When Mexico achieved its independence in September 1821, few imagined that the country would soon become a republic, much less a federal republic. The autonomists, the members of the national elite who gained power at independence, opted for a constitutional monarchy. They initially favored establishing an empire with the Spanish king or a member of the royal family as sovereign. When Spain rejected their proposal, and faced with “popular” demands, the country's political leaders reluctantly accepted a native, Agustín de Iturbide, as Mexico's first emperor. The new monarch, a former royalist commander, had gained immense popularity when he turned against the Spanish colonial regime and proclaimed independence under the Plan of Iguala.

In September, 1584, during an episcopal visita to Chiapa de Indios, a group of townspeople came to the bishop, Fray Pedro de Feria, to accuse the patriarch of one of the principal lineages in the town of leading a clandestine cult. They said that, in nearby Suchiapa, a “gran junta” composed of twelve Indians who called themselves the Twelve Apostles gathered at night to walk among the hills and caves, and to perform “demonic rites against our Christian religion.” With them, Feria was told, went two women. One they called Santa María; the other, Magdalena. Together the cultists carried out ceremonies in which they transformed themselves into gods and goddesses. In their divine form, the women were said to have the power to conjure storms, and to give many riches to whomever they pleased. Feria would report that they had “many other superstitutions and vanities” which he compared to the Alumbrados or Illuminist sect that had been widely popular in Spain during the 1520s and been condemned by the Inquisition.

When smallpox threatened the Mexican province of Guanajuato in October 1797, Juan de Riaño, the Intendant of Guanajuato, instituted a program of inoculation to protect the children of his province against the disease. Realizing that many parents would resist having their children inoculated, he decided to provide an example by having his own six children inoculated first, thereby encouraging other parents to bring their children forward. Accordingly, a physician made deep scratches in the arms of his children, three of whom were under the age of five, and rubbed organic matter containing live smallpox virus into the wounds. Thanking Riaño for this gesture, Dr. Juan de Islas praised him for showing “true mercy for your children, banishing the timidity from the minds of others.” Nor was their timidity entirely unjustified. People occasionally died from inoculation, for inoculation provided immunity by artificially inducing a case of smallpox, but one that was usually benign. The risk of dying from inoculation was much lower than from contracting smallpox naturally. That was the point Riaño was trying to make to the people of Guanajuato.

Upon the plantations themselves the laborers are not so badly treated, for there they are the property of their owners, and men treat their own property well, especially when it is of considerable value. But they are brought from a thoroughly healthy climate, where disease is almost unknown, to a feverstricken region. Within twelve months their numbers will probably be reduced to one-third, and at the expiration of the three years a woefully diminished number will return to their lovely homes in the Western Pacific.

In recent years much attention has focused on the labor migration of Pacific Islanders, and particularly Melanesians, during the second half of the nineteenth century for work on the export plantations of Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea, and Queensland. A smaller number, but a quantity nevertheless significant for the populations from which they came, went to labor in Latin America. In 1862-63, for example, vessels from Peru kidnapped perhaps 3,600 persons from the smaller islands of the eastern Pacific and ventured as far west as the Gilbert Islands, where they ensnared three hundred or more unsuspecting individuals. A larger migration from the Gilberts occurred almost thirty years later, when in 1890-92 some twelve hundred individuals signed up to work on the coffee plantations (fincas) of the Pacific piedmont (boca costa) of southern Mexico and Guatemala; this constituted almost fifteen percent of the Gilbertese who migrated for offisland labor after the middle of the century. Less than 800 of the 1890s cohort actually arrived, and perhaps a quarter to a third of these died in the first year, so that their impact on an industry which annually mobilized tens of thousands of local Indians was limited. Nevertheless, for the Guatemalan coffee elites the experience confirmed what they had long suspected, that there would be no solution to their labor problems outside of the republic itself. For the Gilbertese this was by far the largest instance of labor recruitment of the decade, a period of economic hardship and political changes in the archipelago.

As early as the first decades of the sixteenth century, when English and Dutch corsairs and privateers began to challenge Spain's exclusivist claims to the New World, the struggle for control over the Americas began to be couched in terms of a holy war. The Caribbean, in particular, became the arena in which the commercial, ideological and military forces of Protestant Northern Europe and Catholic Southern Europe clashed. Spanish officials commonly referred to the English and Dutch intruders as “heretics” and “Lutheran corsairs,” while Francis Drake and his fellow Elizabethan sea dogs believed that their penetration of the New World was a crusade against Popery, Catholic fanaticism and idolatry. These rivalries continued for centuries as new actors, the United States in particular, inherited some of the old roles.

