Since the late 1960s, a growing number of studies have drawn on local manuscript censuses, also known as household or nominal lists, to reshape the historiography of late colonial and early nineteenth-century Brazil. While many of those studies focus on family or household composition, manuscript censuses have also been used to explore topics ranging from proto-industrialization and demographic trends to patterns of slaveholding and the status of women. In working with this documentation, scholars have generally restricted themselves to quantitative analyses; they have seldom devoted much explicit attention to the format of censuses and to the categories found in them. As a result, the ideological assumptions and political concerns that census-takers in late colonial and early nineteenthcentury Brazil brought to bear in enumerating, classifying, and ordering the population have remained largely unexplored topics. To detect those assumptions and concerns, we need to go beyond quantification and to read Brazilian manuscript censuses for the qualitative information they contain. At the very least, reading censuses qualitatively holds out the possibility of raising questions that complement and enhance the findings from the more familiar quantitative studies.

When in 1984 I accepted an invitation from editor Frank Smith at Cambridge University Press to collaborate in a new “Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas,” I was naive and somewhat unaware of the potential intellectual dangers and pitfalls involved in what seemed to me, at that time, to be a challenging and worthwhile project. Now, eighteen years later, and having been recently been denounced as the Americanist equivalent of a Holocaust Revisionist by no less than Claude Lévi-Strauss, the grand figure of structural anthropology and arguably the most distinguished scholar in his field in the late Twentieth Century, I am forced to question myself and the whole enterprise of trying to write such as history. Lévi-Strauss's critique was published in the French anthropology journal L'Homme. It was a thunderbolt cast from Olympus— a place which as Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta has recently reminded us, is located roughly between the Rue des Ecoles and the Boulevard St. Michel—and I find it particularly discouraging since its author was one of my intellectual heroes and Tristes tropiques one of the formative books of my own education. To be accused by him of editing a volume that is “politically correct,” and “post-modernist” I find slightly amusing. [I carry a copy of the review to show my graduate students whose characterizations of me tend to run in quite the opposite direction]. Why a Lévi-Strauss should use the analogy of holocaust denial to criticize a work edited by two guys named Salomon and Schwartz is itself worthy of consideration, but it is not what concerns me in these remarks.

[our goal] is nothing less that the coordination of the living forces of Mexican Catholic youth for the purpose of restoring Christian social order in Mexico …

(A.C.J.M.’s “General Statutes”)

The Mexican Catholic Youth Association emerged during the Mexican Revolution dedicated to the goal of creating lay activists with a Catholic vision for society. The history of this Jesuit organization provides insights into Church-State relations from the military phase of the Mexican Revolution to its consolidation in the 1920s and 1930s. The Church-State conflict is a basic issue in Mexico's political struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the Church mobilizing forces wherever it could during these years dominated by anticlericalism. During the 1920s, the Mexican Catholic Youth Association (A.C.J.M.) was in the forefront of the Church's efforts to respond to the government's anticlerical policies. The A.C.J.M.’s subsequent estrangement from the top Church leadership also serves to highlight the complex relationship that existed between the Mexican bishops and the Catholic laity and the ideological divisions that existed within Mexico's Catholic community as a whole.

The study of marriageways in colonial Latin America has altered and deepened our understanding of the societies and cultures within the Spanish and Portuguese empires of the New World. During the last thirty or forty years a series of studies have explored the complex and varied patterns of marriage and family formation in colonial Latin America. Inspired by the work of Peter Laslett, Lawrence Stone and Louis Flandrin among others, historians of the region have produced a rich historical literature on the demographic, social and cultural aspects of colonial marriageways. Most studies have focused on the late colonial period, and the years after 1778 when the Pragmática sanción de matrimonios (first issued in Spain in 1776) was extended to Spanish America. One effect of the new law was an astonishing outpouring of reports, questions, lawsuits and regulations concerning marriage, which in turn have been seized upon by historians to reconstruct important aspects of late colonial Latin American societies. Despite the frequent use of these sources, the legislation itself has received little serious attention, and several basic misunderstandings prevail regarding its background and meaning. As a consequence, the political implications of marriage have been poorly understood.

