AT the accession of Isabella in 1474 the Church in Castile lay prostrate for the most part before the will of the papacy. Greater and lesser benefices were controlled from Rome, foreigners were commonly appointed to the highest dignities, and tribunals of justice were rendered impotent by interminable appeals to Rome. No less were the Castilian nobles accustomed to usurping royal authority in the civil and political branches of government. Castile was a patchwork of private jurisdictions and privileges of which Isabella was no more than a titular sovereign.

Despite a growing interest in the history of women in colonial Spanish America, the Castilian legislation which defined female juridical status has received scant attention. Some scholars have treated legal questions as a corollary to the themes of feminine endeavor and wealth. The law itself, relegated to a secondary position, has remained a maze of confusing mandates to all but a few historians who have wrestled with its directives. An analysis of the legal foundation which was central to the roles that Hispanic American women assumed in the colonies is therefore in order. The purpose of this article is accordingly to clarify pertinent legal terms, concepts, and procedures that were operative throughout the Indies. Particular emphasis is given to the subject of females as donors and beneficiaries of marital endowments and parental estates. Since the abstract legal principles are difficult to understand, concrete examples are drawn from Hispanic families in Chile to illustrate the workings of the law. These eighteenth-century cases comprise a dowry receipt, an estate settlement, and a set of testamentary dispositions. The family papers underscore the fact that norms established in peninsular legislation and applied in Spanish America constituted an important link in the chain of continuity with the past that characterized colonial life even as that life underwent change in the Bourbon era.

Most studies of relations between government and organized labor in Mexico stand firmly on the supposition that the Revolution of 1910 marked a sharp break with the past. The labor policies of the Díaz regime have alternately been described as either brutally repressive or as neutral and aloof in keeping with nineteenth century liberal doctrine (especially before 1906). If either of these somewhat contradictory characterizations are true, then the case for discontinuity in labor policies is clearly confirmed.

This essay will argue that neither description of labor policies during the Díaz regime is accurate. Rather, patterns of interaction between the Díaz government and urban working class organizations, especially in Mexico City, shaped the evolution of the Mexican labor movement and national labor policy along lines followed ever since. The Díaz government developed a flexible and sophisticated array of labor policy instruments that was based upon cooperation with and subsidies to progovernment labor organizations as well as political rewards and the other fruits of cooptation for labor leaders loyal to the regime. With its labor allies, the Díaz government promoted modes of organization which retarded labor militancy, sponsored informal as well as official mediation between workers and employers during strikes and other conflicts, and disseminated propaganda and instituted educational programs, including pro-government labor newspapers and schools for the working class, designed to promote labor's identification of its own well-being with the interests of the state. While the Revolution of 1910 and the later developments of the Cárdenas era institutionalized statelabor relations as never before, the objectives and instrumentalities of contemporary labor relations have their origin in the Porfiriato.

On July 13, 1571, King Philip II of Spain, via a real cédula, authorized the Audiencia of Santo Domingo to enact plans to “conquer” a community of African cimarrones (maroons, runaway slaves) located about 36 miles from the city of Santo Domingo. The king offered to those who ventured forth compensation in the form of the cimarrones they captured as slaves. At face value, the substance of this order was not particularly unique. Since the 1520s, runaway African slaves had formed maroon communities in remote regions bordering Spanish conquests. By the 1570s, African maroons could be found in practically every part of Spanish America. The uniqueness of Philip's order comes from the choice of language, in particular the decision to label the expedition a conquest. In most cases, the monarch or his officials used words like ‘reduce’ (reducir/reducciones), ‘pacify’ (pacificar/pacificación), ‘castigate’ (castigar), or ‘dislodge’ (desechar) to describe the goal of such campaigns. By describing an anti-maroon campaign as a conquest, this cédula went against the dominant Spanish narrative of the sixteenth century, in which resistance, especially by Africans or native groups, signified a punctuated disturbance of an ostensibly stable and coherent postconquest colonial order. The wording of the cédula, and the maroon movements to which it responded, explicitly link anti-maroon campaigns to the process of Spanish conquest. This article suggests that Spanish-maroon contestation on Hispaniola should be construed as an integral piece of a prolonged and often incomplete Spanish conquest. More importantly, this reevaluation of the conflict reveals maroons to be conquerors in their own right.

