This essay uses gender analysis to interrogate the modernization of labor organizations in Ecuador from 1890-1950, with a focus on why domestic servants were excluded in this process. Although labor organizers challenged other forms of paternalism in labor relations, they remained silent on domestic service even though it was the main source of female labor in Ecuador's growing cities. Using publications by labor organizations, laws, and social welfare records, this essay seeks to understand not what life was like for domestic servants, but to explore the contours and contradictions in the relationships between workers, labor organizers, and the state during a critical period of modernization and state formation in Ecuador. I argue that the absence of domestic servants from labor discourses defined and reinforced specific forms of masculine dignity as the core of the modern worker identity. This masculine worker identity made possible the inclusion of indigenous hacienda workers in the labor movement, but women could be incorporated only if they worked in public settings (mainly factories). Domestic servants belonged symbolically to the realm of traditional labor, and their ties to the home placed them beyond the paradigm of class exploitation.

This article establishes the role white women played in shaping the urban labor force and the economy in late colonial times in Lima, roughly from 1790 to 1822. It focuses on the impoverished elite women who, by the end of the colonial period, had to ask for alms to avoid working with their own hands. An important part of the Limeño elites could not respond to the twofold challenge: the negative consequences of the economic and administrative reforms of the Bourbons, and the relative flexibilization of the social order in Lima by the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adapting to new conditions, the Spanish elites generated a social discourse that reaffirmed status and ethnicity as a means to distinguish themselves from the “vicious” plebeian sectors. More than one thousand applications to Church relief programs serve as the main foundation of this article; they are made up of at least one fifth of the white female population of the city in 1806. The article enters into dialogue with studies on socio-labor practices and the history of gender and ethnicity by engaging with concrete experiences of poor elite women in a city considered to be the opulent center of the Spanish colonial power.

David Geggus offers a detailed response to the three critiques of his “Kongomania” article by John Thornton, Christina Mobley, and James Sweet. Centered on demographic statistics and their link to cultural influence, the rebuttal examines evidentiary support for various assertions and hypotheses. The debate ranges over the use of certain ethnonyms (Creole, Congo, Mondongue); the creation of Vodou; the significance of Baudry des Lozières's Vocabulaire Congo; and the organization and aims of the 1791 uprising and the Haitian War of Independence.

It is a feature of modern nationhood that a declaration of independence is reified as a key inflection point, a specific moment in time during which a region and its people cease to be beholden to something else and begin to chart their own collective course. Independence thus represents both an end and a beginning. It is both a process and a goal. Independence is usually understood as a political act, a metaphorical coming of age, a goal achieved, and an event that brings hope. This collection of six recent books on independence in Age of Revolutions across the Atlantic world fit together to show how wartime worlds and worldviews may not fit as neatly into the textbook national story. They share an intellectual project of moving beyond the usual actors and narrative trajectories to introduce us to new perspectives on the events by looking at different regions and demographics: Austrian diplomats, British Foreign Office bureaucrats, Irish radicals, New England whalers, African traders, Chilean popular classes, Mexico City's night watchmen, and many others. These six authors tug at the standard chronology of Atlantic independence as well, pulling it back to the 1770s and extending its living impact into the 1850s. Taken together, they remind us that independence is a tricky concept, one that can look quite different depending on one's place in a broader matrix. Wars eventually end, but combative words and unreconciled worldviews collide and continue the struggle.

The article critiques the scholarly emphasis on the centrality of West-Central Africans in the Haitian Revolution. It argues that two highly influential articles published 30 years ago by John Thornton greatly exaggerated the presence of such “Congos” in the colony, and overstated that of Africans in general. Amplified in subsequent works by Thornton and others, this exaggeration has become the prevailing orthodoxy and the issue has gone entirely unnoticed down to today. To make its point, the article draws on a data set of more than 31,000 enslaved workers of known origin and it attempts to calculate population change on the eve of the revolution. It lays out the way the ethnic composition of the black population varied by crop type and region, and produces for the first time estimates for the whole of Saint Domingue. It additionally makes two excursions into African studies. The first is to investigate the ethnic/geographic origins of the “Congos.” The second relates to the nature of slavery in West-Central Africa and certain items of Kikongo vocabulary. This forms part of a critique of an ambitious article by James Sweet concerning the influence of Kongolese in Saint-Domingue that constitutes the article's final section.

