe and the Rio de Janeiro reexport to Angola. This market diversification made Rio Grande do Sul less dependent on the commercial vagaries of any particular geographical area. The focus of this article is the importance of economic growth in Rio Grande do Sul prior to 1808.

IT is well-known that the Franciscans had a very considerable influence on the history of America. From the days of the conquest up to the present time, their labors have been outstanding in the sphere of American spiritual life by their extensiveness, their intensity, and their brilliance. In the missionary field, Franciscan activity was particularly conspicuous. Up to the end of the sixteenth century, the Franciscan missions were almost as numerous as those of all the rest of the religious orders together; Franciscan primacy was maintained in the seventeenth century, and from 1767 onwards nearly all the missions among the pagans, both in North and South America, remained in their hands, once the Society of Jesus had been suppressed.

Amado nervo’s affection for religious themes is projected so frequently and so intimately in all his work that literary critics have constantly classified him among the number of the mystical poets—those privileged beings who aspired to union with God through love, and who expressed their sublime thoughts in poetic form.

The Lipan Apache mission on the banks of the San Sabá River was located on the northern boundary of Coahuila, New Spain, in the center of today’s state of Texas. On March 16, 1758, Norteño tribes, allied with the Comanches, attacked and destroyed the mission, demonstrating their hostility to what they saw as the Spaniards’ unjust support of their traditional enemy, the Apaches. The destruction of the mission contributed to the failure of the most far-reaching attempt by the Spanish Crown and the Franciscan Order to settle the Apaches in Texas. The Spanish believed that the mission was the only means to ensure a peaceful settlement of central Texas native tribes and simultaneously to check French illegal arms trade in the northern borderlands. Once the Lipan Apaches were pacified, the reasoning went, definitive settlement of all the Norteño tribes and their allies would follow. These settlements of pacified tribes would also provide the much-desired direct link between Spanish settlements in Texas and those of New Mexico.

In the average Spanish American colonial town, there was demonstrated a greater solicitude for public works and social welfare than was typical in the English settlements of North America. On the local level, two institutions were mainly responsible for Spanish welfare projects in the New World, the Church and the cabildo, or town council. In spite of the much commented upon lack of harmony between the Church and higher institutions of civil administration, a surprising rapport existed between Church and cabildo in providing for the welfare of town inhabitants.

Muffled by the night and sobered by their unexpectedly serious task, Corregidor José Manrique y Guzmán and two squads of militia quietly approached the Jesuit college of Arequipa at four o'clock on the morning of September 17, 1767. Manrique had secretly gathered his scribe and the troops during the night after receiving an astounding royal decree from Viceroy Amat in Lima. The top-secret dispatch ordered Manrique to detain all Jesuits within the province of Arequipa in preparation for their expulsion from the Spanish empire. Similar orders had gone out to royal officials throughout Charles III's domains. In Arequipa Manrique found all but three of the local Jesuits housed within the college. He read them the royal edict, placed them under house arrest until provisions could be made for transporting them to Lima, ordered the detention of the three padres absent from the college, and confiscated all the Jesuits' properties.

During the quarter-century following the conquest of the Aztec Confederacy in 1519–1521, Fernando Cortés, the major figure in that epic achievement of Spanish arms in the New World, acquired a great estate in central and southern México consisting of the tributes and labor services of populous Indian towns, extensive land holdings, mines, Indian and Negro slaves, and business enterprises. In 1529 Charles V conferred upon Cortés the title of Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, and subsequently these properties and interests were collectively designated in colonial records as the Marquesado de Cortés. The Marquesado, which Cortés, with royal authorization, set up in 1535 as a mayorazgo, or entailed estate, was inherited at his death in 1547 by his legitimate son, Martín Cortés, born of his second marriage. Subject to various modifications and vicissitudes, the Estate remained in the hands of Cortés’ descendants during the entire colonial period.

Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance was in a state of political and economic shock. Governmental institutions were shattered, their functions practically ceased, and the very basis of political life had to be reconstituted. Fertile fields lay uncultivated, livestock had all but disappeared, buildings were in ruins, orange groves were untended, and the remnant population survived on the bare edge of subsistence. Land titles, never very clear, became further tangled in a welter of conflicting claims. Well might a Buenos Aires editor observe: “The future of Paraguay is so dark that none can read it.”

California has exercised a haunting fascination on men’s imaginations ever since the days of Cortés. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at least twenty expeditions served as a prelude to the occupation, first of the Lower California Peninsula in 1697, and then of New, or Upper, California in 1769. A complete list of these voyages and attempted entradas has not yet been made. Suffice it to say that we are far from possessing the accounts of all the efforts that were made to discover and colonize those regions from 1535 to 1769.

In 1769 New, or Upper, California was first visited by the pionéer founders of its missions and presidios. They had come from Loreto in the Lower California Peninsula, after an arduous trip of over two-hundred leagues over barren mountains. This was the famous expedition of Serra and Portolá, which marks the beginning of the Spanish colonization with the founding of San Diego and the exploration of all the coast up to San Francisco. That year records the birth of Upper California.

In the middle of the seventeenth century a Spanish adventurer, dressed in a traditional Andean cusma tunic and wearing a silver diadem, convinced tens of thousands of Indians in a remote part of the viceroyalty of Peru that he was a direct descendant of the former Inca emperors. More than a hundred native chiefs accepted him as their overlord, carried him on a litter, furnished maidens for his service, and followed him in battle when he promised to liberate them from Spanish control. Although Indian rebellions occurred frequently in colonial Peru, this particular one is unique because a European led it. Initially this imposter secured approval for his actions from the Spanish provincial governor and Jesuit missionaries, but later.when the Indians rebelled, the fake Inca was apprehended, imprisoned for seven years, then hanged. The story of his “empire” is a ten year episode that has not been printed in English and is not widely known in Spanish.

Thank you for the privilege of living an hour among the historians of Saint Francis and among his American children. And thank you for the superlative honor you have awarded me.

When the world of a sudden hardens and turns into a kind of fierce mythology, instead of the consummate humanity that God wished, the Franciscan genius, which is above all a spiritual genius, spreads out, thickens, and intensifies, even as do cosmic forces. A great anxiety falls over us and doubles the meaning of our terrestrial mission.

The cord that we wear around our waist should remind us day by day, especially in time of strife, that our mission surrounds us and clings to us in the same way.

Before the establishment of commercial banks in Mexico in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the aspiring merchant or impecunious landowner had few sources from which he could borrow capital. Funds were available within the country but the rich preferred speculation in government bonds and securities to investment in agricultural or industrial enterprises. Financial deals in which enormous interest rates were paid by the government to private individuals became almost a matter of public scandal and were widely condemned by politicians of all parties. The only institution to operate an extensive lending policy was the Roman Catholic Church which, through the offices of its Juzgado de Capellanías, continued after independence its practice of lending money to any person able to provide adequate security for a loan. Although the contractual terms demanded were by no means onerous to the borrower, nevertheless there was much criticism of these fiscal activities by the clergy. The liberals in particular attacked the Church’s control of the land which was a direct consequence of its lending operations. The Church’s defense against these attacks was based firstly on its rights under both civil and canon law, and secondly, on the benefits which the nation’s economy received from the widespread clerical investments. Furthermore, the clergy insisted that they were genuinely interested in utilizing their wealth for the advantage of the people and country as a whole. Hence their funds were invested by way of loans in every kind of industrial and agrarian venture.