Franciscan historian Antonine Tibesar’s study of the early evangelical accomplishments of the Franciscan Order in the Andes constitutes a landmark contribution to an insufficiently examined subject. Trying to detach his work from Joachimist debates, Tibesar did not deem the spirituality shared by peninsular friars to be relevant in explaining their poor early evangelical results. Although Tibesar acknowledged such shortcomings, he sustained that they were caused by an apathetic Franciscan engagement in parish work among the Indians. The inexperience of Spanish friars and the turmoil of the civil wars that ravaged the Andes in the aftermath of the conquest greatly explain this situation, he sustains. Additionally, Tibesar advances the idea that the undecided approach towards Indian conversion amongst sixteenth-century Franciscan authorities was the major cause of these first evangelical failures. Troubled by the hardships of life in Indian parishes and concerned about the lack of familiarity with parish administration among the Order’s ranks, the Franciscan establishment sent the friars contradictory orders, thus preventing them from bringing together a more coherent evangelical plan.

The land tenure arrangements of missions in Latin America have received insufficient attention. Given the vast extent of land the missions controlled on the Latin American frontier and the effect that land tenure arrangements had on the functioning of the missions, this is a serious oversight. Rather than focus on land tenure, most studies of the missions have examined primarily issues such as evangelization, the labor regime, and demographic patterns. While these topics are also important, indeed vital, to an understanding of missions, an analysis of land tenure arrangements is a useful way for understanding the economic and even the political dimensions of mission systems. For example, the control that the missionaries imposed on their charges should have been reflected in a majority of the land controlled directly by the missionaries rather than holdings controlled by individual Indian families. In this sense, the land tenure system reflected the missionary regime in important ways and helps test hypotheses about economic resources as well as power within this controversial institution. In addition, the changes in ownership and use of land became a key ingredient in determining the survival of indigenous groups once the government secularized the missions.

The Newly independent government of Mexico became concerned in 1821 about the lack of progress made by the Franciscans in preparing the California mission Indians to take their place in the new nation. The government feared that Upper California might well be lost to the encroachments of the Russians or the Americans if it were not settled by a thriving community of Mexican citizens able to exploit its great natural resources. Influenced by the new egalitarian and humanitarian concepts of the day, the authorities felt that the mission Indians were more like serfs than citizens. Unimpressed by the arguments of the experienced Franciscan Fathers that the Indians would either revert to their wild life in the hills or be enslaved by the white settlers if they were prematurely released from the missions, the government decided to instigate a series of experiments, reminiscent of those made in the days of Father Bartolomé de las Casas, to see what actually would happen. A program was begun involving extensive research in the culture and civilization of the California Indians.

In the spring of 1925, Santa Anita's Festival of Flowers seemed to follow its tranquil trend of previous years. The large displays of flowers, the selection of indias bonitas (as the contestants of beauty pageants organized in an attempt to stimulate indigenism were known) and the boat-rides on the Viga Canal, all communicated what residents of neighboring Mexico City had come to expect of the small pueblo in the Federal District since the Porfiriato: the respite of a peaceful pastoral, the link to a colorful past, and the promise that mexicanidad was alive and well in the campo. Unfortunately, wrote Manuel Rámirez Cárdenas of El Globo, “the modern newspaper,” the next day, this idyllic tradition was rudely interrupted by a group of audacious, scantily clad women. The culprits were actresses of Mexico City's Lirico theater, who walked around Santa Anita's streets in “picaresque clothing”—stage outfits that left little to the imagination, particularly in broad daylight—and upset visitors and campesinos alike. According to Cardenas, abuelitas and mamas were shocked by the display, averting their eyes from the female spectacle in fear of “elpecado mortal.” Thankfully, for the mothers and grandmothers in the audience, the festival continued in predictable fashion after the initial uproar. Organizers continued with the traditional dances, and judges selected an india bonita from a pool of young, decente mestizo girls to represent the pueblo and the festival.

In November 1960, the New York Times reported on the looming revolution in Northeastern Brazil, describing how Marxist social movement leaders were organizing peasants. Reporter Tad Szulc claimed that “singers and violeiros—the traveling troubadors of the Northeast who act as human newspapers”—were spreading leader Francisco Julião's manifestos to the largely illiterate rural population and its “miserable, drought-plagued hamlets.” The human newspapers allegedly sung about agrarian reform as a form of liberation, comparing the process of revolution in Brazil with that of Cuba. Szulc wrote:

On February 16, 1696, Doña Inés Velarde, the widow of Capitán Don Miguel de Vera, a former notary of the Mexico City Cabildo, redacted her will before Juan de Condarco y Caceres, a notary public in New Spain’s capital. Despite the typhus (matlazáhuatl) epidemic that ravaged the city in that year, Doña Inés was in good health. She had carefully prepared for the pious act of will writing, issuing over thirty meticulously designed religious directives in her last will and testament. Two directives in particular reveal much about colonial Mexican religious sensibilities. In the thirty-seventh clause of her twenty-page will, she founded a perpetual act of charity with the capital of 3,000 pesos.

