The study of history is a major preoccupation for any society and every country devotes a good part of its intellectual energy in one form or another to the consideration and examination of the past. Those who make a profession of that business, the historians, are always significant weather vanes, pointing out the direction the wind blows in their own culture and indicating at times its velocity as well.

The admission of Alaska and Hawaii into the Union as states has once again raised the question of Puerto Rico's constitutional status. Many islanders see the present commonwealth, very nearly the personal creation of Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, as a way station on the road to full membership in the American federal system. Independence sentiment, barring economic catastrophe, seems safely relegated to the realm of polemical fantasy. Thus the island's only tangible constitutional problem is its relation to the United States: should it be associated with, or an integral part of the mainland. No event in Puerto Rican history has been more important in shaping the course of the island's development than the grant of collective United States citizenship in the Jones Act of 1917. And no Puerto Rican politician of the era was more influential than Luis Muñoz Rivera, who embodied the dominant Unionista party in the same way that his son embodies the now dominant Popular party. Muñoz Rivera's role in the politics of the Jones Bill affords a revealing view of the difficulties of working within the framework of colonialism, and of being forced to reconcile aspirations with political realities.

In any study of extensive documentation of the past, one inevitably encounters personalities whose recorded actions stimulate speculation about the unknowable portions of their lives and their impact upon larger historical events. Such a one, to me, is the man called Miguel Caldera. For some years, and through many thousands of pages of Mexican frontier documentation, I have been increasingly intrigued by the story of this mestizo captain. He is omnipresent in the official papers of a critical phase of North American frontier history. His deeds—and their setting—have a dramatic, symbolistic quality which entitles him, I think, to recognition as one of the continent's most significant frontiersmen. Hence this present attempt—brief and incidental though it is—to “define” Miguel Caldera and his measure of significance.

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.

By the end of the nineteenth century the American public, if it had cared to enlarge upon its knowledge of the Empire of Brazil, could easily have done so without even the necessity of learning a foreign language. From 1822 to 1888, beginning with the independence of Brazil from Portugal and ending with the abolition of slavery— a period corresponding almost exactly with the life span of the Brazilian Empire—about twenty books on Brazil were published by Americans. These were obviously not the only books on the subject in the English language because Britishers wrote about Brazil too (indeed they wrote more about it than we did) and these books on Brazil were also available on this side of the Atlantic. The combined output of the two nations was, therefore, considerable, and the curiosity of the Anglo-Saxon mind which it for the most part reflected presented Brazil to the American reader under a great variety of aspects. There were the solid three volumes on the colonial period of Brazilian history by Robert Southey, the poet laureate of England who was much better as a historian, and the two-volume sequel by John Armitage, who was neither a historian nor a poet but a lover of liberty.

Economic activity on Mexico's Gulf coast steadily increased during the last two decades of the nineteenth century partially as a result of improved means of transportation and the enforced peace of Porfirio Díaz. The Mexican government modernized that area's communication facilities by letting out several highly profitable construction contracts to foreigners for building or improving harbor and port facilities at Tampico, Veracruz, Coatzacoalcos, and Campeche. Alien contractors and investors were responsible for railway connections from Verácruz to the interior which had been completed in 1873, and other Gulf ports were similarly linked to the hinterland during the next two decades. A Mexican-built interoceanic line spanned the Tehuantepec Isthmus in 1894, but it was so poorly erected that in 1898 an English construction firm, S. Pearson and Sons, contracted to rebuild the line. Subsequently the same company leased and operated that railroad. These material improvements served to enliven the growing Mexican economy.

Latin Americans are radically individualistic and sometimes it seems to a foreign observer that there are almost as many differing opinions as there are people. An admittedly extreme case will serve to confirm the aforesaid comment. In 1946 one of the warring factions of the Liberal Party of Colombia received, in response to its circular setting forth the rules for the campaign, the following telegram:

With individualism so rampant, it becomes immediately obvious that in a field as broad as the culture of twenty Latin-American republics, generalizations are difficult to make and some evaluations are only relevant when applied to specific areas or regions.

For more than half a century the great voice of Antonio Vieira (1608-1698) made the churches of Portugal and Brazil echo with its resonance. For more than half a century, on both sides of the ocean, the illustrious preacher never stopped expounding to the faithful the dogmas they should believe and the duties they had to practice. This tireless apostolate produced the just renown of Vieira. But if preaching is the best known of his claims to fame, one must not forget that he had another, of an order as high, perhaps even higher still: his long and difficult missions among the Indians of Brazil and his struggles on their behalf. Nor is this all. A man of many facets, with the richest talents and the most varied aspirations, he was much interested in public affairs and undertook diplomatic missions, with varying success, in France, the Low Countries, and in Italy.

The distinguished Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1945, died in Hempstead, Long Island, on January 10, 1957, of cancer. In the numerous articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines after her death the factual mistakes about her life and writings were endless. Although her critics have not been careful to separate myths from facts, most of these errors can be corrected by referring to books or articles about her—but not the mistakes about her as yet unpublished Poema de Chile. For this reason I have assembled these notes about the Poema de Chile taken from conversations with Gabriela during the last four years of her life which she spent for the most part working on the Poema and on her Lagar poems. Part of the Lagar poems she published in 1954. The rest of her Lagar poems will be published posthumously by her literary heir, Doris Dana. These will probably appear before the unfinished Poema de Chile because of the difficulties inherent in the preparation of the Poema for publication.

