The question of identity has been one of considerable importance to the study of race in Latin America. Particularly for the multitude of racially mixed offspring produced by miscegenation, it has been debated, what exactly was the degree of consciousness that race could produce? What degree of strength, if any, should be attributed to the caste boundaries created in the colonial period, and how did the reins of “caste” contribute to the 19th and 20th century heritage of the region? With the new and emerging research on the African Diaspora in Latin America, the question has often been asked: did the free mulatto, moreno, or pardo ever feel a specific identity, especially during colonial times, and especially when racial discourse was apparently created by, and served the interests of those who held the supreme positions of power?

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.

Land for the landless, food for the hungry, literacy for the uneducated—not through charitable works, but by forcing the state to take seriously its responsibilities to its poorest citizens. This was integral to the theology of liberation as it was practiced by bishops, priests, and nuns in Brazil beginning shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Important sectors of the Brazilian Catholic Church were “opting for the poor” at a time when economic development, modernization, and democracy were not considered appropriate or meaningful partners in the repressive environment characterized by the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).

In their zeal to transform rural society during the 1920s, Mexican educators undertook a number of projects that in retrospect seem unusual. Fancying themselves as the intellectual heirs of the earliest Catholic friars, they sent “missionaries” into the countryside to preach the gospel of progress, developed rigid definitions of the appropriate forms of rural living, and even taught school children in Mexico City to paint according to pre-Colombian styles in order to build a harmonious nation. These were indeed creative ideas, but none was more imaginative than the decision to establish a Rural Normal School in the midst of the largest urban center in the country. Established in the Anáhuac neighborhood of Mexico City in 1926, the Casa del Estudiante Indígena was hailed as the centerpiece of the government's commitment to Indian education. Inside the Casa a culturally diverse student population, speaking mutually unintelligible languages, would be transformed into models of the national culture. They would adopt modern dress and practices, learn perfect Spanish, and in turn bring the benefits of modernity to their home communities.

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.

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.

A seventeenth-century inhabitant of São Paulo once remarked that Indians were “the most profitable property in this land.” Legally, however, Indians were not property at all, for the crown explicitly prohibited their enslavement. During most of the seventeenth century, the settlers of São Paulo complied with the letter of the law and did not officially give their Indian servants any monetary value, and though they often sold them, the sales were known to be illegal and were not usually recorded in public documents, such as the documents used for this study, inventários, settlements of estates. By the end of the century, however, local judges were openly allowing the monetary appraisal of Indians and their subsequent sale was duly recorded in inventários and other court processes.

The international situation in which the early Haitian republic found itself between 1820 and 1843 aggravated its internal problems and precipitated its economic decline. The economic structure of the new country had been weakened by the destruction of the colonial sugar plantations during the war of liberation against France (1791-1804). It proved impossible to resurrect these in the republican era, because of the lack of capital and the unwillingness of the ex-slaves to return to plantation life. They wanted property of their own, and this insistence forced successive governments to distribute land to them. Only Henri Christophe, who ruled the North as a kingdom (1806-1820), succeeded in maintaining the old system through forced labor; an experiment which died with him. Dramatic as these changes were, however, they were not sufficient to prevent the resurgence of a new economy based on coffee; a crop which was well suited to peasant cultivation. The shift towards coffee exports had begun in the last years of the colonial era and accelerated in the years after 1804. An economy of smallholders engaged in the cultivation of coffee and provisions existing alongside the remaining plantations could have provided a modest foundation for economic growth. Alexandre Pétion, the first president of Haiti (1806-1818), had envisioned this possibility and it was one of the reasons which he gave for carrying out the first land reform in Latin America. Haiti was a major exporter of coffee in the first half of the nineteenth century, and there were a number of foreign merchants already present in the country to purchase the crop. Instead of economic prosperity, the years after 1820 witnessed an economic decline which made the first black nation virtually ungovernable after 1843 save by the rule of caudillos.

When I began this extended period of research into the history of nineteenth-century Peru, I was burdened with the ideas drawn from the writings of Bernard Moses and Desdedives du Dezert. In the main, they seem to think that by the end of the 18th century, the Church in Peru had grown stagnant and formalistic, forgetful of the heritage of Santo Toribio, San Martín, San Solano, or Santa Rosa.

