In the summer of 1924, townspeople recount, 14-year-old Manuel Chávez built models of colonial New Mexico mission churches in the dirt outside Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the village of Peña Blanca. He was staying with the Franciscan friars after expressing his desire to enter the seminary, where he would become the first native New Mexico Hispano to be ordained a Franciscan priest in the centuries since the Spanish colonization. Still a boy, but one who was about to embark on a life-changing path, the small missions he playfully constructed in the dirt and staunchly protected foretold the strategy of rematerialization that would characterize his future: he would become a pioneering Franciscan historian who organized and interpreted the vast collection of Catholic Church documents from the colonial period in New Mexico through the twentieth century. The author of two dozen books and over 600 shorter works, Fray Angélico Chávez (1910–1996) was a visual artist, literary figure, historian, genealogist, translator, and church restorer—one of New Mexico's foremost twentieth-century intellectuals.

To the English-speaking world the conquest of Mexico was the achievement of Hernán Cortés, thanks largely to the entertaining account by William Hickling Prescott. The brilliance of the Cortesian exploits, plus Prescott’s popularity, have combined to cause this historical distortion by overshadowing the fact that there were many conquests of Mexico, just as there were, and are, “many Mexicos.” Hernán Cortés merely began the subjugation of Mexico by his victory over the Nahua Confederacy. Some later conquests were more difficult, more expensive in lives and mgney, and far more time-consuming than that of Cortés, but they lack their Prescotts.

This will be a short account of the origin, growth, and death of the great parliament of Castile, the Cortes. That sounds a bit dramatic, but there’s nothing to be done about it, for the history of the Cortes of Castile has the elements of a proper tragedy: the self-destruction of a nation by pride, parochialism, and arrogance. One of my colleagues, now deceased, used to account for the aberrations of Spanish collective behavior by ascribing them to “Spanish individualism.” I can only guess that what he had in mind was that Spaniards, when they act in groups, act differently from the rest of us—in which he was certainly correct. Now, when group actions become consistent, formalized, and ritualistic, I call that pattern of conduct an institution, regardless of whether or not someone has taken the trouble to codify it. Institutions, then, have their origin and their being in the minds of men acting collectively.

The secularization of the Franciscan missions is one of the most controversial problems which historians of Mexican California are called upon to interpret. This essay is an addition to the story of the secularization process in California in the hope that it will render it more complete by illuminating the mind of one of its chief protagonists, Fray Narciso Durán, the Spanish Franciscan friar who held the offices of president and commissary-prefect of the missions during the secularization controversies.

Nowhere in the western hemisphere is the wealth of monumental architecture of the period of colonization still extant as great as it is in Mexico. Spanish in its derivation, transplanted at first almost bodily from the mother country and modified only in certain details by indigenous labor and by the exigencies of distance and circumstances, it remained for two centuries essentially and romantically Spanish.

Memoria Mea in generationes saeculorum. “My memory is unto everlasting generations” (Ecclus. 24:28). These words of the Wise Man come to mind as we are assembled at this Academic Session which is to signalize the Fourth Centenary of the Death of Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga, O.F.M., the first Bishop of Mexico City.

Our Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure, who followed closely in the footsteps of that Giant among the Fathers of the Church, the “Doctor Gratiae,” St. Augustine, assigns to the human Memory a place of exalted dignity and excelling power. Ranking it with the Intellect and the Will, the Celestial Patron of the Franciscan School traces this trinity of faculties of the human soul, by his ingenious method of exemplarism, to the image of the Triune God. “Eo est mens imago,” writes the illustrious Bishop of Hippo, “quo potest esse capax et particeps Deo.” In other words, the human mind is God’s image to the extent that it can grasp, and have a share with, God. “But,” continues the Seraphic Doctor, “God cannot be fully grasped by the soul unless He be loved; nor can He be loved unless He be known; nor again can He be known unless He be present to the soul. The first is achieved by the will; the second by the intellect; the third by the memory.” In this wise, Bonaventure argues, the will is appropriated to the Holy Spirit; the intellect to the Divine Son; the memory to the Eternal Father (cf. I Sent. Ill, II, I, I. Op. Omnia, Vol. 1, pp. 80–81).

In this text, motivated by the need to offer a different perspective to the representation of the Senado da Câmara (Municipal Council) in relation to the society that participated in Corpus Christi, I return to the study of the feast in the eighteenth century. The câmara was responsible for the spatial-temporal framework of the ritual in the diverse cities of Portuguese America, among other prerogatives and duties identified and analyzed by the historiography regarding this institution of the Ancien Regime. According to the câmara's minutes, the “Church, the Senate and the People (Povo)” would be present at the feast, thus establishing in the discourse a tripartite and corporative social order that does not identify the participants, whether individuals or the diverse “bodies” that comprised the Church or the people. And, of even greater importance, the câmara's discourse makes reference to the three bodies it claims to represent. However, it is known that if the camara symbolically evokes the respublica (commonwealth) through the organization and appearance at this royal feast, in political terms, the participation of elements that comprised the people in the Senado da Câmara, in other words, of the artisan crafts and skilled trades, was restricted to Bahia and Rio de Janeiro for a short period of time.

During one of the most brutal wars in modern times the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay fought against and almost annihilated the Paraguayan nation. From 1865 to 1870 Paraguayans earned the world’s respect for their resistance to overwhelming invading forces, yet they endured hideous oppressions under a tryannical government. Although the United States then had little interest in Paraguay or direct involvement in the war and its issues, some valuable articles, including jewelry and money, deposited for safe-keeping in the United States legation in Asunción during the hostilities opened a lingering controversy that plagued the two countries’ relations for more than a half-century.

The study of agriculture, as it was practiced by the early California Padres, should begin in the rough, mountainous region of the Sierra Gorda of Mexico. There, in 1744, Franciscan missionaries began the work of evangelizing the Indians of the central belt of that region. Fathers of the Dominican Order had already established missions along one side of this range, while others of the Augustinian Order were laboring among the Indians of the other side, leaving the middle strip untouched.

The Reverend Father Fr. Pedro Pérez de Mezquía, Superior of the recently founded College of San Fernando in the City of Mexico, had accompanied the Franciscan Padres to aid them in the founding of five missions. From his experience in the missions in Texas whither he had gone with Fr. Margil, Fr. Mezquía had formulated a set of rules and regulations for both the spiritual direction and the temporal government of the Indians of the region. Unfortunately the climate of the Sierra Gorda did not agree with most of those first Padres. Some became ill and were obliged to retire to the College, others died, making frequent changes of missionaries necessary. Few stayed long enough to acquire a knowledge of the language of the Pame people, consequently little progress was made in the conversion of those Indians.