In 1686, Marcial de la Cruz, a Zapotec from the community of San Francisco Cajonos, confessed that he had murdered his wife, Catalina María, two years earlier. Tired of running from authorities, burdened with a guilty conscience, and concerned about the house and land that he had left behind, Marcial returned to tell his fantastic story. He recalled how on the day of the murder Catalina had convinced native officials from the neighboring community of San Mateo to release him from jail, where he was being detained because of a dispute over a mule. On the way back to San Francisco, Marcial stopped to bathe in the river, but Catalina decided to continue walking. After bathing, Marcial hurried along the narrow path to catch up with his wife, but she was nowhere in sight. Then, suddenly, a jaguar jumped out from behind a large maguey plant, poised to attack. Fearing for his life, Marcial commended himself to God and held out the rosary that he wore around his neck to fend off the ferocious animal. He picked up a large stick and struck the jaguar three times. As the jaguar dropped to the ground, Marcial heard a voice say to him in Zapotec “Cuckold, don't kill that woman,” and he saw the jaguar transform into his wife. Stunned by this terrifying vision, he sought refuge in the convent of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca City. His flight from authorities would eventually take him to Mexico City, Puebla, Vera Cruz, and Chiapas before he returned to San Francisco Cajonos.

This article analyses the character of local religious practice in the archdiocese of Michoacán during Mexico's cristero rebellion, and explores the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ religion under persecution. In particular, it shows how the Catholic clergy and laity reconstructed the religious life at parish level in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the revolutionary state's campaigns against the Church. For a variety of reasons, the significance of such passive resistance to the state, and the complexity of the interaction between the ecclesiastical elite and the Catholic laity, tend to be downplayed in many existing accounts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many historians see cristero violence as the most important response to religious persecution, and therefore study it to the exclusion of alternative, less visible, modes of resistance. As for the Church, the hierarchy's wranglings with the regime similarly tend to overshadow the labours of priests and their parishioners under persecution. But the full range of popular experiences has also been deliberately compressed for ideological reasons. Many Catholic writers, for instance, seek to exalt the Church by describing a persecution of mythical ferocity. While Calles is likened to Herod, Nero, or Diocletian, the clergy and laity comprise a uniform Church of martyrs designate in revolt against a godless state. To achieve this instructive vision, however, a few exemplary martyrs—such as Father Pro and Anacleto González Flores—are allowed to stand for the whole mass of priests and believers, in the same way that Edmund Campion is revered as the protomartyr of the Elizabethan persecution in England. As a result, a stereotypical but politically serviceable image of a monolithic Church is perpetuated, an image which was recently institutionalised by the canonisation of 25 ‘cristero’ martyrs in May 2000.

In July 1866, Lima conducted its independence celebrations with great fanfare. The festivities began at the main portal of the walled city, where the members of various patriotic associations gathered to celebrate Independence Day. The participants included the Sociedad de Fundadores de la Independencia, the veteran corps from both the Independence Wars and from the recent war with Spain, the national fire brigades, and the members of an artisan society named the Sociedad de Artesanos de Auxilios Mutuos. Together they sang the national anthem while standing at the foot of a Tree of Liberty, a republican symbol dating back to the French Revolution. They subsequently marched into the city, thus initiating two days of celebrations that included fireworks displays and an intricate reenactment, in Lima's central plaza, of the recent naval combat with Spain. In the course of the ceremonies, two artisans were presented with prizes, one for the most outstanding piece of craftsmanship (in the 1866 celebration the prize was won by Vicente Pedraza for making an organ) and the other for the artisan who had shown the most bravery during the recent military encounter with Spain. The prizes were in the amount of 200 soles. At another point in the celebrations the Chief of the Artisan Fire Brigade gave a patriotic speech and following the speech a young girl offered the President Mariano Ignacio Prado a laurel wreath in the name of the artisans.

The mystical and supernatural experiences that many nuns faced in seventeenth-century convents in Puebla shaped New Spain's spirituality. These experiences and the way they were recounted provided the elements for an archetype of conduct and for socially accepted virtues. Using their imagination, these nuns, servants of God, enlightened and morally exemplary, maintained a direct relationship between the convent, the supernatural world, and colonial society.

Anthropological studies of popular religion have emphasized, almost exclusively, the collective and public aspects of religious expression but have ignored private, individual piety. Yet collective and private religious expressions have been linked throughout history. When individual manifestations of religious expression were socially endorsed, these private forms of piety influenced the creation of identity and models of behavior. Because these archetypes of religious conduct were so important within colonial culture as a whole, it is important to gain an understanding of the events that led to their formation and the way in which they travelled from the culture of the convent to that of the larger society.

