The Role of the hostile Indian in nineteenth century Paraguay would be difficult to exaggerate, yet it is virtually unknown. The trail of agony so clearly expressed in the thousands of documents in the Asunción and other archives deserves to be better understood. This article can do little more than suggest the scope of the problem and describe how the Indian wars of the Paraguayan north did more to define and determine Paraguayan history during the years of the dictatorship of Dr. Francia (1814-1840), than has been previously noted by historians.

In 1810, Paraguay had as its real, if not legal border in the north, the Río Apa, a broad, sluggish tributary of the Río Paraguay, its banks choked in dense, humid vegetation. North of the river was a no-man's land claimed by both Portugal and Spain and thinly occupied by the former. West of the Río Paraguay was the Chaco, a region of desolate scrubjungle, where Spanish and hence Paraguayan claims were virtually unchallenged save by the Indians who lived there. Fort Borbón, in the Chaco, Paraguay's northern outpost, was situated some hundred miles north of the Apa border on the Río Paraguay.

Federal-State Relations have long been assigned a prime role in explaining both the success and the ultimate failure of the Porfirian power structure. Despite this importance there have been few detailed analyses on a sub-national basis of the manner in which these relationships were established and maintained. This lacuna is often glossed over through the use of such phrases as pan o palo or poca politica y mucha administracion. While these descriptions are essentially accurate, they often convey little basic information and frequently oversimplify highly-complex political associations. The traditional view of a central government exercising absolute control over federal and local authorities in the provinces is becoming increasingly suspect. The unavailability of Porfirio Díaz's personal papers long precluded a behind the scenes study of this key subject and the many manifestations it assumed. The opening of Díaz's personal archive, La colección General Porfirio Díaz, in the late 1960's provides ample resources for an in-depth investigation into federal-state relations during the Porfiriato.

In the 1530’s, as Mexico and then Peru began sending eastward the treasure which would so profoundly affect European life, the town of Guayaquil was established on the coast of present-day Ecuador. During the next three centuries Guayaquil developed into a society fundamentally different from and even antithetical to those of the great highland capitals. Agriculture, industry, and commerce, rather than mining, became the mainstays of Guayaquil’s economy. The decline of indigenous population on the coast and an influx of free Negroes from the north rendered an egalitarian and racially mixed people of low social differentiation. Cacao grown on the coastal lowlands provided the thrust for a wide range of trade and manufacturing activities. Yet tensions between location on a main imperial trade route and the stifling commercial control of nearby Lima resolved into a rough-and-tumble political system which thrived on contraband and autonomy. By the early nineteenth century Guayaquil had achieved a large measure of independence from Spain, and it played an important role in the liberation movements of western South America. After sketching the early development of the city, we will examine in some detail the system of labor and production in Guayaquil during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then the city’s precocious autonomy within the colonial system will be discussed, prior to a concluding assessment of the social outcomes of Guayaquil’s development by the time of Independence.

The year 1976 is correctly taken to be the bicentennial year of United States independence, which officially began on July 4, 1776. In a broader sense, however, the year 1776 was also pivotal year in the “Age of the Democratic Revolution” that swept through the entire Atlantic Community of nations during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.

This year, 1976, therefore, may also be properly considered the bicentennial of the opening year of the “age of revolutions” in the whole of America. Professor Robert R. Palmer, in his distinguished work on the subject, convincingly shows that, as he says,

The secularization of the Franciscan missions is one of the most controversial problems which historians of Mexican California are called upon to interpret. This essay is an addition to the story of the secularization process in California in the hope that it will render it more complete by illuminating the mind of one of its chief protagonists, Fray Narciso Durán, the Spanish Franciscan friar who held the offices of president and commissary-prefect of the missions during the secularization controversies.

Attempts to understand the nature of colonial Latin American cities have tended to focus on the role of urban centers in the process of empire building. The Spanish cities of the New World served initially as spearheads of conquest, and later as centers for the exercise of Imperial control. A particularly important aspect of this control was the effort by the Crown to limit the power of encomenderos, men whose royally granted right to use Indian labor threatened to create a local ruling class independent of Imperial power. Richard Morse has recently asserted that the patrimonial nature of many of these urban centers resulted from the efforts of the mother country to retain them in the Imperial structure against the counter-claims of the encomenderos. As for those poorer settlements on the outskirts of empire. Morse believes that the appeal of landed wealth drew many of their most prominent citizens into the countryside, leaving the cities to stagnate.

