This year, 1992, marks the quincentenary or quincentennial of the first voyage of Columbus to the Western Hemisphere. In 1990, as Chair of the Mexican Studies Committee of the Conference on Latin American History, I invited two of the leading scholars on Mexico during the colonial period– Professor Jacques Lafaye (Universite de Paris IV) and Professor James Lockhart (UCLA)–to help set the debate for the upcoming anniversary by delivering a 20 minute summary of the role of Spain in the history of colonial Mexico at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. The following essays are the result of that discussion held on December 29, 1990 in San Francisco.

Students of revolutionary movements often find that the early leaders were motivated more by a desire for power than by revolutionary idealism. After the movement triumphs, the original chiefs are hailed by their followers as farsighted patriots who sought to reform the country. Hindsight renders this conclusion easy, for the later reforms and legislation appear to flow from the uprising. But it must be remembered that the nature of the revolution may have changed during the fighting, and that those who launched the uprising could not perceive its entire course. It is difficult for historians to cut through the aura of idealism that surrounds these leaders, for no people wishes to hear that its hero was merely seeking personal power. Yet a careful examination of the origins of a revolution is essential to understanding the later developments.

GENERAL William Miller had played a leading role in the independence of Peru and Bolivia from Spain, working with the chief leaders of the independence movement, and had held civil posts of distinction as president of Puno and president of Potosí. Bad health, however, caused by the many wounds suffered in the wars, had made it advisable that he return to England for treatment. But, unlike so many other foreign legionnaires, Miller's role in the history of Peru did not end with independence.

During the decade beginning in 1910 the economic involvement of the United States in Mexico increased while diplomatic relations deteriorated. Between 1911 and 1920 United States' imports from Mexico increased from $57,000,000 to $179,000,000 and exports from $61,000,000 to $208,000,000. Much of this economic growth related to petroleum and to land where investments in each of these areas increased phenomenally. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917, however, forecast trouble for foreign investors, especially those who depended upon Mexico's unreplenishable subsoil resources. Concessionaires who mined the subsoil appeared to hold their title only at the will of the state. Additionally, the right of foreigners to hold property in Mexico was often restricted. Land on the shores or borders of Mexico, for example, could not be owned by foreigners. Such provisions were designed to limit the economic subservience of Mexico to the United States. Like other Latin Americans, the Mexicans wanted economic self-sufficiency. They resented the fact that their economy was tied to the fluctuating world demand for staple raw materials and that they were caught in an American vise which squeezed both their imports and their exports.

The evolution of the historical literature on land tenure in northern New Spain has closely paralleled general historiographical trends of New Spain's far northern frontier. For many years, “borderlands” history focused almost exclusively upon the study of those institutions which have been stereotyped as peculiar to the frontier, the mission and the presidio; upon political and administrative history; or upon biographies of notable figures. These studies laid important foundations, but, in general, borderlands historians were slow to adopt the social science methodologies of the new social and economic history which became popular in the 1960s in most fields of historical inquiry. Well after both its Anglo and Hispanic progenitors began to be studied from a perspective which emphasized social and economic structures and relationships, did the geographical area which corresponds to the Provincias Internas (all of today's border states plus Sinaloa, Durango and Baja California) begin to receive similar attention. Thus, our understanding of the social and economic history of the region is still rudimentary, and this is nowhere more evident than in the area of landholding patterns and agrarian development.

The multifaceted character of economic growth in Latin America has several distinctive qualities. Research is now uncovering some basic features of different stages and areas in industrialization. In Latin America, where personalism assumes a more significant role than in the system oriented Anglo-America, the lives of individuals can be quite decisive in the functioning of society. Francisco Javier Cisneros played several highly meaningful roles, all of which are important not only for the legacy left by his agitated, dynamic and dramatic life, but also because his experiences illustrate a not uncommon pattern of economic development in Latin America.

