Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, the internationally known Chilean poetess who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, was born at Vicuña in the province of Coquimbo on April 6, 1889, the daughter of Gerónimo Godoy, a school teacher and minor poet, and Petronila Alcayaga. When Lucila was only three years of age her father abandoned her mother; yet she apparently remembered him with deep filial affection and did not forget the following verses he had written for her:

Known by various names, this Franciscan Province at one time comprised the territory of all the states in the vast basin of the Rio de la Plata and its great tributaries: the Rio de la Plata and Tucumán colonies (present Argentina), Paraguay, and Uruguay—and in the beginning also the southernmost part of Brazil.

Though it was the last of the Franciscan Provinces to be established in Spanish South America during colonial times, it was founded as the independent Custody of Paraguay-Plata as early as 1538. In 1565 another Custody, that of St. George of Tucumán, was founded by Franciscans of the Peruvian Province (see The Americas, II, 83–90). These two Custodies were united into one in 1575, but separated again into two in 1597, both remaining dependent on the Province in Peru. Fifteen years later, the General Chapter held in Rome on July 12, 1612, once more joined the two Custodies to form the Province of Rio de la Plata.

In the summer of 1835 Mexico chose to abandon the federal form of government instituted a decade earlier in 1824 and to replace it with a centralized republic. The dismantling of federal laws and institutions and the enactment of those designed to replace them occupied the next eighteen months until on December 30, 1836 the process of change to the new system culminated in the publication of a new constitution, the so-called Constitutión de las Siete Leyes. This fundamental change in the political structure of the nation was not achieved without considerable dissent and the protracted transitional period permitted many groups who opposed the new order of things to air their views and in some cases, notably in Zacatecas and Texas, to attempt military resistance. The supporters of centralism found themselves, therefore, obliged to make and justify their case for change and to convince themselves as well as their opponents that their proposals represented the popular will. It is with this centralist case for change, or manifesto, that this article is primarily concerned.

In these days of speeding ships that cross the ocean in a few days, of streamlined trains and automobiles that rush from city to city in a few hours, of flashing planes that span the continent almost in a matter of minutes, it may seem strange to sketch the life of a man whose reputation for sanctity is matched only by his fame as a long-distance walker, a foot-traveler par excellence.

The names of most of the 21 California missions as they appear in the founding reports and on the title pages of the parochial books of baptisms, deaths, and marriages are not the same as the names by which they are known at present; names have been shortened for convenience, and changes have been made as the result of changed conditions, especially in the spelling and accentuation. At the time that the names were written and during the sixty-five years of the existence of the missions, there was no uniformity in spelling or punctuation. This problem of uniformity did not arise until after the publication of A. Bello’s Gramática in 1847.

The Franciscan Order was the first large agency to concern itself with the Christianization and civilization of North America. Its personnel sought to change the culture patterns, the institutions, and the ideology of the native aboriginal social order not merely by erecting chapels and churches but also by an educational policy that was vitally interested in improving the quality of individual living and implementing the ideals of a Christian democratic society.

Perhaps the most significant scientific works published about Spanish-America during the entire era 1800–1830 were the botanical and zoological findings of the German scientist, Alexander von Humboldt. He had traveled in the Spanish colonies from 1799 to 1804. Humboldt has been acclaimed as the greatest naturalist that the world had seen since Aristotle and as the foremost man in Europe during his lifetime with the exception of Napoleon. He had taken a scientific education in several German universities and had once held an appointment in Berlin as a mining official for the Prussian government. On his way back to Europe in 1804 at the conclusion of his scientific survey in Spanish-America, he stopped in the United States to visit President Thomas Jefferson who asked him to fix the new boundaries of the United States following the purchase of Louisiana. This side trip probably saved Humboldt’s life because the ship which sailed from South America with his specimens was lost at sea.

In the twilight years of the eighteenth century, Spanish authorities of church and state resolved that the original Franciscan missions of Texas had achieved the goal of their early foundation, namely conversion of indigenous cultures to an Hispano-European lifestyle. Cognizant that the mission as a frontier agency had gained souls for the Catholic faith and citizens for the empire, Hispanic officials initiated secularization of the Texas establishments with the longest tenure, beginning with the missions along the upper San Antonio River. Less than a generation later, in the transition from Spanish dominion to Mexican rule in the nineteenth century, the Franciscan institutions, woefully in a condition of material neglect, engendered widespread secular avarice as numerous applicants with political contact in municipal government energetically competed to obtain land grants among the former mission temporalities.

In the following study we are presenting, as a supplement to our latest book, Las Instituciones del Nuevo Reino de Granada al tiempo de la independencia, a documentary study on the repercussions which the wars of independence had upon the institutional life of the provinces of New Granada that were still in the hands of the Spanish.

Many of the documents which are cited here show us the innermost idéas of the Spanish leaders in those difficult days when so many institutions were crumbling not only overseas but in Spain itself. By comparing documents concerning the metropolis and the colony, we can gain a fairly good idea of the institutional comings and goings, the efforts to obtain regularity in the functioning of the various governmental bureaus, and the useless attempts to control the uncontrollable.

As the sun was setting on December 12, 1907, the 16-year-old Tecla Xicay and her sister Inocenta were returning to their village of Tonajuyu, San Martín Jilotepeque (henceforth San Martín), in highland Guatemala when a portly ladino with a thin blonde mustache jumped out from behind a gate, took off his shoes, and attempted to rape Tecla. When she resisted, he hit her twice in the neck and then stabbed her in the back as she fled. Illiterate and monolingual speakers of Kaqchikel-Maya (henceforth Kaqchikel), the sisters recounted their harrowing ordeal through an interpreter the next day in Chimaltenango's municipal court. Apparentiy eager to escape the grasp of the state and ladino world, the two indigenous women did not tarry in Chimaltenango. Despite the military surgeon's insistence that Xicay be admitted to the hospital to cure her open wound, she refused, saying she would take care of it herself. Ladino and patriarchal in their design and operation, institutions such as courts and hospitals that held the potential to assist indigenous women often alienated them.