Research on women in colonial Latin America is a complex and often frustrating task, in part because the data base is narrow, especially as one descends the social ladder, which often restricts the subject to women from the elite sectors in urban settings. Too often writing on colonial women is based on a “Great Woman” approach to history in which modern concerns about feminism and women's liberation are imposed on traditional, patriarchical historical epochs where these precepts have little meaning or application. There are indications, however, that this orientation is changing. A recent collection of studies about women in colonial societies, for example, compares the economic, political, and social roles of women in twelve different colonial situations, including Peru and New Spain, and considers the changes wrought by European civilization. From an anthropological and historical perspective, the authors compare the position of women in various premodern societies prior to the emergence of the world capitalist system in an effort to determine the historic origins of inequality and subordination.

“I, Juan Garrido, black resident [de color negro vecino] of this city [Mexico], appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of making a probanza to the perpetuity of the king [a perpetuad rey], a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [Cortés] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out, always with the said Marqués, all of which I did at my own expense without being given either salary or allotment of natives [repartimiento de indios] or anything else. As I am married and a resident of this city, where I have always lived; and also as I went with the Marqués del Valle to discover the islands which are in that part of the southern sea [the Pacific] where there was much hunger and privation; and also as I went to discover and pacify the islands of San Juan de Buriquén de Puerto Rico; and also as I went on the pacification and conquest of the island of Cuba with the adelantado Diego Velázquez; in all these ways for thirty years have I served and continue to serve Your Majesty—for these reasons stated above do I petition Your Mercy. And also because I was the first to have the inspiration to sow maize here in New Spain and to see if it took; I did this and experimented at my own expense.”

On April 5, 1723, Juan Joseph de Porras, a mulatto slave laboring in an obraje de paños (woolen textile mill) near Mexico City, appeared before the Holy Office of the Inquisition for blasphemy. According to the testimony of six slaves, including Porras’ wife, while his co-workers prepared to bed down for the night in the obraje Porras had blasphemed over a beating he had received from the mayordomo (overseer) earlier in the day. Señor Pedregal, the owner of the obraje, testified that Porras was one of nearly thirty workers, all Afro-Mexican slaves or convicts, who lived and labored in his obraje without the freedom to leave.

The case against Juan Joseph de Porras and dozens of others like it in the Mexican archives raise important questions, not only about the makeup of the colonial obraje labor force, but also about the importance of Afro-Mexican slavery in the middle of the colonial period. Was the Pedregal labor force, composed entirely of slaves and convicts, the exception or the rule within obrajes of New Spain? If it was not exceptional, how important were slaves to that obraje and others like it? What exactly was the demographic makeup of the obraje labor force in the middle of the colonial period? And, how might the answers to those questions change our understanding of the histories of labor and slavery in colonial Mexico?

The image of the lone and footloose venturer, all but penniless, striking out for the Indies seeking immediate enrichment, has long since given way to a more balanced picture of the Spanish settlers of the New World in the sixteenth century. This revised picture suggests that the Spanish emigrants had their origins principally in a wide middle sector of social and occupational groups, ranging from hidalgos below the level of the high nobility, professionals and officials, to artisans and tradespeople of all sorts, farmers, and an impressive number of “servants.” One component of the earlier image of Spanish emigrants—the down-on-his lick hidalgo whose pride and sense of honor propelled him to the Indies in hope of improving his fortunes—survived the transition to the revised idea now accepted, his reputation somewhat rehabilitated but his presence undeniable. Stereotypes notwithstanding, the image of the cadet sons of hidalgo families and of relatively poor hidalgos going off to the Indies has considerable basis in fact; it is a reflection of the realities of Spanish family and social structure that sent the same type of individual into religious orders, universities, or the army. But while a basic truth gave rise to the longstanding cliche, we still know relatively little of what lies behind it—nor, for that matter, do we know very much about the hidalgos and provincial nobility of Spain, the sector (as opposed to the high titled nobility) that entered into the Indies venture in the sixteenth century in some numbers.