The epic struggles between Mexicans and the Apaches and Comanches in the far northern reaches of the Spanish empire and the conflict between gauchos and Araucanians in the pampas in the far south are the images the mind conjures up when thinking of Latin American frontiers. We must now add for the twentieth century the dense Amazon jungle as one of the last frontiers in popular (and scholarly) minds. However, these images ignore the eastern Andean and Chaco frontier area, one of the most vital and important frontier regions in Latin America since colonial times, today divided up into three different countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay) in the heart of the South American continent. This frontier region has not received sufficient attention from scholars despite its importance in at least three different aspects: First, the indigenous peoples were able to remain independent of the Creole states much longer than elsewhere other than the Amazon. Secondly, indigenous labor proved to be vitally important to the economic development along the fringes, and thirdly, a disastrous war was fought over the region in the 1930s by Bolivia and Paraguay. This essay provides an overview based on primary and secondary sources of the history of the eastern Andean frontier and compares it to other frontiers in Latin America. It thus endeavors to contribute to frontier studies by creating categories of analysis that make possible the comparisons between different frontiers in Latin America and placing within the scholarly discussion the eastern Andean region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During most of the nineteenth century, more than fifty organized African nations existed in Buenos Aires with the official name of African Associations. They were also known by the popular names of tambos, tangos and, later on and more loosely, of candombes. Beginning in 1822, the provincial government chartered ten African Associations with the goal of encouraging the emancipation of slaves by appealing to mutual aid and self-reliance. Along the way, the African Associations were expected to pay for the education of the recently emancipated freemen, delivering them from illiteracy and turning them into self-governing citizens of the new republic. To the dismay of liberal politicians, the African Associations defied government expectations and chose more autonomous directions. The purpose of this article is to analyze the interplay of government officials and candombe leaders in an attempt to reveal the internal organization of such associations. Although Buenos Aires was never a major destination of the African diaspora in the Americas, the rare quality of the records produced by the local police department, in charge of looking after the African nations, sheds light on a phenomenon of hemispheric dimensions.

When 22 Capuchin friars landed in Barcelona in 1843, they could not anticipate the troubles they faced in the years to come. As refugees from the Spanish Carlista wars, Gallegos and Catalans who did not even speak much Spanish, the friars must have been happy enough to serve a nation that did not want them dead—yet. In their contract with the Venezuelan government, the 22 Capuchin friars who labored in Venezuela's Oriente promised to stay in Venezuela for at least ten years. In return, the Venezuelan government promised to pay them 400 pesos annually, to leave all spiritual matters in the hands of the missionaries, and to cede to the missionaries all authority in Indian mission matters.

If only things worked out that well. The Capuchin friars found themselves inextricably bound in complex relationships of race and class, often intertwined with matters of land and labor. Poverty and politics (or the politics of poverty) did not allow clergy to use their position as parish priests to maintain any degree of neutrality in the tug of war between the white elite and the poor, primarily Indians, ex-slaves, and the mixed race descendants of all groups. To the contrary, poverty and politics made clergy important players in the ongoing high stakes game of chess between the elite and the masses.

As she lay bleeding to death from an accidental knife wound, María Josefa Vargas said to her husband: “Look what the Devil has done (Mira lo que hace el diablo).” María Josefa and her husband, José Rosario, were both indigenous, natives of Almoloya and Tenancingo respectively, and at the time living in Malinalco in the Valley of Mexico. They had been fighting playfully over some meat that María Josefa had bought to make cecina Mock anger and a very sharp knife made for bad companions, and José Rosario accidentally cut María Josefa in the leg.

María Josefa's words are one of those elusive examples of the key place occupied by the Devil in Mexican popular culture in the late eighteenth century. By the late colonial period the Devil seems to have become more of a concern for rural Mexicans, particularly within indigenous communities, than he had been before. Once a European import, the Devil had become a more evident part of the symbols used by Indians in the countryside. He had become less of a concern to Church and State authorities and was rather used to explain accidents, such as the one cited above, but more frequently as an excuse or a reason for unacceptable conduct, such as violence or illicit sexuality.

A contributor to La Lei, the journalistic mouthpiece of Chile's reformist Radical Party, attended a peculiar cultural event on a mild spring evening in 1909 that evidently made quite an impression. Workers with their spouses and children, all donning their best suits and dresses, had gathered in one of the capital's dance halls to enjoy what the onlooker grasped as an evening of “aesthetic enjoyment without ostentation.” As the writer noted, “For three hours I was enchanted by the order, by the discretion, by the culture of the dancers. [The cultured worker] is a natural friend of order, he does not let himself be convinced by high-sounding words, nor does he accept subversive ideas; the revolutionary preaching of the Utopians and those without spirits repulse him. He loves tranquillity and has a profound respect for republican laws. A man of this nature is not only a pillar of our democracy but also an unceasing producer of wealth and social well being.” What the writer recognized as “culture” evidently was conducive to the perpetuation of liberal democracy, the defense of the economic order, and the preservation of social peace during the so-called Parliamentary Republic (1891-1925). Indeed, if workers were culturally educated, if they properly understood, imitated, and enjoyed a “mainstream” culture, they would be less apt to engage in disruptive political endeavors, or so it was suggested in La Lei.