In 1796, the commander of die Guatemalan presidio of Peten, Jose de Galvez, together with its leading prelate and the caciques of the nearby pueblos of San Andres and San Jose, registered a formal complaint: an increasing number of runaway black slaves from Belize taking refuge there had been marrying Maya women in their villages. The officials objected to these unions, stating that they did not want “their blood mixed with these newly Christian blacks” and alleged that the asylum seekers took Maya brides in thinly disguised attempts to exploit native female labor. The cacique of San Andres, don Raimundo Chata, backed by the leading civil and ecclesiastical authorities in a rare moment of unity, advocated the removal of the escaped slaves to a site set aside for blacks on the other side of Lake Peten (see map in Figure 1). The result of this proposed policy of segregation was the creation of a “new pueblo for blacks converted to the faith.”

This article examines the data contained in the last volume of our five-part index of 16th Century Spanish emigrants to the New World. Originally entitled the Indice geobiográfico de 40, 000 pobladores españoles de América en el siglo XVI, the series in fact now furnishes biographical data on a total of roughly 55,000 individual men, women, and children, known to have emigrated to the Indies before 1600, whose birthplace we have identified from contemporary records. So far we have found publishers only for the first two of these five useful reference volumes, however a series of articles in both Spanish and English have presented our findings on each of the roughly twenty-year periods into which we have divided that all-important century during which Spanish colonial society was first taking shape. Though in conducting this basic research our primary goal has always been a linguistic one, i.e., to shed light on the early dialect differentiation of New World Spanish, the work is designed to be of use to historians and sociologists also.

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 as well as 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 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.

In the early eighteenth century, two Basque brothers of the Spanish Zangroniz family established a trading house in the Cuban capital. Through the expansion and diversification of their business activities over time, they created a powerful transatlantic commercial network, and in the process became important actors during a period characterized by vastly increased economic integration in the Atlantic world. Behind this growth were technological innovations. The brothers' shrewd use of them “made it possible to transport more and different kinds of items across great distances.

Writing in 1904, the Chilean intellectual Nicolás Palacios bitterly complained that his fellow-countrymen inhabiting the southern frontier provinces were “orphans” in their own land. The simile was appropriate. Since the 1870's, the government, through its land policy, systematically and deliberately had excluded Chile's wage-labor class from property ownership in the frontier. As a direct result, many Chilean laborers fell to peonage while European immigrants and wealthy Chileans acquired ownership of much of the public domain. Shortly before World War I, social and political pressures in Chile forced the government to end this discriminatory policy and to begin distributing the remainder of the public domain to nativeborn settlers.

On July 20, 1740, King Philip V of Spain was given paperwork regarding a dispute over the adjudication of a notarial office in Panama City and, as usual, he was expected to make a decision. The king also had in hand recommendations from the Cámara of the Consejo de Indias. The king would have handled the case in a relatively straightforward manner, but for one fact—the two notaries involved in the public bid were of African descent.

The issues involved in the topic of Jesuit wealth have excited observers and investigators since the sixteenth century. Their contemporaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries commonly believed that financial shrewdness and a deep involvement in commerce made the Order fabulously wealthy. From the time of the celebrated disputes with Bishop Cárdenas in Paraguay and Bishop Palaf ox in Mexico in the 1640’s, their detractors have considered the fact of their apparent wealth and rumored activities primafacie evidence of scandalous behavior, and so published many unsubstantiated allegations in their attacks on the Order. Even their admirers held the same views of Jesuit wealth and financial ability although they drew different conclusions concerning the effect of involvement with Mammon on Jesuit morals.

