Conflicts between Church and State, and between liberals and conservatives over the role of the Church, were a constant feature of nineteenth-century Mesoamerican history. These struggles eventually stripped the Church of much of its wealth, with a consequent decline in its political influence. However, the timing of this disinvestiture, the composition of liberal and conservative factions, and the role of the Church varied substantially throughout Mexico and Central America.

In Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the Church survived the turmoil of the Independence period, to continue as a major holder of wealth and an important political actor. Notwithstanding repeated royal attacks upon Church prerogatives, and innumerable forced loans levied by both colonial and national authorities against Church wealth, the decisive confrontation between the Church and the Liberal-dominated State in these nations awaited the second half of the nineteenth century.

Despite its crucial importance to the development of twentieth century Argentina and the volumes of scholarly, journalistic and partisan exegesis the movement has generated, historians have yet to reach a minimal consensus on the nature of Peronism. In the quarter century since Perón's first fall from power, numerous efforts have been made to explain, glorify or denigrate his regime. Many anti-Peronists have dismissed their bête noire as an unprincipled demagogue, motivated solely by political opportunism and an insatiable desire to retain power. Some supporters of the regime echo its propaganda by picturing Perón as taking the first great strides toward a politically free, economically independent and socially just Argentina. Certain anti-Peronists and a number of foreign commentators grudgingly admit that the movement had political and ideological content, but then label it as an imported fascist interlude, an alien virus that infected the body politic of Argentina just as it neared the end of the long march towards liberal democracy. The London Economist recently described the advent of Peronism as an instant replay of Italian Fascism. “The bulk of his supporters were the lower middle class immigrants who poured into the country from impoverished Italy after the second world war… The new arrivals cheered El Lider as they had cheered Il Duce for two decades. Perón representated the same historical phenomenon as Hitler and Mussolini…”

The Spanish American Empire in its last half century of existence experienced an economic resurgence in oceanic shipping and inter-change with Europe. That prosperity, prompted by the reforms of the enlightened Bourbon monarch, Charles III, produced an unexpected result. Non-Spanish immigrants appeared in ever increasing numbers in Spain's American colonies. That immigration, almost always illegal, had always occurred in the colonial era in spite of the many barriers erected to exclude foreigners. Now, searching for economic opportunities, these immigrants participated in the economic revitalization of Spanish America.

For the most part these newcomers posed no threat to the state; and often by virtue of their commercial expertise or skilled labor, were a boon to Spanish American economic life. Unofficially, imperial officials were well aware of this. The major concern, regardless of official statements, was that immigrants profess the Catholic faith. Many of the newcomers soon acquired families in the New World, pursued their own ends, and quietly melded into Spanish American society. Certainly that proved to be the case in the Rio de la Plata. In this vast region, until the creation of the Viceroyalty in 1776, Spanish authority had been loose and the small foreign presence was generally tolerated or just ignored.

This essay explores the social relations within a landed elite—the dominant class in eighteenth-century Mexico. It aims to outline the nature of the powers that sustained that elite, to determine who directly exercised those powers, and to detail the relations between those pivotal powerholders and the remaining majority of elite class members. My primary concern, then, is the relationship between elite power and class membership.

That, in turn, brings atttention to the roles of elite men and women, and the relations between them. Powerholders were usually men while class membership was shared equally between men and women. Was the internal structure of the elite thus based on sexual stratification? Were men able to be powerful and thus wealthy, while women could be wealthy only through subordination to a powerful man? To a great extent, that was true. But the majority of men within the Mexican elite were also wealthy while subordinate to a powerful man. And in a few notable cases, elite women exercised great power while men and women lived as their dependents. Sex was not the only principle of stratification among late colonial Mexican elites. Rather, sexual differentiation interacted with inequalities primarily based on economic power. This essay attempts to study the relations between economic power and sexual differentiation to approach an understanding of life within the late colonial landed elite in Mexico.

The political legacy of Lázaro Cárdenas is marked by a striking paradox. On the one hand, Cárdenas as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940 presided over the most radical phase of the Mexican Revolution or what some historians call the “Second Revolution.” He was instrumental in organizing industrial workers and peasants at the national level and incorporating both groups into the reorganized government party, the Partido de la Revolutión Mexicana (PRM), that had as its declared purpose the establishment of a “workers' democracy” in Mexico. Under his leadership the government supported the demands of industrial workers for higher wages and improved working conditions, greatly expanded the distribution of land to the peasantry, established new welfare programs, nationalized the railroad and petroleum industries and inaugurated a program of socialist education in the public schools. The prestige of Cárdenas as the foremost leader of the radical phase of the Revolution was enhanced by the fact that he, unlike many of his contemporaries, never attempted to use political office for personal financial gain; he was not a rich man when he completed his term of office as president. At the time of his death in 1970, Cárdenas was eulogized as “the greatest figure produced by the Revolution… an authentic revolutionary who aspired to the greatness of his country, not personal aggrandizement.” On the other hand, Cárdenas was the architect of the corporatist system of interest representation, including labor, peasant and business organizations, that provided the institutional framework of what Crane Brinton has called the “Thermidor,” i.e., the conservative reaction to the radical phase of the revolutionary process, that began in Mexico in approximately 1940. The institutions developed by Cárdenas were utilized by his successors to curtail the very reforms, such as agrarian and labor reform and socialist education, that had been central to his reform program. Moreover Cárdenas facilitated the transition to a more conservative era by naming as his successor Manuel Ávila Camacho, who was known to favor a moderation of the reform process, rather than Francisco Múgica, the preferred candidate of the radicals in the government. In short, Cárdenas played a decisive role both in presiding over the radical phase of the Revolution and in launching and shaping the relatively conservative post-1940 era. The paradox of the political legacy of Cárdenas is that though the seemingly radical reforms he carried out had a lasting impact upon Mexican politics, the impact was predominantly conservative rather than radical. This essay will endeavor to explain the paradoxical political legacy of Lázaro Cárdenas by focusing upon his ideology, the institutional reforms he carried out while president, and the impact of those reforms after 1940.