In 1880, following a two-generation-long civil war, Argentina embarked upon a critical period of nation-building, which culminated in the centennial celebrations of 1910. In The Argentine Generation of 1880: Ideology and Cultural Texts, David Foster has commented upon the inconclusiveness of national cultural formation as Argentina turned from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the uncertainty of how much from the provinces would be incorporated into the elite-constructed culture emanating from the port city of Buenos Aires. The recently published work of Roy Hora, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History 1860-1945, and the work of Tulio Halperin, “The Buenos Aires Landed Class and the Shape of Argentine Politics (1820-1930),” which preceded it, further heighten the significance of provincial-porteño interaction at this point in Argentine history. Halperin and Hora find that during these years, and beyond, the socio-economic and the political elite of Argentina was not a unified whole, but rather two distinctive groups. In the leadership of the socio-economic elite was a landed class based on the estancias of the Argentine pampa and overwhelmingly porteño in character. Provincials dominated the political elite, as the provinces ‘captured’ the federal government in the years following their reunification with the province of Buenos Aires in 1861. Participation in the federal government brought the provincial political elite into contact with the porteño estancieros who dominated the socio-economic elite, as these were almost universally resident in the federal capital. But Roy Hora has described the relationship between the two groups as “problematic.”

Throughout the era of the Mexican Revolution, the United States provided sanctuary for thousands of political exiles who opposed the regimes of Porfirio Díaz, Francisco Madero, Victoriano Huerta, and Venustiano Carranza. Persecuted enemies of Don Porfirio and losers in the bloody war of factions that followed the ouster of the old regime continued their struggle for power from bases of operation north of the international boundary in such places as San Francisco, Los Angeles, El Paso, San Antonio, New Orleans, and New York. As a consequence, Mexican regimes were compelled not only to combat their enemies on domestic battlefields but also to wage more subtle campaigns against their adversaries north of the Río Bravo. The weapons in this shadowy war included general intelligence gathering, surveillance, espionage, counter-espionage, and propaganda; the agency most responsible for these activities was the Mexican Secret Service.

In the late nineteenth century, the move away from classical criminology toward positivist criminology brought with it new categories of crime and new definitions of the criminal. A great deal of scholarship has focused on positivism's new approach, which grew out of research in Europe, especially in France and Italy, and later took hold in Argentina and other Latin American countries. It might be supposed that as a state's judicial and penal authorities and doctors of forensic medicine were becoming more professionalized and positivist at this time, and as state and society were becoming more secularized and urbanized, such a traditional figure as the devil would have disappeared from criminal court cases.

Marian apparitions and miraculous images in Mexico inevitably bring to mind one renowned figure — Our Lady of Guadalupe and its shrine at Tepeyac in the Valley of Mexico. Guadalupe is, indeed, a touchstone to the history of Catholicism and popular devotion in Mexico, and Mexico is a special case of a religious image becoming the main symbol for an emerging nation. As Jeannette Rodríguez recently wrote, “To be of Mexican descent is to recognize the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.” But devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe has a history. This image has not always been, and in some ways still is not, the dominant symbol throughout Mexico, and the location of its principal shrine on the edge of Mexico City is as much a key to its importance as is its association with the oldest Marian apparition officially recognized by the Catholic Church. Dozens of different shrines to other miraculous images have captured the hearts of thousands, sometimes millions of followers in Mexico. They still do.

This essay uses court disputes over indigenous widows’ land rights to examine the impact of an expanding national state on indigenous peasant interpersonal relations in late nineteenth-century Ecuador. In doing so, it offers a response to historian Carmen Ramos Escandón's recent call for historical studies of changing family life in order “to know how this domestic web is related to social processes in a broader sense and how the organization of the family contradicts or reflects society's structures.” Specifically, the confrontations under scrutiny reveal the extent to which indigenous peasants’ notions of marriage and widowhood rights adhered to, diverged from, or were influenced by state views of gender relations. Most court cases from the central highland province of Chimborazo in this period uncover parallels between indigenous and state views of marriage and widowhood; yet the three focal cases here, in which widows’ privileges came under question, highlight differences between indigenous and state understandings of gender relations. In the first case, an Indian woman's father-in-law recognized her right as a widow to inherit a portion of her former mother-in-law's lands; court officials, however, decided to uphold patriarchal legal standards when they granted the land in question to the woman's second husband rather than to her. In two other cases, widows’ claims were undermined not by state authorities themselves, but by Indian men in their own communities. Calling upon patriarchal notions that were at the center of the state's marriage laws, these men wrested control of property from women whose customary claims to it were stronger than theirs. Though cases like these rarely appeared in the court data from Chimborazo, they are illuminating because they promote an exploration of the relevance of ethnically distinct gender ideologies.