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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Of all the issues raised by the Mexican Revolution, none has stimulated artistic creativity more than that of the Indian, his past, his culture and his exclusion from the mainstream of national life. At the same time, no artistic form provides so thorough a treatment of these issues as the indigenista novel.

While the Revolution was not launched by Indians, nor were their interests initially central to it, as it developed their problems became a natural and important issue in the reorganization of Mexican society. As one writer observes: “in attempting to organize Mexican society, the mestizo revolutionary has had no other choice but to take into consideration the indigenous factor, so that although the Revolution was not the work of the Indian, in certain ways it has been for his benefit.”2