In April 1802, the leaders of the Haitian Revolution faced a choice that would expose fundamental differences in their vision of liberty in post-emancipation society: join General Leclerc's army or continue the fight against French expeditionary forces. Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean Jacques Dessalines agreed, whilst Kongo leader Macaya and Sans-Souci refused, the latter describing his forces as “defenders of liberty.”1 Following his arrest, Louverture famously declared: “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of the liberty of the blacks; it will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous.”2 The most obvious roots of liberty were Sans-Souci's mainly African troops, known as the “Congos,” who continued the revolution using tactics honed in 1791. But when Christophe, Dessalines, and Alexandre Pétion defected from the French and joined the newly-united “indigenous army,” the conflict over who would lead the “defenders of liberty” persisted, culminating in Henri Christophe's assassination of Sans-Souci, after whom he would famously name his palace.3 Sans-Souci's death foreshadowed a broader discursive victory in post-revolution historiography, which celebrated the role of Creole and mixed-race leaders, and the political ideology of the French Revolution, to the exclusion of African people and ideas.4

Thousands of soldiers swept onto the campus of the University of El Salvador with tanks and planes, ransacking buildings and arresting more than eight hundred students, professors, and staff. It was July 19, 1972, and the university had “fallen into the hands of the Communist Party of El Salvador and a minuscule group of opportunists of the most disgraceful immorality,” said the recently inaugurated president Army Colonel Arturo Armando Molina.1 Troops handcuffed the rector, Fabio Castillo, and the dean of the medical school and sent them into exile in Nicaragua.2 Early in the invasion, the troops sealed off and occupied the university's printing press, where workers produced a magazine of arts and politics called La Pájara Pinta that essayist Italo López Vallecillos and novelist Manlio Argueta had founded in 1966, and of which Argueta was still the editor.3 The campus occupation lasted two years and proved a milestone in El Salvador's long march to civil war. The closing of La Pájara Pinta that day silenced the most important forum for Salvadoran dissident writers and marked, for many of them, the end of their literary careers and the start of their lives as fugitives and, eventually, guerrillas.

Through presence or absence, indigeneity has long been at the center of Bolivian politics, culture, and nationalism.1 It carries immense social import. Yet what Indigenous means and who gets counted as part of this umbrella category has never been clear or static. Although Bolivia's racial and ethnic categories seem as etched in stone as the Andes themselves, individual classification is fluid and situational based on sociocultural markers that change over time. These markers include occupation, literacy, dress, language, surname, and residence. Individuals may move through these categories (and not only in one direction) over the course of their lives. This fluidity, combined with changing meaning and the valorization of indigeneity at the national and international levels, has led to wild fluctuations in official statistics on race since independence. The social construction of these categories came to the fore in 2012 when the census reported that Bolivians who identified as Indigenous had dropped to 40 percent of the population, down from 62 percent only eleven years earlier. International observers were left wondering, where did all the Indigenous people go?2

On November 22, 1981, thousands of laypeople, along with bishops, priests, and theologians, gathered in Recife to celebrate the Eucharist. Offered during a military dictatorship in a period of popular insurgency, the Quilombos Mass mourned the death of millions in the African slave trade, sought pardon for the Church's past sins, and celebrated the resistance of Blacks in Brazil and beyond its borders. The acclaimed Black Brazilian pop star and activist Milton de Nascimento collaborated with an activist poet and three bishops to produce a multimedia performance; in the spirit of liberation theology, it was marked by striking visuals, dance, music, and the invocation of the sacred. This article draws on reportage, speeches and correspondence, military court and intelligence records, published interviews, and the author's interview with one of its composers. It offers a close textual analysis, with attention to Catholic theological debates, as well as an analysis of the performance itself, drawn from video recordings and bringing attention to aspects neglected by most commentators, who refer only to the album, as it was finally produced. Initially stifled by the Vatican, Milton's masterpiece, issued as an album on vinyl and performed in paid concerts, became a powerful cultural reference for activists, serving as a touchstone for a strategic alliance between Black activists and the liberationist Church.

This article traces the professional life of Rafael Almarza, the last royal escribano (notary) of Mérida in the captaincy of Venezuela, and his role in undermining monarchical authority among the enslaved community displaced in the plains region (Los Llanos) during the war of independence in 1814-18. Despite their status as minor officials within the Spanish imperial bureaucracy, notaries, through the records they made, helped to establish legally binding truths underlying everyday actions, making them influential agents of colonial rule in the community they served, particularly among those seeking notarial documents to obtain freedom. During the battles for independence, escribanos like Almarza facilitated the transition of sovereignty and created documents that fomented the independence cause among enslaved individuals during the years of total war. By examining the manumission documents found in the notarial book Almarza kept during exile, the author of this article shows the importance of enslaved people in granting legitimacy to the emerging leadership of José Antonio Páez and the Republican project. At the same time, this study aims to provide a new look at manumission during the early stages of nation-building and the involvement of underrepresented groups in this process.