Support by a segment of industrialists for Juan Perón has been a crucial feature of much writing about Peronism. This has been sustained by such diverse authors as Torcuato Di Tella, Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Portantiero, and Guillermo O'Donnell. Moreover, in many discussions of the nature of populism—in which Peronism is considered an epitome of the phenomenon—a critical role is played by a multiclass alliance which included both workers and industrialists. Yet in 1945 industrialists as a group did not support Perón. The year 1945 is critical to any discussion of the nature of Peronism because it was then that Perón built his core constituency. In addition, there occurred what can only be considered the founding myth of Peronism—the massive workers' demonstration of October 17. Later Perón was able to expand his support, but his base was created in 1945. In order to better understand both the development of Perón's support and then to reflect on what this tells us about the nature of populism, the relationship between Perón and industrialists will be explored from the military's seizure of power in June 1943 to the presidential elections in February 1946. During this period—although Perón was rapidly gathering power—he was not formally head of the government.

Two days before Easter 1916, a teacher in the Mérida ferrocarrilleros’ school demolished a pine statue of Saint Joseph with an axe to show “it was simply a monkey on a stick (un tucho de palo)”; students then hacked up smaller icons before approving parents. During the Cristiada, General Eulogio Ortíz ate consecrated hosts with carnitas de puerco in a public market in Zacatecas. Constitutionalist military proconsuls in 1914-15, leftist regional caudillos of the 1920s, and federal educators and some provincial strongmen during the Maximato (1931-35) all believed anticlericalism would build a new nation; these three waves of attacks against the Catholic clergy proved to be decisive moments in revolutionary state formation. At no point, however, did revolutionaries agree on either means or ends. Radicals favored the destruction of the Church (if not organized religion entirely). Their reliance on iconoclasm—literal as well as metaphorical—also distinguished them. Some iconoclastic radicals hoped their attacks would help create a humanistic, post-Christian belief system. More moderate anticlericals advocated less destructive and more persuasive measures, including using education and the law to weaken and/or reform Catholicism. Some moderates promoted alternative creeds; others hoped to remake the Catholic Church in Mexico. Certainly iconoclasts and reformers did collaborate at times, but they also clashed, as in the rancorous debates over the “religious question” at the Querétaro Constitutional Convention and again when anticlerical Reds and moderate Whites battled during the early 1930s.

In 2006, Mexico City's Museo Franz Meyer held an exhibition titled Creating a Modern Mexico, celebrating the furniture designs of Clara Porset y Dumas. This exhibition and a growing literature on her work by design historians during the first decades of the twenty-first century have helped establish Porset as the highest-profile pioneer of industrial and interior design in twentieth-century Mexico.

In the 1530’s, as Mexico and then Peru began sending eastward the treasure which would so profoundly affect European life, the town of Guayaquil was established on the coast of present-day Ecuador. During the next three centuries Guayaquil developed into a society fundamentally different from and even antithetical to those of the great highland capitals. Agriculture, industry, and commerce, rather than mining, became the mainstays of Guayaquil’s economy. The decline of indigenous population on the coast and an influx of free Negroes from the north rendered an egalitarian and racially mixed people of low social differentiation. Cacao grown on the coastal lowlands provided the thrust for a wide range of trade and manufacturing activities. Yet tensions between location on a main imperial trade route and the stifling commercial control of nearby Lima resolved into a rough-and-tumble political system which thrived on contraband and autonomy. By the early nineteenth century Guayaquil had achieved a large measure of independence from Spain, and it played an important role in the liberation movements of western South America. After sketching the early development of the city, we will examine in some detail the system of labor and production in Guayaquil during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then the city’s precocious autonomy within the colonial system will be discussed, prior to a concluding assessment of the social outcomes of Guayaquil’s development by the time of Independence.

In recent years, an impressive effort has been made to supersede established interpretations of religious conflict in revolutionary Mexico that dismissed religious motivations as superstructural derivatives of “true” socio-economic and political factors. This has been accomplished by— pardon the cliché—“bringing religion back in” to the study of the Mexican Revolution. Yet while our post-secular understanding of Mexican religions and their impact has been vastly enhanced, the same cannot be said of revolutionary anticlericalism and irreligiosity, which have similarly been dismissed as mere tools in the hands of a cynical, Machiavellian revolutionary leadership intent on mystifying a credulous people.