A seventeenth-century inhabitant of São Paulo once remarked that Indians were “the most profitable property in this land.” Legally, however, Indians were not property at all, for the crown explicitly prohibited their enslavement. During most of the seventeenth century, the settlers of São Paulo complied with the letter of the law and did not officially give their Indian servants any monetary value, and though they often sold them, the sales were known to be illegal and were not usually recorded in public documents, such as the documents used for this study, inventários, settlements of estates. By the end of the century, however, local judges were openly allowing the monetary appraisal of Indians and their subsequent sale was duly recorded in inventários and other court processes.

Cotton growing and textile production in the northern regions of newly independent Argentina, as in many other parts of Latin America still relatively unaffected by the industrial revolution, were linked to the gender division of labor and the type of landholdings found in agrarian societies. As early as 1970 Ester Boserup pointed out the divergent roles that women and children would play in societies based upon extensive properties farmed or ranched by slave or hired help as compared with smaller, more intensive farms and ranches. She, like many others, however, presumed that wage labor, large scale agriculture, and ranching dominated the Latin American landscape, and she emphasized the role of women compared to other family members in rural production.

Prior to the last two decades most scholars paid little attention to the Central American Catholic Church, viewing it in general as little more than a benevolent arm of the elite power structure or as an anachronistic institution intent on regaining privileges it lost during the nineteenth-century Liberal reforms. Traditionally conservative, its sacerdotal leadership had long accepted without question the medieval notions of church-state cooperation and social inequality. Such a mentality had led to a paternalistic approach to the poor. Rejecting as un-Christian all concepts of class conflict, the church believed the lower classes should be patient and ought not take it upon themselves to attempt to better their own condition. Instead, a well- ordered society was seen as a cooperative, top-down venture in which the upper class worked with the church to ameliorate the condition of the masses.

In September of 1907, the residents of a large conventillo, or tenement house, in Buenos Aires protested a 47 percent rent increase by striking against their landlord and refusing to pay. The strikers called on the residents of other rental buildings to join with them and organized a central committee. The strike spread quickly. By October 1 tenants from more than 750 buildings had joined in the strike. That number increased to nearly 2,000 buildings before the end of 1907. Neighborhood and building committees arose throughout the city as nearly one tenth of the total population of Buenos Aires, and tenants in several other major cities as well, joined the strike in one of the largest and most unusual forms of working-class collective action in early twentieth-century Argentina.

One of the most important aspects of the recent mass migrations of Latin Americans into previously remote regions of the hemisphere is the impact these have had on areas cut by international boundaries. With the exception of the United States-Mexico border, however, historical examination of the process is still in its infancy. And few observers have developed a satisfactory theoretical basis explaining an admittedly complex process.

One exception was Cuban historian Jorge Mañach, who spoke of “balanced” and “unbalanced” frontiers, largely in the context of the United States-Mexican boundary. He believed that power distribution between nations determined the degree to which their frontier interrelationships were equal or unequal. In Mañach's view, when a politically or economically weaker nation shares a boundary with one that is stronger, overall communication is sacrificed and the stronger power inevitably “spills over” into the neighboring region, economically and culturally.

On November 27, 1902 Colombia signed an agreement with the Vatican that established parameters for the evolution of the mission as a frontier institution in the twentieth century. Renewed in 1928 and again in 1953, the Convenio sobre Misiones granted to religious orders chosen by the Vatican absolute authority to govern, police, educate, and control the Indians in the peripheral regions of the republic, which at that time accounted for sixty-five percent of the national domain but only two percent of the population. An exchange for substantial state subsidies, the orders were to carry out such government functions as administering a rudimentary judicial apparatus, providing primary education for whites as well as Indians, and promoting colonization through unlimited access to public lands. Another provision assured the ascendancy of the religious over civilian authorities by granting the former the right to reject nominees for positions in civil government if they regarded the candidates as unsuitable or as threatening to the Indians or the missionaries. Under these terms, the Augustinian Recoletos (Candelarios) in Casanare and the Capuchins in Putumayo expanded their operations, while between 1903 and 1918 the Montfort Fathers, Lazarists, Claretians, Carmelites, and Jesuits took control of apostolic prefectures and vicariates in other parts of the country.

