On September 27, 1821, Mexico achieved its de facto independence from Spain when Agustín de Iturbide led his 16,000-man “Trigarante” Army into Ciudad México, thus culminating the revolution inaugurated by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo in 1810. In December 1822, the United States gave official diplomatic recognition to Mexico, followed shortly thereafter by Great Britain in 1823. Despite such action on the part of the United States government, however, no official minister was dispatched to Mexico until May 1825. Based upon the circumstances of this delay and upon conditions in Mexico, when a United States minister did arrive in Ciudad México to meet with Mexican officials, the stage was set for a significant confrontation which would determine the tenor of Mexican-United States relations until the twentieth century. This was the confrontation between Joel R. Poinsett and Lucas Alamán.

Fray Antonio Margil was not the leader of the first group of missionaries to enter Texas. The entrada of which he was a member did not occur until 1716. However, previous to this, there had been only one serious attempt at permanent occupation of Texas by missionaries. This had occurred in 1690. The Spanish claim to Texas antedates this attempt at occupation by almost a hundred and fifty years. In order to present the work of Fray Antonio Margil with’ greater clarity, it will be well to show its exact position in the history of the territory by summarizing here the history of the occupation of Texas previous to the work of Fray Antonio.

Thus Did the wife of the first Spanish Minister to Mexico describe, in October, 1840, the reception given a letter written by José María Gutiérrez Estrada and published in pamphlet form together with an essay which amplified and clarified his position. The letter, addressed to President Anastasio Bustamante, carried the date August 25, 1840, whereas the pamphlet did not appear until October 18, 1840. The letter pointed to the necessity for a convention to seek a remedy for Mexico’s problems. The remedy advocated by Gutiérrez Estrada in the essay which amplified his position, and which caused such a sensation— was a constitutional monarchy.

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.

At his trial Socrates described himself as attached to Athens “as a gadfly to a horse.” In Sixteenth Century Spain the Order of Preachers played a similar role. Dominican friars freely criticized royal officials, conquistadors and fellow churchmen. At times their meddling in affairs of state drew down on them the wrath of the authorities. Charles V, though favorably disposed toward the Indians, more than once angrily rebuked their defenders, the friars, for letting zeal outrun prudence. One of the most effective of these critics was Francisco de Vitoria. Vitoria was renowned as the founder of the Salamanca Thomist school. Not content with the elaboration of scholastic doctrines, he carried them into the political forum, delivering public lectures on the problems of his time.

WITH the death of Herbert E. Bolton in December, 1953, we close the circle of an important epoch in inter-American cultural relations. We come to the end of a period that, in the United States, had its beginning about the middle of the 1890’s and which eventually culminated with the Good Neighbor Policy and the close collaboration of the American nations during the Second World War.

Royal officials of the Indies found the contraband trade one of the most critical and debilitating problems in their administration of Spanish America. Contraband existed throughout the colonial period, despite occasional strenuous efforts to stamp it out. Various ideas have been advanced to explain the failure of Spanish counter-contraband in America, and these largely reflect on the quality of Spanish administration of the Indies. The implication is that governors and royal officials were generally guilty of corruption, of passive or active connivance in the contraband trade, or, at the very least, of incompetence or inefficiency in preventing it.

The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 acquired for the United States one-half of Mexican territory, while the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 secured a more level route for railroads destined to connect the south and the far west. Impatient investors, however, sought immediate union with the west, and the shortest route at hand was across the isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. The Department of State advanced these interests, and only on failure turned their efforts to an overland route across Northern Mexico. This latter route would have connected Matamoros on the Rio Grande and Atlantic with Matzatlan on the Pacific. To this goal, Delphy Carlin, an American long-experienced in trade with Mexico, urged Secretary of State Lewis Cass. He was convinced that a line skirting the mountains and connecting these ports would be an ideal boundary; that “all north of that red line is a nuisance to Mexico.”

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.