The question of the jurisdiction of the Holy Office of the Inquisition over the native populations in New Spain and the rest of the empire has been one of controversy and confusion since the earliest days of the conquest. The perplexing problem of enforcing orthodoxy among the recently converted Indians was linked with the debate over whether or not the Indian was a rational human being who had the capacity to comprehend the Roman Catholic faith and enjoy the full sacramental system of the Church. As in the case of the rationality controversy, the position of the Indian vis-à-vis the Holy Office of the Inquisition was not resolved articulately, and after the first decades of the spiritual conquest the question took on added importance as the Mexican clergy discovered recurrent idolatry and religious syncretism among their flocks.

Mining had far-reaching ecological consequences throughout much of colonial Spanish America. It deformed the landscape, introduced pollutants such as sulfur, mercury and salt into the biosphere, and caused human settlement of sparsely populated or uninhabited regions. Forests succumbed to the charcoal makers' axes. Workers' lungs filled with silicosis-causing dust. Cave-ins snuffed out lives or crippled those they spared.

As unhealthy as mining was elsewhere in Spanish America, it was reported to have been especially harmful in the central Andes at Huancavelica. Workers there suffered the common diseases and injuries associated with the industry such as respiratory disease and broken limbs. They also had to overcome the challenges of arduous labor at high altitude. Most pernicious of all was the toxic nature of the mercury they were mining. Colonial critics asserted that Huancavelica was an environmental tragedy that placed workers in exceptionally dangerous conditions in order to produce the mercury needed by silver refiners to amalgamate and refine their ores. The critics claimed that the mercury mines' human cost was immoral, yet their cries of despair and outrage could not overcome quicksilver's crucial importance to the imperial economy. Killing and maiming, Huancavelica earned for itself an infamous reputation as the mina de la muerte (the mine of death).

The relative absence of riots in colonial Mexico City is an intriguing phenomenon which has attracted the recent attention of scholars interested in questions of social stability and conflict. While the Mexican countryside experienced over 130 rebellions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the cities by comparison remained calm. The most cogent explanation of urban lower class passivity during the late colonial period has been formulated by Eric Van Young, who suggests that a number of short- and long-term social and economic forces converged to keep the cities, most notably Mexico City, relatively quiet during the wars for independence. Among those he noted were the existence of urban social service and food-distribution institutions, the presence of security forces, an atomized and fluid social order, the lack of traditional communal rights to defend, and weak organizational means to focus discontent.

Atourist arriving in Mexico City in the early summer of 1968 would have found the capital awash in color, an air of expectation and optimism everywhere palpable as the country finalized last-minute preparations for the Olympic Games, scheduled to commence that October. Yellow, blue, and pink banners framing a white dove of peace lit up major thoroughfares. Throughout the city, numerous commercial billboards had been replaced with photographs of cultural and physical activity related to the Games; in one corner, was the omnipresent peace dove. Other enormous images laced the skyline: caricatured line drawings of school children, a family portrait, anonymous faces in a crowd. “Everything is Possible in Peace,” the new billboards proclaimed in a multitude of languages—set against a background of hot pink and vibrant yellow. Along a designated “Route of Friendship” that extended across the southern part of the city, large abstract sculptures of brightly painted concrete by artists of international renown could be observed in various stages of completion. The country's official logo for the Games—“MEXICO68”—whose evident Op Art influence was designed to evoke a moving, modernist feel, was omnipresent; so too were the hundreds of young edecanes (event hostesses), whose uniformed miniskirts and pantsuits were emblazoned with a graphic representation of the logo. The viewer could scarcely have avoided the sensation of a city, a country on the verge of something spectacular.

Scholars have long taken interest in the conversion of African slaves to Christianity in the New World which have mixed, to one degree or another, African religious forms with Christianity. The process has been studied in greatest depth by sociologists, such as Roger Bastide, anthropologists like Melville Herskovitts or art historians such as Robert Farris Thompson. Although the most devoted of the scholars concerned with this have not been historians, and much of the basic research has been in current practices rather than historic origins of African and Afro-New World religions, all scholars share some vision of the historical process. In this vision African and European religions and world views meshed in a past which is far beyond the memory of modern informants and probably dates back to the early days of Afro-European contacts.

