Atourist arriving in Mexico City in the early summer of 1968 would have found the capital awash in color, an air of expectation and optimism everywhere palpable as the country finalized last-minute preparations for the Olympic Games, scheduled to commence that October. Yellow, blue, and pink banners framing a white dove of peace lit up major thoroughfares. Throughout the city, numerous commercial billboards had been replaced with photographs of cultural and physical activity related to the Games; in one corner, was the omnipresent peace dove. Other enormous images laced the skyline: caricatured line drawings of school children, a family portrait, anonymous faces in a crowd. “Everything is Possible in Peace,” the new billboards proclaimed in a multitude of languages—set against a background of hot pink and vibrant yellow. Along a designated “Route of Friendship” that extended across the southern part of the city, large abstract sculptures of brightly painted concrete by artists of international renown could be observed in various stages of completion. The country's official logo for the Games—“MEXICO68”—whose evident Op Art influence was designed to evoke a moving, modernist feel, was omnipresent; so too were the hundreds of young edecanes (event hostesses), whose uniformed miniskirts and pantsuits were emblazoned with a graphic representation of the logo. The viewer could scarcely have avoided the sensation of a city, a country on the verge of something spectacular.

The American Historical Association has been in the forefront of professional academic organizations that have seen the potential of the Internet for fomenting the production and circulation of academic scholarship and for contributing to the teaching of history. This has been no more apparent than in the AHA Workshop, “Entering the Second Stage of Online History Scholarship,” carried out in the days before the 118th annual meeting of the American Historical Association and under its auspices. In the AHA Workshop, the topic was electronic scholarly publishing: maintaining its quality, mediating its use and access, and assessing its impact on the changing shape of the profession. It took into account the perspectives of all those involved in scholarly production: authors, journal editors, department chairs, university press publishers and editors, and, at the same time, those involved in mediating its use and access at the technical level, that is, the librarians and technicians.

In December of 1980 three women religious and a lay missioner from the United States were brutally raped and murdered by the Salvadoran military. This outrage brought international attention to the violence in El Salvador and led to a temporary halt in US military aid. The sisters were neither the first nor the most violently killed—8,000 people were massacred in 1980 and 45,000 between 1980 and 1984—but their rape and murder, the murder of Archbishop Romero in March of 1980, and that of six Jesuit priests in 1989 were consistently cited as evidence of the sheer brutality and impunity of the Salvadoran military regime. Killing priests and bishops and raping and murdering nuns signified quite simply that “nothing was sacred.”

It was in 1531 that, according to the apparition legend first recorded over a hundred years later in 1648, Juan Diego’s visionary experience of the Virgin of Guadalupe was miraculously mapped onto his tilma (tilmatli in Nahuatl) or woven cloak. This painted cloth, hereafter referred to as the tilma image, is said to be the same relic venerated today in the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City (fig. 1). However, no sacred image is invented from whole cloth, to use a highly appropriate metaphor here, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe is no exception. Moreover, its very materiality makes it vulnerable to the passage of time, the laws of physics and human intervention. As an object of human craft produced post-Conquest, it has a traceable genealogy within the combustible mix of art modes, mixed media and theological tracts found circulating in early colonial New Spain.

When Pero Magalhães de Gândavo returned to Portugal from Brazil in the 1570s, he wrote two accounts about life in Brazil, both of which extol the possibilities for poor Portuguese colonists. In one treatise he proclaims that as soon as a colonist arrives, no matter how poor, if he obtains slaves “he then has the means for sustenance; because some fish and hunt, and the others produce for him maintenance and crops; and so little by little the men become rich and live honorably in the land with more ease than in the Kingdom.” In his history, published in 1576, Gândavo adds that many colonists in Brazil own 200, 300, or even more slaves. Although the Portuguese had pioneered the development of a slave trade from West Africa and despite the fact that the sugar plantations of Bahia and Pernambuco would become vast consumers of slaves from Africa, the vast majority of the slaves that Gândavo refers to were Indian, not African. But, in the 1570s, when Gândavo confidently predicted that even the poor could acquire slaves in Brazil, the reality was that the coastal regions around the Portuguese colonies, with the exception of a few friendly Indian villages, had been left “unpopulated by the natives.” Three powerful factors challenged the future of Indian slavery. One was epidemic disease, such as the smallpox epidemic of 1562 that was described as so terrible that in two or three months 30,000 died. The second was a Jesuit campaign against Indian slavery, which resulted in a new law signed by King Sebastião in 1570 that clearly stated that the Indians of Brazil were free. The third was a rapid increase in the number of slaves arriving in Bahia and Pernambuco from Africa. But while it might seem that high mortality, legal sanctions, and the increase of African slaves would limit the future of Indian slavery, it was not to be so. Instead, Indian slavery expanded dramatically after 1570, due to the emergence of a new, trans-continental, slave trade. Facilitated by mixed-race mamelucos, this trade brought Indians from the sertão (inland wilderness frontier) to the coastal plantations. This is the first manifestation of a phenomenon that would repeat itself in later centuries in São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Amazonia. Known as bandeirismo, it would make Indian slavery an integral part of the colonial Brazilian economy and society. The expeditions from Bahia and Pernambuco from 1570 to 1600 descended thousands of Indians for the sugar plantations of the Bahian Recôncavo, reinforcing Indian slavery in spite of high mortality, royal laws to the contrary, and the increase of African slavery.