This article examines the migration and expropriation policies of Guatemala's revolutionary governments toward Germans present in the country during the postwar years and the start of the Cold War. It reconstructs the challenges around the domestic and international articulations of their strategy. Revolutionary governments’ concerted efforts to confiscate valuable land and condition the return of German-Guatemalans classified as ‘dangerous’ can be interpreted as part of a cohesive plan to regain control of strategic domestic resources for future redistribution. It also reflects financial policies that have both electoral and financial purposes. The article is built around newly available judicial, legislative, and consular (France) Guatemalan sources, along with personal letters from Guatemala's top politicians, and complemented by Mexican, Chilean, Argentine, British, and US diplomatic documents. In methodological terms, this article shows the importance of articulating long-term processes, here the nineteenth-century German presence in Guatemala, in the context of historical junctures such as the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It also draws attention to the importance of analyzing events on domestic, regional and global scales to understand foreign policy-making. This article enriches an already complex set of global, regional, and domestic interactions of the postwar period, as well as the role of Guatemala during that time.

In 1520, during the midst of the conquest of Mexico, Spanish conquistadors and their Native allies embarked on a massive naval project—the construction of 13 brigantines and a canal—needed to help conquer the aquatic city of Tenochtitlan. In the dominant historical literature on the war, the Spanish tend to receive most, if not all, of the credit for the success of the nautical program. The contributions of their Native allies by contrast are little-known and oft-overlooked in the historiography. Drawing on Spanish and Indigenous sources, this article highlights the vital roles that Native peoples played in the naval episode, whether it be felling timbers, carving wood, transporting logs, or excavating the canal. In addition to labor services, it also considers the importance of Indigenous ecological and hydrological expertise, and demonstrates how such knowledge played a pivotal role in the overall success of the enterprise. I argue, ultimately, that these contributions made the Native peoples, and not the Spanish, the true masters of the amphibious operation. Along the way, this essay seeks to contribute to several important strands of scholarship, chiefly the New Conquest History, environmental histories of New Spain, and the burgeoning literature on Indigenous knowledge production in Spanish America.

In January 2001, before the Conference on Latin American History decided to link its annual luncheon address to the recipient of its Distinguished Service Award, I had the honor of speaking at the CLAH luncheon, and in that previous talk I briefly discussed the circumstances that led to my becoming a Latin Americanist. Here I return to the theme of becoming a historian of Latin America, but this time I will be drawing not on my own rather unremarkable experience, but instead on my current research for an intellectual biography of the renowned Latin Americanist Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969), whose path to specialization in Latin American history was considerably more remarkable.

A prevailing idea in the scholarly literature is that the New Laws of 1542 outlawed the enslavement of indios (Indigenous people of the Spanish Indies, a category invented by Europeans) in Spanish America. Many see the enactment of this legislation as emblematic of the Spanish crown's exertion of imperial authority over the conquerors who had caused irreparable damage to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This article contests this prevailing narrative. It explores how and why the Council of the Indies (the governing council of the Spanish possessions, reporting directly to the king), the Spanish king, and viceroys (or audiencias with viceregal approval) mandated Indigenous slavery for life or for a temporary period. Mandates affected at least 15 Indigenous groups in at least ten locations throughout the Spanish-occupied Western Hemisphere in the seven decades following the passage of the New Laws. I focus on this period to explain the conditions, rationales, legal channels, and procedures used by vassals and local and imperial authorities to authorize the enslavement of targeted Indigenous peoples.

In the Spanish monarchy, corporations, religious orders, and other petitioners kept procurators in Madrid to lobby the royal councils on their behalf. Drawing on an efficient network of information, the Madrid-based Jesuit procurators were known for their insistence on solving the financial and personnel needs of several missions throughout the New World. This article analyzes a series of petitions composed by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in the late 1630s on behalf of Jesuit missions in Paraguay. These missions had been harassed by Portuguese slavers, who captured tens of thousands of natives in this region. Ruiz de Montoya's petitions reveal that the Jesuits’ lobbying actions had a much greater impact than has been assumed. Far from confining themselves to asking for material and human resources for the missions, the Jesuits proposed that the Spanish crown make a large-scale intervention in the administration of Portuguese domains in the South Atlantic, a program that Madrid would have implemented were it not for Portuguese independence in 1640.

In 1899, municipal officials throughout Mexico sent tables of agricultural statistics to Mexico City to assist in the preparation of a special publication for the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, where the Mexican government hoped it would impress the world with Mexico's modernity and potential. Though the activity was nothing new, the ways in which municipal officials provided the requested information confounded the national project of both understanding and representing the Mexican countryside. The statistics were never published. This article serves as an introduction to a new dataset and collection of maps built from transcriptions of the manuscript tables. It also demonstrates that regular participation in statistical undertakings served as a means for provincial Mexicans to complicate and confound the process of state consolidation. Here I see, rather than refusal or rebellion, ready participation in state knowledge projects as another way in which those beyond Mexico City managed their relationships with President Porfirio Díaz's technocratic government. Engaging with conceptions of governmentality on one side and data management on the other, I use the 1899 agricultural statistics to highlight how unruly participation in data collection frustrated the practice's centralizing and standardizing project.