The War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), pitting Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay, continues to provoke debate over its causes and implications. No antique quarrel between battlefield historians, the historiography of the War revolves around the basic questions of nineteenth century economic colonialism, imperialism and dependency. My contribution to the continuance of the discussions is that the nature and outcome of the war were shaped significantly by the participation of the Triple Alliance's indispensible fourth ally, Great Britain—in some ways, the most implacable of all independent Paraguay's nineteenth century foes.

Much has been published about the Church in colonial Peru, but very little has appeared regarding the regular orders' internal financial workings or their members' economic activities. The little written about Peruvian nuns tends to describe them as comfortably housed, colorfully dressed and bejeweled, and surrounded by slaves and servants. There is nothing on Peruvian convents comparable to Asunción Lavrin's detailed research on Mexican nunneries. A bibliography about the finances of friars and their monasteries would be similarly weak, except for material on the Jesuits.

The notarial archive of the Mexican city of Puebla de los Angeles, virtually complete from 1540 on, is a treasure-house of information about social and economic life in the early colony. Many of its earliest documents are, however, in deplorable physical condition, unindexed and chronologically unorganized, which makes them extremely difficult and time-consuming to consult. In order to remedy this condition and make the archive more accessible to scholars both in Mexico and elsewhere, I have indexed and extracted from microfilm the substance of over 1,600 documents executed between 1540 and 1555. These will probably appear in a two-volume collection published by the Editorial Jus in Mexico City. The documents make fascinating reading. There are wills, dowries, contracts, law-suits, partnerships, promissory notes, rentals, powers of attorney, as well as bills of sale itemizing every imaginable kind of property from real estate to livestock to produce to general merchandise.

The early European presence in California and in the American Southwest in general is identified with missions. Although missions were equally important in Spanish Florida and at an earlier date, the average American does not associate missions with Florida or Georgia. Indeed, as David Hurst Thomas observed in a recent monograph on the archaeological exploration of a site of the Franciscan mission of Santa Catalina de Guale on Georgia's St. Catherines Island, the numerous missions of Spanish Florida have remained little known even in scholarly circles. And as Charles Hudson has noted, this ignorance or amnesia has extended to awareness of the native peoples who inhabited those Southeastern missions or were in contact with them, even though these aboriginal inhabitants of the Southeast “possessed the richest culture of any of the native people north of Mexico … by almost any measure.” Fortunately, as Thomas remarked in the above-mentioned monograph, “a new wave of interest in mission archaeology is sweeping the American Southeast.” This recent and ongoing work holds the promise of having a more lasting impact than its historical counterpart of a half-century or so ago in the work of Herbert E. Bolton, Fr. Maynard Geiger, OFM, Mary Ross, and John Tate Lanning. Over the fifty odd years since Lanning's Spanish Missions of Georgia appeared, historians and archaeologists have made significant contributions to knowledge about sites in Spanish Florida where missions or mission outstations and forts or European settlements were established. But to date no one has compiled a comprehensive listing from a historian's perspective of the mission sites among them to which one may turn for the total number of such establishments, their general location, time of foundation, length of occupation, moving, circumstances of their demise and the tribal affiliation of the natives whom they served. This catalog and its sketches attempt to meet that need.

The debate over the granting of petroleum concessions to foreign enterprise was one of the most significant areas of contact between the United States and Colombia after World War I. The official United States response to the plight of American interests involved in the development of the Barco concession exemplifies the nature of United States Latin American policy in the transition from the Coolidge to the Hoover administration. State Department actions in the Barco instance underline the growing awareness in American circles of the need to fashion a policy which would protect American enterprise as well as the principle of foreign investment against nationalist sentiment in Latin America.

One of the most important colonial institutions which joined church and society in the Brazilian cities were the lay confraternities which were attached to churches, convents and monasteries. These voluntary associations of laymen and women joined people of all classes and races in common religious activities and social works of mercy. In colonial Brazil there were separate lay associations for different races, although these racially suggested societies might parade together during religious festivals and share side altars in a common church. Free blacks, mulattoes and slaves joined separate religious associations since the white confraternities were very exclusive and discriminatory towards the poorer non-white population. The slave confraternities of the cities of 18th century Brazil were the only lay religious associations in that society which were open to all people regardless of class, race, sex or ethnic background. However as the century wore on some of the black brotherhoods tended to differentiate among themselves according to tribal distinctions, language, social condition and the extent of assimilation in Portuguese America. The larger slave confraternities like the Rosary brotherhood usually had a more diverse membership of free and slave brothers, mulattoes, Creoles and tribal Africans, blacks and whites.