In a personal letter dated October 1, 1953, to the President of the United States, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, President of the Republic of Bolivia, urgently appealed for both food and economic assistance for his nation. “Our availabilities in foreign currency,” Paz wrote, “have diminished so considerably through the fall in the price of tin and other minerals that we find ourselves in the insurmountable difficulty of not being able to provide food and other essential articles for the people, since in order to import them we need foreign currency.”

Never particularly stable, even by Latin American standards, the fragile fabric of the nation had been rent by the revolutionary change of April 1952 which brought the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario from underground and from exile to power. The MNR, led by Paz himself, had instituted rapid, radical modifications in the political, economic, and social structure of the country. These changes, however, exacted their toll. The most serious consequences were a decline in productivity of both minerals and foods. The nation, which had long depended on food imports, could not feed itself, and its foreign exchange earnings were insufficient to permit purchase of foodstuffs from abroad.

The last fifteen years have witnessed a growing amount of historical scholarship offering sound evidence that slavery and postemancipation racial attitudes in Brazil were not as benign as some historians have suggested. These writings have demonstrated that racial and class prejudice existed both during and after slavery. Comparatively little attention, however, has been devoted to specific studies of free Afro-Brazilians in the years immediately following the passage of the Golden Law in May, 1888. Such studies are required to better understand the problems involved in the integration of blacks and mulattoes into modern Brazilian society.

The issues involved in the topic of Jesuit wealth have excited observers and investigators since the sixteenth century. Their contemporaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries commonly believed that financial shrewdness and a deep involvement in commerce made the Order fabulously wealthy. From the time of the celebrated disputes with Bishop Cárdenas in Paraguay and Bishop Palaf ox in Mexico in the 1640’s, their detractors have considered the fact of their apparent wealth and rumored activities primafacie evidence of scandalous behavior, and so published many unsubstantiated allegations in their attacks on the Order. Even their admirers held the same views of Jesuit wealth and financial ability although they drew different conclusions concerning the effect of involvement with Mammon on Jesuit morals.

A hundred years ago the United States had one of the worst depressions in its history. The disastrous drop in wages, prices, and output threw the mid-1870s into deep gloom and made the Centennial celebrations of 1876 seem to many persons no more than a bad joke. In subsequent years no one found a permanent cure for depressions, but during the late 1870s and 1880s a conviction developed that the Federal government must do more to aid American foreign trade. Thereafter the State Department cooperated increasingly with American business to expand the nation’s influence abroad.

For centuries the only roads in Guatemala were no more than trails—slippery and muddy during rainy seasons, dry and dusty during dry seasons, and always treacherous. Travelers who ventured outside the few cities and towns usually walked or rode horses or mules. Freight traveled similarly, on the backs of pack animals or on the backs of men. Consequently, communications were at a minimum; Guatemalans and other Central Americans were isolated. And if they had little communication among themselves, they had less with foreigners. The few ports touched occasionally by foreign ships offered little in the way of trade because of the difficulty of transportation to and from the interior. Under conditions such as these it is no wonder that prosperity was limited and that progress was slow.

It’s easier to make a revolution, than it is to make a revolution work,” Fidel Castro once told a packed audience listening to him discuss the progress of Cuba. His remark, made with characteristic candor, expressed the challenge that confronts all rebels who manage to achieve power. For the Anti-reelectionists in Mexico, the revolution had been made in the victory over federal troops at Ciudad Juárez in May, 1911. It then fell to Francisco Madero to direct the program that would make it work. He intended to justify the violent overthrow of the porfirian dictatorship by invigorating Mexican politics as a means to restore democratic government and to establish the mechanism for responsive reform of the economy and society. The critical element in his proposal was the redemption of the authority of the state governors, to whom he delegated the responsibility and the opportunity to reconstruct Mexico. This policy represented no casual abdication of authority, but a carefully devised scheme of decentralization. Madero’s opposition to highly-centralized government resulted from his birthright as a son of remote Coahuila, the native state of Mexico federalism, his political convictions, including an abiding faith in the confederated government posited in the 1857 Constitution, and his philosophic precepts, based on the ideals of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and a reaction to the governmental consolidation rationalized by Comtean Positivism (promoted in Mexico by the Positivists, the Científicos, and the dictator).