This article examines baptismal naming in sixteenth-century Guatemala in the context of Indigenous adaptation to the sociopolitical upheavals of Spanish-led invasion, forced resettlement, and the imposition of Catholicism. As part of the institution of baptism—the first Catholic sacrament and one that missionaries implemented soon after their arrival in the Spanish Americas—Indigenous baptizees received a European name, as well as spiritual kin in the form of godparents. The distribution of baptismal names in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Santiago Atitlán, a predominantly Tz'utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, suggests that Indigenous christening marked a break with precolonial onomastic practice. Instead of continuing the Indigenous tradition of naming children according to their birthdate, Maya adults in the Santiago Atitlán area developed new naming strategies that simultaneously located their children in the Spanish administrative sphere and reconstituted local social networks in the wake of colonial disruptions. Furthermore, the influence of godparents on name selection both expressed and reinforced godparenthood's rising significance as the most socially salient Catholic institution in colonial Indigenous society and one that remains vibrant into the present.

In February and March of 1812, Indigenous, mestizo, and creole rebels led an uprising in and around the colonial city of Huánuco in the viceroyalty of Peru. The diversity of the insurgent army reflected, to an extent, the vision of bilingual friars who, in the months preceding the uprising, had written, translated, and distributed pasquinades that called on residents to unite and drive out the Spanish. Although the insurgent army had two initial victories, Spanish authorities quickly put down the movement and began an investigation into the motives and leaders of the rebellion. Their interrogations led them to the subversive friars and the “papeles seductivos” (seductive papers) that these men of the cloth had been circulating. Using a collection of digitized documents from the uprising, which includes several examples of these seditious verses, this paper examines the significance of the Huánuco Rebellion in Peruvian and Latin American history. The rebellion demonstrates the potential of friars in their role as mediators of information to destabilize colonial relations. Additionally, the diverse army of insurgents complicates, at least to a degree, historians’ frequent characterization of Peru in the independence era as a bastion of royalism beset by ethnic tension.

This article explores the vision, process, and reaction to the privatization of Mapuche lands in Araucanía, Chile, from 1871 to 1916. It shows how politicians developed a racial vision for Araucanía between 1871 and 1882 during the final battle with independent Mapuche forces. Chilean government officials and elite societies created land policies that targeted the removal of indigenous populations from fertile lands to expand industrial agriculture by favoring large Chilean-owned estates and partitioning small to medium-sized plots to European settler-farmers. From 1883 to 1896, the Chilean government put its vision into practice, investing in the recruitment of European farmers and reconsidering new laws regarding colonization, land rights, and indigenous settlements. However, after the 1891 civil war, the government retreated from expensive state-building projects. From 1896 to 1916, Chilean small farmers intensified land grabs and, in response, indigenous communities formed organizations to defend their lands. At the core of the conflict were the issues of land and racialized policies that defined land access. By examining laws, government reports, missionary chronicles, and indigenous writings, this article demonstrates the progression of a racialized language that excluded indigenous peoples from their lands, founded in the desire to privatize native lands and accelerate the making of a modern Europeanized nation.

Until the 1980s, Catholic elements in Haitian culture tended to be interpreted exclusively in connection to the forced conversion of the enslaved population under French rule. This changed following John Thornton's groundbreaking research into the development of Christianity in early modern Africa—Kongo in particular—and the awareness that a significant number of enslaved Africans already identified as Christian before their arrival in Saint-Domingue. This article's goal is to go beyond Thornton's research by showing that we can acquire a better understanding of Catholic elements in Haitian culture if we start our analysis in late medieval Iberia. To illustrate this, the article focuses on one of Haiti's most enigmatic cultural traditions, known as Chariopié, Lwalwadi, or, most commonly, Rara. Although this performance has received abundant scholarly interest, questions relating to the origin of its Catholic elements have remained largely unanswered. This is regrettable considering that Rara parades follow the liturgical calendar of Lent and intensify in frequency during Holy Week. Moreover, a key element of Rara consists of the destruction of an effigy of Judas Iscariot, in accordance with the Biblical account of the Easter story. Using a comparative analysis, this article presents a number of remarkable parallels between Rara and late medieval Iberian Lent traditions. To explain these parallels, it claims that enslaved Africans who were familiar with Iberian practices prior to their arrival in the Caribbean established, by their own initiative, a network of mutual aid and burial societies modeled on Afro-Iberian Catholic brotherhoods.