As the recent clashes in Mexico City's metropolitan cathedral show, it is not just clericalism that is making an apparent comeback in post-priísta Mexico: clericalism's faithful alter ego, anticlericalism—provoked to violence when clanking church bells disturbed a political rally in the zócalo in November 2007—is also stirring anew. This dialectical affinity between rival ideological traditions goes back a long way, as historic clashes over church bells—auditory symbols of institutional jurisdiction and influence—remind us: and yet, as Alan Knight points out, neither the terrain, nor the terms, of the dispute between clericalism/anticlericalism have been mapped out with enough clarity by Mexicanist historians. The 1910-40 revolution, for instance, is associated with various anticlericalisms— be it the protestant variety studied by Jean-Pierre Bastian; the constitutionalists' liberal clerophobia, irrupting circa 1914; masonic, spiritist, or popular anticlericalisms; or the “socialist” god-burning of the 1930s which climaxed in the iconoclasm studied by Adrian Bantjes. This trajectory— from priest-baiting to dechristianization within a generation—makes it tempting to posit an irreligious revolution, whose anticlericalism was a precursory form of mature godlessness. Some revolutionaries, like Tomás Garrido Canabal in Tabasco, encouraged such a conflation by using anticlerical restrictions—especially state licensing of priests, enshrined in constitutional Article 130—in a vindictive and secularizing way: squeezing the clergy so hard that priests were eradicated, not just rubber-stamped by the state. Such figures clearly hoped that persecuting priests would fatally mine belief: the day would come, Adalberto Tejeda hoped in 1926, when religion would expire and churches become places of recreation for apostate Indians. The Roman Catholic clergy, meanwhile, was fond of denouncing anticlericals as deicides, if not devils, and reinforced its own position by encouraging the association of anticlericalism with anti-Catholicism in the minds of the faithful.

[our goal] is nothing less that the coordination of the living forces of Mexican Catholic youth for the purpose of restoring Christian social order in Mexico …

(A.C.J.M.’s “General Statutes”)

The Mexican Catholic Youth Association emerged during the Mexican Revolution dedicated to the goal of creating lay activists with a Catholic vision for society. The history of this Jesuit organization provides insights into Church-State relations from the military phase of the Mexican Revolution to its consolidation in the 1920s and 1930s. The Church-State conflict is a basic issue in Mexico's political struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the Church mobilizing forces wherever it could during these years dominated by anticlericalism. During the 1920s, the Mexican Catholic Youth Association (A.C.J.M.) was in the forefront of the Church's efforts to respond to the government's anticlerical policies. The A.C.J.M.’s subsequent estrangement from the top Church leadership also serves to highlight the complex relationship that existed between the Mexican bishops and the Catholic laity and the ideological divisions that existed within Mexico's Catholic community as a whole.

Agriculture was at the center of the Poblano indigenous communal economy, and therefore, successful harvests were the motor of the community's survival. The struggle to retain land by Indians was a fundamental part of their quest to retain a viable community, but for some, an equally important task was to maintain control of water rights. The central place of sufficient water resources for the well-being of the collectivity was often expressed when village elders complained that its loss led to migration of substantial numbers to more vital economic regions. As such, the defense of water resources had a more important place in the survival mechanisms of indigenous groups than usually accorded it by scholars.

The statue of the Christ of the Andes commemorates the termination of a sixty-year boundary controversy that on several occasions brought Argentina and Chile to the brink of war. The dispute amicably resolved by King Edward VII of England in 1902 grew out of the Treaty of 1881, in which the two nations agreed for the first time on the boundaries in Patagonia, and in the Straits of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego, that we take for granted today. The dispute that preceded the Treaty of 1881 was long and bitter. For although Patagonia and the adjacent areas were without question possessions of the Spanish crown, official neglect throughout the colonial period had denied to either successor state a clear title over them based on uti possidetis.