When the Portuguese Inquisition officially began in the year 1536, Brazil inhabited only the extreme margins of the Portuguese Empire and elicited little concern from the Inquisitors in Lisbon. Royal authority only became permanently established in 1549 in the person of Tomé de Sousa as governor-general of Brazil. The establishment of ecclesiastical authority over Brazil occurred about the same time through the padroado real, or royal patronage. The Order of Christ (whose grand master was the king himself) and the Mesa da Consciência e Ordens administered the royal patronage in the colony. The Church in Brazil remained directly subordinate to the archbishopric of Funchal on Madeira until the first diocese was established in Bahia in 1551. Pernambuco did not become a diocese until 1676 when Bahia became an archbishopric. Throughout the entire colonial period Bahia remained the only archbishopric in Brazil, although six bishoprics were eventually established. For Pernambuco, this meant that until 1676 the highest local ecclesiastical officials were the vicars general, the rectors of the Jesuit College, and the priors of the Benedictine, Franciscan, and Carmelite convents.

After expelling their European rivals from the Amazon in the early–seventeenth century, the Portuguese set about exploiting the principal assets of the vast basin—the indigenous inhabitants. As allies, converts, and slaves the native population provided the labor and much of the social fabric of the developing colony. While a variety of canoe-borne expeditions ventured ever farther up the main river and its tributaries seeking elusive gold, harvesting forest products, and expanding the crown's domain, prosperity and power for the leaders and sponsors of those forays derived mainly from the human cargo brought downstream to missions, forts, and other settlements. As a result, crown and colonial authorities attempted to regulate and control the expeditions, and fierce competition developed among institutions and individuals involved in the process. Documents in Portuguese and Brazilian archives reveal the key role played by the Indians themselves in collaboration with the little-studied cross-cultural intermediaries, known as cunhamenas.

El Salvador, the smallest but most densely populated country of Central America, experienced one of Latin America's bloodiest civil wars, accompanied by widespread human rights violations. State repression was especially brutal against opposition groups such as peasant associations, unions, students, and religious people. Twenty-five church people were murdered and many religious workers were persecuted, expelled, or tortured. Several U.S. missionaries were among those murdered or expelled victims. Although the number of religious victims is relatively small in comparison to the tens of thousands of people who were killed in the three civil wars of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, the murders of religious personnel had a profound impact on the religious community in Central America, and particularly in El Salvador. This impact also reached religious groups in the United States. Given the traditional alliance between the Catholic Church and the political and economic elites throughout most of Salvadoran history, the murders of religious leaders by government or government-linked forces symbolized a remarkable shift.

On the afternoon of June 15, 1574, the conflict between the Franciscan Order and the local governor of the province of Yucatán intensified. A heated controversy had emerged between the recently appointed bishop of Yucatán, Fray Diego de Landa, and the provincial governor, Francisco Velázquez de Gijón. On that afternoon, the dean of the cathedral of Mérida, Licenciado Cristobal de Miranda, went to the home of the provincial governor with a message from the bishop. The governor had recently received an order of excommunication issued by the bishop for his actions against several Franciscan friars.

Starting in the early twentieth century, Latin American physicians organized expeditions to study remote rural populations living in their own countries. These expeditions usually aimed to solve scientific mysteries, spread western medicine, protect urban populations from epidemic diseases coming from the countryside and increase the productivity of new areas of economic exploitation. They also produced fascinating knowledge, images and stereotypes on individuals and diseases considered rare in Latin American cities.