At approximatety eight o'clock in the morning on the 22nd of June, 1719, Don Gaspar Agüero de los Reyes y San Pelayo, the alcalde mayor (Spanish magistrate) of the district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, prepared to depart on horseback from the town square of the Zapotec pueblo of San Juan Juquila toward four disputed parcels of land. Standing with him in the square were the cabildo officers of San Juan Juquila and San Juan Tanetze, who had been engaged in a legal battle over the land for four years. Their lawyers stood with them. Juan Tirado, a district interpreter, and court witnesses (in lieu of an official notary) translated and notarized the proceedings. From his perch on the back of his horse, the alcalde mayor read the legal decision in the dispute, which the interpreter translated for the benefit of the Zapotec officials. The auxiliary judge, who rendered the decision in the case from the distance and comfort of the diocesan seat of Antequera, had ordered that the land in question should be divided equally between the two pueblos. The lawyer for the cabildo of Tanetze voiced his official protest and vowed to appeal the case to the Real Audiencia. The alcalde mayor registered the protest. Then, he addressed another group of men who had been waiting in the wings: Juan de Yllescas, Andrés Ramos, Juan Baptista, Pedro Hernandes, and Nicolas Santiago, all natives of the Zapotec pueblo of San Miguel Talea, and all of whom had testified in an earlier probanza on behalf of the pueblo of Juquila. Through his interpreter, the magistrate swore them in as witnesses and ordered them to guide the group to the disputed territory, identify the parcels of land and their borders, and determine where they should be divided. From this point on, the Zapotec witnesses took the lead and proceeded toward the disputed territory along the Camino Real, with their “faces pointing south.” In this manner, the legal ritual of boundary marking (amojonamiento) began.

On June 18, 1539, at Tlaxcala, New Spain, Indians recently converted to Christianity performed a pageant written and directed by the Franciscan missionaries. The play titled “The Conquest of Jerusalem” featured the final siege of the Holy City led by combined armies from Spain and New Spain aided by forces from France and Hungary. The drama unfolds with the army from New Spain, protected by angels and St. Hippolytus, showing the most valor. Huddled to one side of the battlefield are the Pope and his court offering prayers for a Christian victory. After several attacks, each of which ends in a miracle saving the Christian armies, the Moslems capitulate and convert to the true faith. In the final scene, the Pope causes all the new converts to be baptized after which the Sultan and his soldiers bow before Charles V and proclaim him to be “God's Captain” for all the earth. The pageant commemorated the Truce of Nice concluded on June 17, 1538, between Charles V and Francis I at the urging and coordination of Pope Paul III who wanted to free Charles V to attack the Turks and capture Jerusalem. Celebrating the Truce of Nice was a natural choice for the friars because it reflected commonly held theories of apocalypticism. The pageant exhibited salient themes of the apocalyptic conversion of non-believers and infidels, the recapture of Jerusalem, and the recognition of a “last world ruler.” Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía), who recorded the pageant, prefaced the drama by praying that this prophesied victory would soon happen and he assigned an unprecedented role to the peoples of the New World in the victory.

For most residents of Mexico City at the turn of the nineteenth century, daily life was cash poor. Homemakers with servants or without, merchants and artisans, carpenters and domestic servants all turned to pawnshops to finance routine household, business and recreational needs, some on a daily basis. At the end of the colonial period and in the first decades of independent republican rule, residents from the lower and intermediate ranks of the city commonly raised cash by securing loans with possessions as collateral, leaving clothing, tools, and jewels temporarily with pawnbrokers. Based on more than 8,000 transactions culled from pawnshop records from the 1780s to the 1820s, this article argues that pawning material goods served to alleviate economic and other pressures at the household level.

It was mostly women managing households who provided for dependents and/or maintained class and ethnic identities through creative financing strategies that depended on regular use of petty credit mechanisms. Archival documents and literary sources suggest that there were fundamental continuities in this material history of Mexico City from the last decades of the colonial period well into the decades after Independence, which was achieved in 1821. Material goods continued to serve as collateral for small loans throughout the nineteenth century. Pawning was a regular strategy used by many urban residents to negotiate the colonial and post-colonial political economy as well as cultural hierarchies. Petty credit secured by women helped individuals and families steady their precarious foothold on the social ladder of hierarchy. While pawning could allow some to maintain their status or even ascend the ladder, for most people collateral credit cushioned (or simply prolonged) the slip down.

The Mexica people, nomads forced southward by the bellicose Chichimecas of the north in the early fourteenth century, received revelation from their principal deity, Huitzilopochtli, which would terminate their wanderings. Appearing in dreams to the priest Cuauhtloquetzqui, Huitzilopochtli stated that on the spot where the heart of his slain nephew, Copil, was thrown, there would grow a great nopal cactus where an eagle would make his nest and dry his wings in the morning sun. This site he further stated would be named Tenochtitlan, place of the nopal, and there the people were to build a great city from which they would become the masters of the surrounding regions. The announcement of this revelation was made by Cuauhtloquetzqui, and, locating the great nopal on an island in the center of the Lake of Texcoco, a temple to Huitzilopochtli was constructed on the site in the year 1325.

