In this paper I carry out a microphilological study of a section of the Codex Indianorum 7, a colonial devotional manuscript in Nahuatl preserved in the John Carter Brown Library. It contains wisdom teachings derived from the biblical Book of Tobit and directed to both parents and their children. I argue that this hitherto unstudied text reveals the Native author's liberty to creatively mold and adapt a culturally remote European prototype into the Native genre of oratorical art—the huehuehtlahtolli, or “words of the elders.” The author also skillfully embedded and contextualized the content of the biblical instruction in local cultural meanings understandable and valid to an Indigenous audience. As an example of cross-cultural translation and colonial textual production, this source provides new insights into Native forms of agency, intellectual autonomy, and acculturation strategies reflected in creative dialogues with European traditions, developed and maintained despite the seemingly substitutive Christianization policies imposed on Indigenous people in the sixteenth century.

This article traces women's involvement in Colombia's mid nineteenth-century Liberal Revolution, particularly the 1860 Liberal-Federalist revolt led by General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera and the two-and-a-half year civil war, or Federalist War, it precipitated. It uses personal correspondence and other archival sources to trace that involvement, highlighting how women both participated in the war, taking sides with one or another of the country's two rival political parties (Liberals or Conservatives), and shaped the larger partisan contest in which the fighting was embedded. It shows first how Mosquera's female supporters cooperated with him, offering logistical support and information that proved critical to the Liberal-Federalists’ eventual victory. It also shows how Conservative women opposed or resisted Mosquera and his followers. The article, moreover, examines the efforts of members of both groups of female partisans—pro-Mosquera Liberals or “Rojas” and anti-Mosquera “Godas”—to influence politics and public opinion, whether through private, behind-the-scenes personal conversation or through the spread of news, and sometimes disinformation. Above all, it reveals how women shaped the wartime public sphere through their active participation in the so-called ‘war of words’—the fierce ideological and rhetorical struggle that defined the very terms and meaning of the conflict.

Education was an essential ingredient of the state strategy to address the so-called ‘Indian question’ in the Americas throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Bolivian intellectuals promoted a new educational policy inspired by indigenismo, a trend of thought that sought to solve the problems faced by indigenous people concerning welfare, hygiene, agricultural techniques, and land issues; it also sought, to some extent, to teach them to value their own culture. The educational experience, originally conducted in the village of Warisata and then spread across the Andes, has merited special attention from historiography. However, very little is known about Warisata's replication in the country's lowlands. This paper explores the originality, scope, and limitations of the first project of socialization of ‘non-subjected’ societies of the Amazon Basin. That project was inspired by the postulates of the innovative Warisateño model, which aimed to give birth to a “new Indian” who would contribute actively and voluntarily to the progress of the nation. The categories adopted in that project, and the practices carried out, were inscribed in the positivists’ thought, based on their view of the alleged “wild nature” and “savagery” of the groups with whom educators would interact. This study aims to contribute to the debate on the ‘Indian question’ in the Americas by highlighting the contradictions faced by intellectuals when designing projects for the “integration” of otherness into the nation.

This article analyzes the political afterlife of the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944-54 by relating the story of exiled political elites and their efforts to retake power in the decade following the CIA-sponsored coup of 1954. Through a thorough examination of the personal papers of Juan José Arévalo, the article argues that the demise of Guatemala's democratic left was not inevitable after 1954, but rather that the counterrevolutionary period (1954–63) was full of historical contingencies and possibilities. Factional tensions were rife among the exiled leftists, rooted especially in a debate over the culpability of Jacobo Arbenz and other radicals in the demise of the government, as well as disagreement over the proper relationship between the broader revolutionary movement and the communist Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT). This factionalism, as well as a failure to fully grasp from exile the extent to which Guatemala's political landscape had changed, ultimately rendered the movement unsuccessful in its bid to retake power. In 1963, a presidential campaign to restore Arévalo to power was ended by a military coup. The coup was a significant turning point in Guatemalan political history, after which there were few opportunities for the democratic left.