Mexicans during the early national era actively grappled with identifying, clarifying, and defining core republican political values, principles, and doctrines. Throughout the first federal republic (1824-1835), the central republic (1835-1846), the second federal republic (1846-1853), and into the years of the Revolution of Ayutla (1853-1855) and the Wars for Reform (1858-1861), defining and protecting individual rights, delimiting the rights and prerogatives of corporations and their members, and limiting the power of the state became the fundamental challenges Mexicans confronted as they endeavored to create a republican political society and their own republican political culture. As in many, if perhaps not all, countries in transition from a corporate model to a republican model, the issues polarized public opinion; and militant elements procured arms and pursued civil war, not just once but several times. Simultaneously, el pueblo mexicano actively clamored for justice. Because of that clamoring, jurists, litigants, legislators, and executives all came to recognize that colonial jurisprudence was no substitute for new and innovative republican jurisprudence. The men on the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice persistently counselled politicians that extant jurisprudence contained their competence and impeded them from administering justice when individuals, corporations, and local and national government officials sought protection from perceived wrongs. Significantly, in seeking protection from perceived wrongs, in seeking justice, el pueblo mexicano initiated defining those values, principles, and doctrines that ultimately could unify the society and mystify and mythicize the meaning of the nation.

The prosperous state of Peruvian historiography partly reflects the parlous condition of Peruvian historians. With full professors' takehome pay just over 200 dollars a month at Lima's Pontificia Universidad Católica rather less at the University of San Marcos, and with prices not that much lower than in industrialized countries, scholars scrounge for additional support. Moonlighting as a cabby is risky though definitely known among academicians; high schools offer extra hours to about a fifth of San Marcos' lecturers; and the Católica historians staff the university's general studies program for freshmen and sophomores. But the most attractive solution lies in promoting projects for foundations. That is one way for history to be written.

This unpublished document gives a revealing look at the situation of the Franciscan Order in southern Brazil in the early nineteenth century. It was written in 1833 at the request of Msgr. Scipione Domenico Fabbrini, Chargé of the Papal Nunciature of Rio de Janeiro, by Frei Francisco de Monte Alverne, O.F.M., one of the better-known friars of the nineteenth century, and considered by many to be the greatest preacher in the Portuguese language since António Vieira, S. J.

To understand the deep pessimism and melancholy evident in his Plan of Reform, one has to understand some of the background on the Franciscan Order in Brazil, and to know a little of the life of Frei Francisco himself.

When in 1808 Napoleon replaced the unfortunate Bourbon King, Charles IV, by his own brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain, he undoubtedly was not unmindful of the Spanish possessions in America. Without them Spain would be no more than a second rate power. Mexican silver must have lured the French Emperor, who like all conquerors was in constant need of money. The wealth of the Indies was one of the arguments he used in order to convince Joseph to give up the Crown of Naples for that of Spáin. Furthermore, it had been for many years the dream of French merchants to trade with the distant and wealthy lands which the poorly documented work of the Abbé de Raynal, Histoire Philosophique … had made quite popular in Europe by the end of the eighteenth century.

During the forty years from 1567 to 1607 there were three Spanish expeditions from Peru to the South Seas. The first, under Alvaro de Mendaña in 1567, was for the discovery of some rich islands, called Solomon, believed to lie in the equinoctial region between New Guinea and Peru. In the following year he reached a group of islands. Mendaña did not then give them a collective name, but subsequently they became known as the Solomon Islands. With the expedition were four Franciscan friars acting as chaplains and missionaries. The second, a colonizing expedition, was in 1595, again under the Adelantado Mendaña. And here we introduce the celebrated figure and the one to achieve immortal fame in the proto-history of Australia, Pedro Fernández de Quirós. He accompanied the adelantado as captain of his capitana and chief pilot of his fleet of four ships. Because of errors in reckoning latitude and longitude Quirós brought the fleet with close on four hundred settlers to Santa Cruz Island instead of the Solomons, discovering on the way the Marquesas group. At Santa Cruz the settlement knew only tragedy. There was mutiny and disease. Pestilence thinned their ranks by death, and—above all—the adelantado himself died there on October 18, 1595. The settlement, then only a month old, was a month later abandoned. Quirós, by a remarkable feat of navigation, brought the remnants of the expedition to Manila.