In a personal letter dated October 1, 1953, to the President of the United States, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, President of the Republic of Bolivia, urgently appealed for both food and economic assistance for his nation. “Our availabilities in foreign currency,” Paz wrote, “have diminished so considerably through the fall in the price of tin and other minerals that we find ourselves in the insurmountable difficulty of not being able to provide food and other essential articles for the people, since in order to import them we need foreign currency.”

Never particularly stable, even by Latin American standards, the fragile fabric of the nation had been rent by the revolutionary change of April 1952 which brought the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario from underground and from exile to power. The MNR, led by Paz himself, had instituted rapid, radical modifications in the political, economic, and social structure of the country. These changes, however, exacted their toll. The most serious consequences were a decline in productivity of both minerals and foods. The nation, which had long depended on food imports, could not feed itself, and its foreign exchange earnings were insufficient to permit purchase of foodstuffs from abroad.

FOREIGN investment, mostly from the United States, fueled the rapid growth of the Mexican economy under the regime of Porfirio Díaz. By 1910, foreigners had invested well over a billion dollars in Mexico's railroads, mines, and a variety of other undertakings. At the core of the expansion and development of foreign investment was the connection between foreign entrepreneurs and the native elite. This association, worked out over three decades, greatly affected the economic, political, and social development of the nation.

The relationship between native elite and foreign entrepreneurs was based on three sets of factors. First, the native elite controlled both the government which in Mexico, on all levels, played an important role in the success or failure of any enterprise and, through their ownership of much of the nation's land and mines, the rich natural resources which foreign enterpreneurs sought to develop. Second, the native elite was willing to permit foreigners to develop the nation's resources, to participate in a wide range of economic activities, and to dominate certain sectors of the economy, such as mining. The native elite allowed this, because on one hand, one group within the elite, the cientificos, was ideologically committed to the modernization of the country and saw foreign investment as the quickest and most efficient method to modernize and, on the other hand, the traditional groups within the elite saw foreign investment as a means to increase their own incomes (through bribes, commissions, and the sale of their property) and to preserve their traditional privileges. The only conceivable alternative to the development of the nation's economy through foreign investment would have been through the expansion of direct government participation in the economy, but this would have required (apart from an implausible ideological reorientation towards the discredited conservatism of an earlier era or the exotic doctrines of European socialism) a considerable redistribution of the nation's wealth (through taxation and other means of “forced” savings) to the disadvantage of the elite. The development of Mexico's economy through foreign investment did not disturb the political status quo. Third and finally, foreign entrepreneurs had both the capital and technological know-how to develop the nation's resources, neither of which was present in Mexico.

The 1920s saw the emergence of a distinctive, new urban culture in the city of Buenos Aires. Although this culture did not extend to the borders of the nation, it was a national culture in the sense that it continually manufactured and reproduced images of Argentine national identity. Research conducted over the last two decades has greatly improved our understanding of this new culture. We know that it was, to a great extent, forged in the city's new, outlying barrios where manual workers lived side by side with skilled workers and members of the middle class. The relatively strong performance of the Argentine economy during these years made social mobility a more for realistic aspiration for more people than it had ever been before. Partly as a result of this economic reality, the new barrio culture revealed a less militant attitude on the part of porteño workers, a trend visible as well in the significant decline in membership and effectiveness experienced by labor unions. But the new cultural milieu reflected more than just economic prosperity; it was intimately tied to the birth of a mass culture disseminated by radio, cinema, and tabloid. In particular, the 1920s witnessed the commodification and massification of tango and football, two popular cultural practices that were now transformed into quintessential representations of Argentinidad.

Four years before the suppression of male religious orders in Mexico (1859) the Minister of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs, Ezequiel Montes, asked the provincials to inform him on the number of friars, their activities and their monasteries' properties (December 22, 1855). The data, which began arriving to the Minister in January 1856, provides some of the most complete information on the nineteenth century Franciscans in Mexico. Comparing this data with what is available for the end of eighteenth century we can draw the following comparative table.

A quick glance at these figures reveals the great deterioration through which the order had gone in a period of seventy years. From 1786 and 1856 the Franciscans had lost three fifths of their members, two fifths of their monasteries and four fifths of their missions. It can be pointed out as a counterweight that, during the same period, two colleges of Propaganda Fide were founded: Orizaba in 1799, and Zapopan in 1812.l But it also should be noted that during the same time a province disappeared, Yucatan.2 The general conclusion, then, is that in no other period of their presence in Mexico, had the Franciscan