“The womb of the Province” is how one eighteenth-century resident described Querétaro, for within that city the Franciscans of the Province of San Pedro y San Pablo de Michoacán supported not only the friary of Santiago el Grande with its Spanish and Indian parishes, but also the pioneering College of Santa Cruz, the convents of Santa Clara and Santa Rosa de Viterbo for women, the seminary of the Province, the mission church of San Sebastián, and the friary and shrine of Nuestra Señora de Pueblito. The city additionally served as the seat of the Provincial chapter. Friars and nuns at these various foundations directed over twenty associations of laity organized into confraternities, or cofradíos. Poised delicately between those who were professed Franciscans (male and female, of the First and Second Orders, respectively), and the lay confraternities affiliated with the monasteries, was the Third Order, an institute which has defied classification.

The final years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth signified a time in which the Cuban people adjusted to a reality for which they were not fully prepared. The world created by centuries of Spanish colonialism crumbled in a spectacular and miserable manner, leaving in its wake a country desolated by war and famine. On January 1, 1899, the Spanish flag was lowered from El Morro in Havana and replaced with the flag of the United States. During this politico-military transition from Spanish rule to U.S. occupation, the defenders of independentismo and Cuba Libre were ignored and humiliated.

In his 1884 address to the National Assembly, President Justo Rufino Barrios gave a glowing report of a polity fired by the torch of Liberal progress. “When I see the movement and the animation in everything and everywhere, in our streets, in our plazas, in our roads and in our ports, I cannot repress a feeling of vanity.” He extolled not only commerce and new technology, but model prisons, a disciplined professional army, and “a school in the most miserable town and in the most hidden corner.” This is a world of flowing capital, technological linkages, and the ceaseless penetration of enlightenment into every corner of the Republic, where before there had been only a “dark mansion of apathy, of immobility, of stagnation and silence,” and where now we (Guatemalans) “can say that we have–if not everything–almost everything.” The Utopian rhetoric masked a rather different and sorry reality. Still, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, the succession of possessive plurals in Barrios' speech–our streets, our plazas, our roads–assured the listener of a solid sociological and political entity that can only be Guatemala. Surely Barrios spoke from the solid foundations of a Liberal nationalist certainty?

In November 1834, Mary Robinson Hunter sailed to Rio de Janeiro with her husband William, a prominent Newport lawyer and newly appointed chargé d'affaires to the Imperial Court, and five of their six children. President Andrew Jackson had named Hunter to the post in June 1834 on the recommendation of their son, William, a clerk with the State Department. The Hunters had experienced financial difficulties over the years, and a diplomatic assignment offered them a steady income, prestige, and a unique travel opportunity.

The experience of living in a Latin and tropical culture inspired Mary Hunter to record her impressions in six diaries which she kept during a residence of fourteen years. These journals are part of a larger collection of Hunter family papers that are located in the Newport (RI) Historical Society. The volumes were carefully scanned by her daughter, Elizabeth Hunter Birckhead, who crossed out passages which shed light on family quarrels; they were ultimately deposited by her great granddaughter, Anna Dunn, in 1945. These diaries, written in medium sized script, in brown ink and a firm hand, are thoroughly legible and in good condition, given their age. They serve as the main source for her memories of life in Brazil, since her letters to female friends in Newport do not survive.

Throughout the centuries of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, Africans and their descendants struggled against a social system that sought to reduce them to chattel. They found that their struggle was to continue, albeit in different forms, long after abolition. In Brazil, emancipation in 1888 was followed the next year by the demise of imperial government and the installation of the First Republic. This created a new political and legal framework for Afro-Brazilians to negotiate positions in society. Racial relations in former slave societies are not the simple result of imposed identities and social spaces by a dominant group upon an oppressed group. They evolve from a dialectical power struggle in which blacks as well as whites affect the outcome.

A patente, in the ecclesiastical sense of the term, was an official letter expedited by a prelate and addressed to his religious subjects. Both the Father Guardian of the College of San Fernando in Mexico City and the Father President of the Franciscan missions in Alta California were regarded as prelates in the canonical sense of the term. Consequently, the friars who worked in these missions were held by religious vows to obey the admonitions and instructions in such documents. Patentes sent by the guardian of the college to his missionaries in Alta California dealt with the administration of the missions and the observance of the religious life and were supposed to be transcribed or at least summarized in a book intended for that purpose and called a Libro de Patentes.