Shortly after the Spanish conquests in Mesoamerica (or, as the colonizers termed it, New Spain), friars chiefly of the Franciscan and Dominican orders taught the art of alphabetic writing to the indigenous elite. As a result the colonial period saw the production of an extensive body of documentation—overwhelmingly notarial and largely legal in nature—by Mesoamerica's indigenous peoples, written in their own languages but using the Roman alphabet. The language best represented in the surviving material (and thus in the ethnohistorical literature) is Nahuatl, often misleadingly called Aztec but in fact widely spoken throughout central Mexico. Yucatec Maya places a distant second in terms of known records, probably followed in order of magnitude by Mixtec. While this article will focus primarily upon these three tongues, it should also be noted that scholars have investigated a small but significant body of Cakchiquel and Quiché materials from highland Guatemala, and that there are also known to exist unstudied sources in Chocho, Cuicatec, Mixe, Otomí, Tarascan, Totonac, and Zapotec; other Mesoamerican languages may also have been written alphabetically in the colonial period.

Regional separatism in Mexico, especially in the north, has been one of the most persistent and difficult to explain problems in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. It is well known that men of the north (norteños) made the Revolution, in large part, and finally succeeded in winning political power. But norteños, even those who followed Francisco I. Madero and after his fall, continued the struggle under the Constitutionalist banner, failed to agree among themselves either on their aims or their leaders. Leaving aside the questions of motive and ultimate objectives of the major separatists—Pascual Orozco and Francisco “Pancho” Villa in Chihuahua, Esteban Cantú Jiménez in Baja California Norte, and the triumvirate of Alvaro Obregón, Plutarco Elías Calles and Adolfo de la Huerta in Sonora—the question of how they financed their independent courses during and after the Constitutionalist victory remains. The following pages represent a preliminary inquiry into the role of illicit drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States in the era of the Mexican Revolution and its contribution to regional autonomy. Patterns and practice of medical and personal usage, as well as supply and demand in both countries are considered for opium, its derivatives, cocaine and alcoholic beverages, along with the gambling and prostitution associated with this trade. The interaction of all these activities and the governmental revenue derived from them, are treated in detail for Baja California Norte. The combined evidence clearly shows the potential governmental income from this clandestine traffic and strongly suggests the hypothesis that illicit trafficking provided a financial base for regional autonomy and separatism during the Revolution.

The Holy Office of the Inquisition in colonial Mexico had as its purpose the defense of Spanish religion and Spanish-Catholic culture against individuals who held heretical views and people who showed lack of respect for religious principles. Inquisition trials of Indians suggest that a prime concern of the Mexican Church in the sixteenth century was recurrent idolatry and religious syncretism. During the remainder of the colonial period and until 1818, the Holy Office of the Inquisition continued to investigate Indian transgressions against orthodoxy, and to provide the modern researcher with unique documentation for the study of mixture of religious beliefs. The “Procesos de Indios” and other subsidiary documentation from Inquisition archives present crucial data for the ethnologist and ethnohistorian, preserving for him a view of native religion at the time of Spanish contact, eyewitness accounts of post-conquest idolatry and sacrifice, burial rites, native dances and ceremonies as well as data on genealogy, social organization, political intrigues, and cultural dislocation as the Iberian and Mesoamerican civilizations collided. As “culture shock” continued to reverberate across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Inquisition manuscripts reveal the extent of Indian resistance or accommodation to Spanish Catholic culture.

Inspired in part by Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic paradigm, the past several years have witnessed a reinvigoration of Black Studies, with careful attention being paid to the approaches and methods of writing black history. The terms “African Diaspora” and “Black Diaspora” have become almost commonplace in scholarly discourse, emerging out of relative obscurity from their roots in the politically inspired Pan-Africanist and Civil Rights discourses of the 1950s and ’60s. Critiques of the Black Atlantic model and its overly narrow concentration on the English-speaking world have fueled new and important discussions that have touched fields and subfields well beyond the traditional boundaries of Black Studies.