This article points to the 1820s as a crucial period that saw a great reversal in the location of sovereignty in Belize. The article employs two inflection points—first, an 1822 case of ‘Indian’ slaves from Mosquito Shore, and second, slave desertion in 1825—to point to unprecedented challenges to settler sovereignty over slavery in Belize that arose during the 1820s. While British amelioration allowed the metropolitan government to bring frontier and borderland regions within its legal purview, thus challenging settler autonomy, the concurrent event of Central American emancipation provided enslaved people in Belize additional opportunity to desert their masters at a moment when restitution of runaway slaves became increasingly difficult. Yet, this essay is about more than just the fracturing of settler sovereignty over slavery. Rather it also illuminates how settlers responded to these challenges by using force, diplomacy, and the print media. The settlers’ most potent response was in portraying Belizean slavery as ‘benign,’ creating a surprisingly robust narrative that would endure for generations. The essay illuminates how emancipation and imperialism remained inextricably linked in borderland areas such as Belize, which straddled the boundaries between Spanish America and the British Caribbean.

In this paper I carry out a microphilological study of a section of the Codex Indianorum 7, a colonial devotional manuscript in Nahuatl preserved in the John Carter Brown Library. It contains wisdom teachings derived from the biblical Book of Tobit and directed to both parents and their children. I argue that this hitherto unstudied text reveals the Native author's liberty to creatively mold and adapt a culturally remote European prototype into the Native genre of oratorical art—the huehuehtlahtolli, or “words of the elders.” The author also skillfully embedded and contextualized the content of the biblical instruction in local cultural meanings understandable and valid to an Indigenous audience. As an example of cross-cultural translation and colonial textual production, this source provides new insights into Native forms of agency, intellectual autonomy, and acculturation strategies reflected in creative dialogues with European traditions, developed and maintained despite the seemingly substitutive Christianization policies imposed on Indigenous people in the sixteenth century.

The year 1976 was a violent one in Nicaragua. In an effort to quash the Sandinista guerrillas, the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle had declared a state of siege, suspending constitutional guarantees, muzzling the press, and unleashing the Guardia Nacional. Despite the dangers of dissent, thousands of students across the country walked off their secondary school campuses that year to protest poor funding, inept teachers, and oppressive administrators. This article examines this series of strikes to uncover the ways in which teenagers managed to organize their schools and communities in spite of the repression that marked the final years of the Somoza regime. Analyzing student documents, Ministry of Education records, and newspaper reports, this article argues that in the context of a decades-long dictatorship, student demands for more democratic schools opened a relatively safe pathway for cross-generational activism that forced concessions from the Somoza regime. By the 1970s, secondary schools had come to reflect the state's authoritarianism and mismanagement, and widespread educational deficiencies brought students and parents together in a joint project to demand better schools. Battles over the quality of education, thus, showcased the power of an organized citizenry and laid the groundwork for the revolutionary mobilizations that were to come.

On march 22, 1833, the regency of Brazil in the name of the emperor, by virtue of the privileges of ecclesiastical patronage which the crown enjoyed, appointed Dr. Antônio Maria de Moura to the See of Rio de Janeiro, vacant since the death of the eighth bishop, Dom José Caetano da Silva Coutinho, on January 27, 1833. In accordance with the usual practice, the regency petitioned Pope Gregory XVI on April 30 of the same year to confirm the appointment by sending the appropriate bulls of institution without which (since collation is effected solely by institution of the Roman Pontiff) the bishop-elect could not be consecrated and enthroned and, in the case of Brazil, could not exercise jurisdiction over the diocese or administer it. When Gregory refused to confirm Dr. Moura, for reasons which will later be made clear, the Imperial Government and the Holy See became involved in a dispute more bitter and prolonged than any of the many disputes between the two powers that characterize the history of the church-state relationship in Brazil from the proclamation of the independence of the country in 1822 to the abrogation of the union and the renunciation of patronage by the government in 1890.