Enrico Martínez, an important but little known figure in New Spain, was an extremely talented man with a wide range of I interests. Interpreter for the Inquisition, Royal Cosmographer for the Consejo de Indias in Mexico, author, printer and cartographer, Martínez was also the architect and engineer of the drainage system (desagüe) of the Valley of Mexico.

Despite his important governmental positions and the Spanish obsession for record-keeping, Martínez’ national origin remains undetermined. One major documentary source relative to the desagüe states that his true name was Henrí Martin, that he was of French origin and that he later Hispanicized his name to enter Spanish territories legally; however, other sources ascribe his nationality to various other countries. Interested in solving this discrepancy, Joaquín García Icazbalceta stated in a letter to Nicolás León on April 23, 1883, that he had searched for data on Martínez but “was unable to find any material that determined his origin. Nevertheless Francisco de la Maza, author of the introduction to a modern edition of Martínez’ Reportorio de los tiempos e historia natural de Nueva España and his principal biographer, stated that Martínez was definitely German and that his true name was probably Heinrich Martin. According to Maza, Martínez was born in Hamburg between 1550 and 1560 and was probably a Protestant because Hamburg was one of the first German cities to become involved in the Reformation. Martínez spent his first eight years in Hamburg, then journeyed to Sevilla possibly at the request of the Martins, probably German relatives who were printers. Although no definite documentation has been located, it is reasonable to presume that if he were in fact Protestant he must have converted to Catholicism during his stay in Spain, a sine qua non for his immigration to New Spain and for his appointment as translator for the Inquisition in later years. Martínez remained in Sevilla until he was nineteen, returning then to Hamburg for a year and one-half, and at age twenty, he traveled throughout Europe, spent enough time in Paris to graduate with a degree in mathematics, and then traveled on to Poland. From eastern Europe, Martínez returned to Spain where he resided in Madrid, Toledo and Sevilla; and in 1589 he sailed to New Spain on the same fleet as his protector and friend, Luis de Velasco, newly appointed Viceroy of New Spain and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, later author of a comedy entitled, El Semejante a sí mismo which mentions the desagüe of Mexico.

For Spain the Succession War (1702-1713) capped a century of stagnation and decline with a decade of civil war, invasion, and anarchy. Together with many other issues at stake in the conflict, commercial ambitions—particularly those relating to the Indies—lurked behind the facades of Habsburg and Bourbon dynastic claims. Both before and during the war foreign penetration, especially by the English and the Dutch, challenged Spain’s claims to exclusive trading rights in the New World, a challenge which neither the Spanish Navy nor Spanish imperial strategy was able to thwart.

When the old Palacio de Gobierno was demolished in 1938, a mass of papers and volumes were discovered and saved. They turned out to be the heart of the colonial archive of the Lima Tribunal of the Consulado (or Merchant’s Guild) and represented a substantial portion of the colonial Hacienda, or treasury, papers of Lima as well. An archive, the Archivo Histórico de Comercio y Hacienda, was created (and opened in 1944) for the express purpose of housing these documents and its first director, Frederico Schwab, was entrusted with the organization and cataloguing of this valuable collection. Schwab and Luis Felipe Muro Arias’ Catàlogo de la Sección Colonial del Archivo Histórico del Ministerio de Hacienda was published in Lima in 1944 and listed all of the major documentation held by the new archive relative to the colonial affairs of the Consulado and the Real Hacienda. A few years later Robert Sidney Smith, another scholar to reach and work this rich depisitory in its early years, transcribed the original index to the archive created by the Consulado to house its papers in the late eighteenth century. This work, El Indice del Archivo del Tribunal del Consulado de Lima, appeared in 1948 with an excellent preface to the history of the collection by Schwab and a valuable introduction to the Lima Consulado prepared by Smith himself. Since then, scholars such as the Peruvian Manuel Moreyra y Paz-Soldan and the Frenchwoman Marie Helmer have been able to take advantage of this great collection because of the pioneering work of Schwab, Smith, and their colleagues. The archive has since lost its autonomy and is now incorporated into the Archivo Nacional, which was a logical step in centralization since both archives are located in the Palacio de Justicia in Lima.