The history of African slave societies in the New World can be divided into three distinct phases—formation, maturity and decline. The third, the demise of the slave order, will be the focus of attention in the present discussion. There appear to be three general patterns to the decline of slave societies in the Americas. The first, exemplified by the United States and Haiti, came quickly, but at a time when the slave order was deeply entrenched, engendering profound resistance accompanied by a civil war. In the second, demonstrated by Cuba and Brazil, it occurred over the course of a few decades, involving a more varied combination of international pressure, slave resistance and a transformation of the labor regime utilizing both recently freed slaves and imported foreign workers. Of the third prototype, in which Mexico and Colombia represent cases in point, it was a seemingly undramatic, very slow process encompassing several generations, during which slavery appeared to wither away. This essay will examine the fate of slavery in Mexico, a topic which has been mentioned in various works, but has not been examined in detail. It is important not only for comparative purposes, but also for understanding the social history of late-colonial Mexico.

In the nineteen twenties a group of graduates from the Colegio de San Nicolás and the Universidad Michoacana in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán, drafted a program for the economic and social development of the countryside that, in the next decade, influenced federal policies and ideas about health care. This article examines the ideas and efforts of two Morelian physicians, Jesús Díaz Barriga (1891-1971) and Enrique Arreguín Vélez (1907-1989) who, during the 1920s and early 1930s, developed an incipient system of rural health in Michoacán. In 1935 they organized the First Congreso of Rural Hygiene, an event which they hoped would launch a state-managed system of rural health, and eventually the socialization of medicine in Mexico.

The “horseman of hope,” Brazil's “undefeated column”—much is known about the legendary Luis Carlos Prestes and his rebel column's march through thirteen Brazilian states in the 1920s. Indeed, legends are made of such stuff. Roughly one thousand rebellious federal soldiers and state policemen pushed their way through 25,000 kilometers of Brazil's isolated interior. Forced marches day and night helped them elude capture and defeat from late 1924 until they chose exile in Bolivia in early 1927. Soon the column's fame and impact reached worldwide. Even today, for example, the study of Prestes's tactics is still a part of Red Army officer training in China.

This article examines the creation, in the 1930s, of restaurants, known as restaurantes populares, which were funded and run by the Peruvian state in order to “solve the urgent problem of [the provision of] easy, comfortable and healthy nutrition to the popular classes.”

The existence of racial democracy in Brazil has long since come into serious question. The work of sociologists like Florestan Fernandes and historians like Carl Degler has demonstrated the fact of racial discrimination in Brazil, yet the history of race relations in Brazil still seems to stand in contrast to that of the United States. Occurrences of widespread racial violence and the organization of militant movements for social, economic, and political equality take up little space in the historical literature dealing with Brazil. The apparent lack of endemic racial conflict in Brazil has been explained as the result of the marginalization of black people in Brazilian capitalism or as the result of a social mechanism like Degler's “mulatto escape hatch,” which separates the mass of black people from their natural leaders. Consequently, a consciousness of racial solidarity did not develop as the basis for political organization. Without such organization, black people could not effectively confront the white power structure on the issues of race, and, ultimately, class discrimination.

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.

On a spring morning in 1919, worshipers leaving Mexico City’s cathedral were horrified to discover the body of a little girl who had fallen to her death from the Hotel del Seminario. Yet as far as the Excélsior newspaper was concerned, the tragedy that had ended that morning had actually begun with her conception. Her mother was a prostitute who lived in the hotel and busybody guests reported that the mother neglected her child. On the day of Domitila’s death, her mother was not at the hotel, as she had been admitted to the Morelos Hospital, which specialized in syphilitic prostitutes. The hotel’s guests did their best to care for Domitila, giving her food, affection, and chiding when she played on balconies: one moment of inattention allowed the tragedy. The article concluded that perhaps it was for Domitila’s own good that she had died falling off a balcony. Readers did not need to be told why Domitila was better off dead, because the case encapsulated common anxieties about childhood and parenting in Porfirian and revolutionary Mexico.