Some of the Latin American republics have produced newspapers that rank with the best in the world. In Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Colombia there have been great editors who presided over especially noteworthy journals. Political stability certainly contributed to the development of such papers as La Prensa and La Nación in Buenos Aires and of El Mercurio in Chile. While political stability is a prerequisite for continuous good journalism, freedom of expression, guaranteed by government and jealously guarded by legal institutions, is even more important. Equally important is self-discipline by the press, nowhere more clearly shown than in Chile where the important law of 1872 brought under control abuses that had plagued Chilean journalism for three decades. A free press is incompatible with dictatorial or authoritarian government, a truism amply demonstrated by the Paraguayan experience.

Colonial Spanish America would have found the idea of publishing a periodical directed toward a feminine audience alien. Yet the colonial period was not long over when such periodicals began to appear in Mexico. Typical of those published in the period 1841–1855 were El Semanario de las señoritas mejicanas (3 vols.; México, 1841–1842) and La Semana de las señoritas mejicanas (5 vols.; México, 1851–1852). They have been examined in detail to determine what appeal the fledglings tried to make to Mexican society. El Album mexicano (2 vols.; México, 1849), La Camelia (México, 1853), El Album de las señoritas potosinas (San Luis Potosí, 1865) and, as examples of a later type, El Album de la mujer (Mexico, 1883–1890) and El Correo de las señoras (México, 1883–1893) have been used to supplement the information. While none of them achieved the success of Godey’s Lady’s Book which by 1860 claimed a circulation of 150,000, they did show that in the nineteenth century some publishers in Mexico were concerned with woman’s edification, education, and entertainment through reading.

Historians often date the “professionalization” of the Latin American military establishments to the late nineteenth century. At that time, widely accepted “positivist ” beliefs equating technological modernization with “progress” resulted in the military's perceived need for superior defense forces, to be commanded by officer graduates of newly inaugurated military academies. In Brazil, the military was already emboldened by its successes in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1864-1870); it now sought to consolidate its gains in the competitive institutional climate of the late 1800s by presenting a more recognizably professional appearance.

Madrid, 20 September 1623.

Requesting that the natives of the Austral
Lands be given into the care of the Franciscan
friars, who would undertake their conquest
by spiritual and peaceful means.

Most Holy Father

Friar Juan de Silva, preacher of the Seraphic Order of our Father St. Francis (and confessor of the Royal Palace of His Majesty), of the Province of Castile, prostrate at the feet of your Holiness says that, with zeal for the honor of God, Our Lord, and for the propagation of the Holy Gospel, and at the express command of his Majesty Philip II (who is in heaven), he went to the Realms of the Indies.

The Little Pueblo of Tiripetío lies at the foot of a mountain near Morelia in the state of Michoacán. Its Indian name means “place of gold”, but the adobe houses with their straw roofs plus a general appearance of shabbiness belie such a title. Tiripetío, however, was not always a ghost town. In the sixteenth century it pulsed with life and activity. The life of the place centered about a convent of Augustinian friars, with its adjoining church, hospital and school. The name Vera Cruz is closely linked with this convent and school as with many other educational activities in sixteenth century Mexico. But like Tiripetío itself, which marked the scene of his early labours, the name of Alonso de la Vera Cruz has fallen into obscurity and today counts little, even with historians of his own Order. The recent work of Oswaldo Robles, a translation of one of Vera Cruz’s philosophic treatises, the Physica Speculano, (vd. The Americas, October 1944, under article: “Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz and the Beginnings of Philosophic Speculation in the Americas”.) is truly a step in the right direction. It can only be hoped that the relatively settled political set-up in Mexico will open the way for a more thorough search for historical data on outstanding figures like Alonso de la Vera Cruz. The present article attempts, from the sources now at hand, to synthesize the many and varied activities in the field of education in which Vera Cruz engaged and to give an interpretation of the influence he exerted in the field of learning and in the development of the philosophic thought of his day in Mexico.

By The 1920's, the Brazilian population included a rich spectrum of racial and national groups dominated by an elite profoundly European in origin and outlook. At the same time, it was marked by extensive intermixture among the lower classes and public lip-service to racial tolerance, a condition attributed by Gilberto Freyre and others to Brazil's heritage, its physical environment, and its paternalistic division of labor. Most Brazilians believed that economic achievement and ability, not color, determined class standing, subscribing to the hypothesis of Brazil as a racial democracy unique among the nations.