The important role in world affairs played by Spain during the period from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth contrasts sharply with the utter neglect of the writings and theories of great Spanish scholars by those who have written about the development of social thought in western civilization. Almost never has the present writer seen a reference to the work of any Spaniard by those who have prepared the compendia dealing with the history of social and sociological theories which are in general use as texts and references in colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada. This neglect seems to be paralleled in the writings of most European sociologists; and even in Latin America there appears to be little familiarity with the work of important Spanish social thinkers, exception made of the comparatively recent writings of José Ortega y Gasset.

During the forty years from 1567 to 1607 there were three Spanish expeditions from Peru to the South Seas. The first, under Alvaro de Mendaña in 1567, was for the discovery of some rich islands, called Solomon, believed to lie in the equinoctial region between New Guinea and Peru. In the following year he reached a group of islands. Mendaña did not then give them a collective name, but subsequently they became known as the Solomon Islands. With the expedition were four Franciscan friars acting as chaplains and missionaries. The second, a colonizing expedition, was in 1595, again under the Adelantado Mendaña. And here we introduce the celebrated figure and the one to achieve immortal fame in the proto-history of Australia, Pedro Fernández de Quirós. He accompanied the adelantado as captain of his capitana and chief pilot of his fleet of four ships. Because of errors in reckoning latitude and longitude Quirós brought the fleet with close on four hundred settlers to Santa Cruz Island instead of the Solomons, discovering on the way the Marquesas group. At Santa Cruz the settlement knew only tragedy. There was mutiny and disease. Pestilence thinned their ranks by death, and—above all—the adelantado himself died there on October 18, 1595. The settlement, then only a month old, was a month later abandoned. Quirós, by a remarkable feat of navigation, brought the remnants of the expedition to Manila.

Before he met death by his own hand in 1946, Colin Ross was one of Germany's most famous journalist-travelers. No less than fifteen books and a host of articles described his visits to countries from the Arctic to the Pacific and Haha Whenua to Africa, “ mit Kind und Kegel und Kamera ”—“ bag, baggage, and camera.” His greatest renown—or notoriety—dated from the Nazi era. Hitler himself said, “A man like Colin Ross, for example, gave me infinitely more precious information on the subject” of the Far East than all of the professional diplomats. Ross was, indeed, regarded with some exaggeration as “ one of Hitler's foremost geopoliticians,” and, probably with even greater exaggeration, as a paid spy for the Third Reich. When he visited South America in 1919-1920, however, it was suspicions of Bolshevist rather than Nazi inclinations which placed obstacles in the path of high ambitions.

During the imperial crisis of the 1770's the Pennsylvania conservative, Joseph Galloway, offered a plan to close the everwidening breach that was dividing England and her colonies. Galloway's Plan of Union, a revision of the Albany Plan proposed by Franklin twenty years before, called for the establishment of a subordinate colonial parliament “for regulating the administration of the general affairs of America.” Though rejected by the Continental Congress, the plan continued to draw support from some statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic. Among them, curiously enough, was the Marquis of Pombal, Portugal's prime minister, a man who by no stretch of the imagination could be regarded as a friend of popular government.

Madrid, 20 September 1623.

Requesting that the natives of the Austral
Lands be given into the care of the Franciscan
friars, who would undertake their conquest
by spiritual and peaceful means.

Most Holy Father

Friar Juan de Silva, preacher of the Seraphic Order of our Father St. Francis (and confessor of the Royal Palace of His Majesty), of the Province of Castile, prostrate at the feet of your Holiness says that, with zeal for the honor of God, Our Lord, and for the propagation of the Holy Gospel, and at the express command of his Majesty Philip II (who is in heaven), he went to the Realms of the Indies.

On February 1, 1584, Pedro Moya de Contreras, archbishop of Mexico City, dispatched the official summons to the bishops of his ecclesiastical province to attend the Third Mexican Council set for the ninth of December of that same year. At the request of the bishop of the distant diocese of Guatemala, Fray Fernando Gómez de Córdoba, of the Order of St. Jerome, the opening date was postponed to January 20, 1585.

One of the Archbishop's letters of convocation was addressed to the first bishop of the Philippines, Fray Domingo de Salazar, Dominican. From Salazar's reply we know that the Archbishop did not insist on his personal attendance nor did he even suggest that he send a delegate. The purpose of the letter was to inform Salazar of the convocation of the Council and invite him to send a written report on conditions of the Church in the Islands, and propose such problems as he thought the assembled bishop should discuss and strive to solve.

Exmo. Sr.

1. A carta de V. S.a que trouxe o n.° 44, e a data de 7 do corrente chegou aqui no dia de hoje depois de haverem partido os despachos que dirigi a V. S.a na data de 18 e 25 do mesmo mez que corre.

2. Em continuação e supplemento d'elles, não posso deixar de significar a V. S.a que o seu referido despacho fez subir ao maior ponto a justa perplexidade, que me tinham causado os inesperados termos com que mylord Rocheford se havia explicado com V. S.a nas conferencias que fizeram os objectos da minha instrução de 20 de outubro proximo precedente: vendo que o referido lord insistia ainda em mostrar que se não tinha feito algum cargo, de que a situação em que actualmente se acha este côrte, mettida entre as concussões das de Madrid e Paris, não émais critica a respeito de Portugal do que o é a respeito da Inglaterra, pelas obvias razões que no meu officio de 25 do corrente foram recopiladas.