In 1657, the marquis of Villagarcía was appointed as president of the Audiencia of Charcas. Although, he eventually declined the post, his nomination generated an unusual trail of private documents. Using my study of this correspondence as a base, I will discuss how the networks of patronage were built and sustained, how they operated, and how they impacted the global mobility of imperial officials. Patronage networks were indispensable to itinerant officials who relied on their clients, patrons, and brokers to help them govern distant regions by gathering resources and information, and implementing their objectives. Moreover, this particular case gives us a glimpse into the relationship between Villagarcía as husband and his wife, and the private assessments and negotiations surrounding the transatlantic journey.

This article examines criminal court cases about conflicts related to the electoral process at all stages from determining how elections would be administered to disputes about results. It argues that contemporary allegations of fraud, corruption, and misconduct during elections can inform us not only of the anomalies but also of the ways in which elections worked as expected, according to the laws and norms of the time. We can also see how participants defined and defended the democratic ideal. A careful reading of participants' complaints to local authorities about electoral law violations, including incidents that ended in violence, can provide important insights into partisanship, the mechanics of elections, and the formation of political culture. The use of democratic rhetoric in these complaints suggests a consensus around a democratic ideal based on free and fair elections even though that ideal was not yet realized. Through the analysis of criminal court cases, it also introduces a broad range of questions about how nineteenth-century Chileans understood and practiced democracy that suggest avenues for further research.

On May 15, 1930, in the small border town of Naco, Sonora, census enumerator Miguel Robles started to count. When he finished walking his assigned portions of Calle Hidalgo, Avenida Independencia, and Calle Morelos, he had enumerated 143 individuals, each of whom answered the single question regarding religious identity the same way: Catholic. A block over, a carpenter named Ignacio Ledgard left his tools for the day to canvas his own neighborhood, counting 252 individuals, including his own family. They also all identified as Catholic, except for two Chinese men with no religion.

In October of 1958, amidst the guerrilla war to topple Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro's Rebel Army passed an Agrarian Reform Law that would serve as an embryo for the Cuban Revolution's 1959 land reform. Relying on rare documents from the insurgency, this paper reanimates the debate over the role of peasants during the war, arguing that peasants not only helped shape the movement to topple Batista, but that their mobilization led to the articulation of important guerrilla agrarian policies—including land reform. As the liberated territories became a laboratory in which rebels experimented with how to run a state, peasants took part in civil projects, simultaneously bestowing legitimacy on the movement and harnessing its organizational apparatus for the achievement of the peasants’ own goals. In highlighting the political subjectivity of Cuban peasants, this paper also gives new insight into everyday life during the rebel insurgency.