In this paper I will analyze a similar case: the medical dimension of an effort to “colonize” or modernize the Peruvian Amazon during the 1940s. This region, an expanse of more than 500 square kilometers, was—according to a prominent Peruvian economist—“territorio inculto” scarcely populated by primitive tribes. Economic, nationalistic and political motivations coincided in the term Colonización de la Amazonía used by governmental and international agencies. Its meaning included diverse proposals such as: to encourage the migration of Andean peasants, the implementation of scientific agriculture, the creation of rural schools and military posts, the “civilization” of local natives—a process developed by religious orders in the nineteenth century—and the construction of roads to facilitate access to urban markets.

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.

Historians of colonial Brazil have conventionally located the conclusion of the great era of bandeira-led conquest somewhere near the end of the seventeenth century. The onset of the colony's gold cycle, corresponding with a series of major inland mineral strikes, reoriented those most actively engaged in the bandeira enterprise. Concentrated in the southern coastal captaincy of São Vicente, later, São Paulo, these wilderness adventurers had explored Portuguese America's immense interior and hunted its indigenous inhabitants. When their accompanying search for alluvial riches finally had born fruit, the Paulista backwoodsmen remade themselves into miners and merchants. The bandeirantes had first discovered gold in 1693 in Brazil's southeastern interior, the region that would soon acquire the name Minas Gerais or the General Mines; they made secondary strikes far to the west in Mato Grosso and Goiás in 1718 and 1725. Many then found themselves quickly displaced by the tide of Portuguese fortune-seekers and their African slaves who followed the paths now opened to the mining zones. As gold and then diamonds flooded the Atlantic world in unprecedented quantities, the colony's subsequent historical legacy would accrue not to São Paulo's peripatetic rustics but to those who consolidated control over the flow of riches. During the second half of the eighteenth century, with the mineral washings already in decline, attention would shift still further away from wilderness exploits, supposed to reflect a bygone era, back toward the coastal agricultural export enclaves that had traditionally preoccupied the Portuguese crown. The scholarly concerns of a later era would generally follow suit. As a consequence, the persistence of armed expeditions of exploration and conquest, which continued to roam the unmapped interior of Portuguese America, would go all but unnoticed as a critical feature of the late colonial period.

“Peru lives in a psychological moment of singular confusion,” Argentine Ambassador Hugo Oderigo wrote in 1947, suggesting that “the United States and Argentina are its two great realities. It is attracted to our country by the community of historical origin, lives our reality, and recognizes the greatness” of General Juan Domingo Perón. On the other hand, the hegemonic United States, with its vast wealth and modern industrial order, offered promise for the future. In the years following the Second World War, both Perón and the Harry S. Truman administration forced two Peruvian presidents to choose between what one Lima journalist called “short-term Argentine imperialism” and the “exclusive domination which the Great Democracy of the North today exercises.” Perón's road promised rapid industrialization and liberation from foreign exploitation through statist corporatism and membership in a “southern bloc” of economically-integrated South American states, while Washington stood as the guardian of a new global order based on liberal capitalism and multilateral commerce. This conflict represents an important international aspect of what has heretofore been considered a domestic struggle within Peru from 1945-1949.

To the sound of trumpets and drums, the people gathered before the church of Our Lady of the Rosary in the square of the small town of Santa Cruz in southern Goiás. They were there for the “jogo dos cavaleiros” (the game of the cavalrymen). First of all, the troops processed from the commandant's house to the square, which was lined in the form of a cross. Enveloped in long mantles, the women of the commandant's family headed a second procession, including soldiers, musicians, and the Austrian visitor, Johann Emanuel Pohl, who accompanied the commander and the judge. The townspeople followed at the end. Receiving them in formation in the “spacious” square were the mounted cavalrymen dressed in Portuguese uniforms. With their swords, they saluted Pohl and the other men of high rank, who took their seats on the top of a stepped platform shaded by a thatched roof, while the soldiers sat below.

The exact date on which the first Franciscan friars arrived in Cuba remains unknown, but it was certainly during an early phase of the conquest. Regardless of the exact moment in which the friars disembarked on the island, it is important to note that it marked the beginning of a long history, a history almost condemned to obscurity and from time to time the object of harsh criticism and impassioned indulgence, and more often recorded through partial constructions than through investigation and reasoning. Perhaps because of the complexity of its peculiarities and/or for certain socio-political determining factors that will not be analyzed at this time, Cuba has been one of the marginalized territories of the American ecclesiastical historiography. Nevertheless, in recent years, interest in ecclesiastical themes has grown incrementally among some scholars who, striving to fill the voids, have opened new lines of research and venture to investigate the older documents of the archive.