In the eighteenth century the Spanish Crown regarded the setting of maximum prices as a legitimate function. Price fixing was intended to guarantee a just price to producers and consumers. Underlying the entire scheme was a desire by the monarchy to insure the adequacy of the fixed incomes of government employees. Hispanic California provides a case study of price fixing. Fixed prices in California were of two varieties. Prices were limited on those goods coming from San Bias with a view to keeping the cost of living within the limits of military salaries in Alta California. In the late 1770’s, mission agriculture began to produce surpluses. For a number of years the only significant outlet for this excess was the military establishment. Because it removed the burden of providing staples from the Naval Department of San Bias, the Crown willingly turned to the missions as a source of supply. The missions gradually assumed the monopoly of provisioning the military, which had belonged to San Bias. In order to ensure that military salaries would suffice to keep body and soul together and to protect them from price gouging the government determined that price regulation was essential.

This article examines the data contained in the last volume of our five-part index of 16th Century Spanish emigrants to the New World. Originally entitled the Indice geobiográfico de 40, 000 pobladores españoles de América en el siglo XVI, the series in fact now furnishes biographical data on a total of roughly 55,000 individual men, women, and children, known to have emigrated to the Indies before 1600, whose birthplace we have identified from contemporary records. So far we have found publishers only for the first two of these five useful reference volumes, however a series of articles in both Spanish and English have presented our findings on each of the roughly twenty-year periods into which we have divided that all-important century during which Spanish colonial society was first taking shape. Though in conducting this basic research our primary goal has always been a linguistic one, i.e., to shed light on the early dialect differentiation of New World Spanish, the work is designed to be of use to historians and sociologists also.

General Cipriano Castro came to power in Venezuela in 1899. During his nine year regime he destroyed all internal political opposition, imposed a tight, one-party dictatorship, and undermined the national economy by creating federal monopolies, implementing arbitrary trade policies, and antagonizing foreign nations. His relations with outside powers were poor in particular. Not only did General Castro’s refusal—or inability—to pay international debts result in the December 1902 naval blockade of Venezuela by Great Britain, Germany, and Italy, but his undiplomatic treatment of foreign representatives, harassment of foreign companies, and policy of trade warfare prompted the severance of official ties with Colombia (1901), France (1906), the United States (1908), and the Netherlands (1908) and strained relations with Great Britain and Italy. In fact, in late 1908 the Dutch fleet began to conduct a belligerent naval demonstration against the Venezuelan coast and the United States was debating, among stronger measures, whether or not to boycott Venezuelan coffee and cacao. Clearly most Venezuelans and most foreigners favored General Castro’s removal from office. Their wishes were fulfilled in late 1908 when the dictator’s health—he had been bordering on death for four years due to a kidney ailment—again collapsed and he opted for surgery in Germany. First Vice President Juan Vicente Gómez was named Acting Chief Executive until General Castro returned from Europe.

On August 25, 1867, Benito Juárez was feted at a now-famous banquet attended by General Porfirio Díaz, as well as most of the leaders of the Mexican government and military. The occasion, however, was hardly festive. Throughout the banquet, Díaz remained sullen in his seat instead of offering the customary first toast. As his silence became more embarrassing, Juárez finally broke the tension by graciously rising and offering a toast to “Liberty and Independence.”

Church-State relations in nineteenth century Chile remained relatively calm when compared with tempestuous events occuring in Mexico during the War of the Reform. While tempers flared in both nations when the rights of the Church in a secular society were discussed, the problem was resolved in Chile without bloodshed or violence. The question of the economic power of the Church had already been settled by 1830, as the financial genius of the new Republic, Manuel Rengifo, urged that all lands that had been confiscated by Bernardo O’Higgins in 1824 be returned to the original owners. Despite a well-intentioned belief that Church ownership of land was smothering the economic development of the new nation, the expropriation of these lands failed to produce any dramatic change. While the Treasury received 226, 442 pesos for the sale and rental of these lands, the government was forced to spend 181,297 pesos from 1824 to 1830 in order to finance religious affairs and pay the congregations for the expropriation of their lands. After the Conservative victory at Lircay in 1830 the lands were returned to the Church, providing considerable relief for the heavily burdened state treasury. The minor importance of Church property to the Chilean economy was symbolized by the relative ease of the confiscation and return of the lands, while similar attempts in Mexico unleashed civil war.