In the spring of 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I and adopted universal, male, military conscription, American war resisters and draft dodgers known at the time as “the slackers” began to arrive in Mexico. Senator Albert Bacon Fall claimed there were 30,000 slackers hiding out in Mexico, and slacker Linn A.E. Gale agreed with him. When American adventurer, reporter and writer Harry L. Foster passed through Mexico City in 1919, he noted that there were hundreds of Americans, many of them slackers, loitering in the city’s parks and plazas.

Since the fall of Nicaragua's Somoza dynasty in 1979, nearly 900 books dealing with Central America have appeared. They repeat the themes of imperialism, paternalism, and security that traditionally have characterized studies about Central America and its relations with the U.S. The imperialist theme is pursued by Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions and Karl Berman's Under the Big Stick. They assert that the United States economically exploited and politically controlled Central America in general and Nicaragua in particular. A sense of moral righteousness is found in Tom Buckley's Violent Neighbors and Richard Alan White's The Morass while the security theme is pursued by John Findling in his Close Neighbors, Distant Friends. Histories about Central America reinforce these themes. For example, the Dean of the U.S. Central Americanists Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., and Costa Ricans Edelberto Torres-Rivas and Hector Pérez-Brignoli, and Honduran Mario Argueta demonstrate that the American businessmen capitalized upon the ignorance of region's elite for their own economic gain. Despite their diversity, all of these volumes demonstrate that the United States dominated the relationship and criticize it for so doing.

In 2006, the Newberry Library in Chicago announced its digitization of the ancient Maya-K’iche’ myth, the Popol Vuh. While digitization ensures the preservation of the document and easier access for researchers, it is also significant in that it marks a new stage in the long historical trajectory of the manuscript itself. The Popol Vuh, or “Maya Bible,” is the most studied indigenous document of Mesoamerica. Contemporary scholarship has considered it, among all the early colonial documents, to best reflect a pre-Hispanic native voice. It provides a breadth and depth of detail concerning Maya religion, cosmology, and society, and its contents have been generalized to apply to virtually all of the ancient Maya religions. Additionally, the text has been used as a source for numerous ethnohistorical studies, and its mythological context has profoundly influenced most Guatemalan literature from the early nineteenth century to the present. More important, the Popol Vuh has become a symbol of Guatemalan national “indigenousness” and was officially declared Guatemala’s national book in 1971.

In the introduction to his The Jews in the Canary Islands, Lucien Wolf wrote almost a half-century ago that “The work of the… branches of the Holy Office in America has only been made known to us piecemeal… For social data relating to the great body of Marranos the records have not hitherto been studied.” These records of the trial proceedings, called procesos, still constitute a fairly virgin field of social, religious and economic Latin American history in general and specifically for the history of Jews and Judaism.

A few have written articles about Mexican Jews in colonial times after a cursory study of a few documents and several acclaimed texts. It is, therefore, not surprising that the results are superficial and often suffused with errors. The foregoing may be illustrated by statements in an article published in the American Jewish Historical Quarterly. Among the numerous errors that appeared therein are “among 2,281 trials of the Mexican Holy Office, 351 concerned crypto-Jews…” and that “By the end of the seventeenth century, the whole crypto-Jewish community had been destroyed.”

The European practice of conceptualizing their enemies so that they could dispose of them in ways that were not in accord with their own Christian principles is well documented. In the Americas, this began with Columbus's designation of certain Indians as man-eaters and was continued by those Spanish who also wished to enslave the natives or eliminate them altogether. The word “cannibal” was invented to describe such people, and the Spanish were legally free to treat cannibals in ways that were forbidden to them in their relations with other people. By the late fifteenth century the word cannibal had assumed a place in the languages of Europe as the latest concept by which Europeans sought to categorize the “other.” As David Gordon White has shown, by the time the Spanish discovered America, barbarians were an established component of European mythology, history and theology as well as popular thought, and the categories Europeans employed to describe outsiders date as far back as the Greeks and the Egyptians before them. Therefore, it is not surprising that when they reached Mexico the Spanish easily adopted a word from Nahuatl to describe the Indian peoples of the north whom they believed to be barbarians. This word, chichimeca, which both designated and defined in a very particular way the native peoples of the north Mexican frontier, assumed in Spanish the credibility of longstanding native use, although as we shall see, this was not entirely justified.

Participation of women in the Cristero rebellion, the Catholic uprising against the anti-clerical revolutionary government of Mexico, has largely been ignored by historians. A fresh reading of the documents, and more important, conversations with the principal women in the movement, reveal that the traditional role of women in the church gave way to changed behavior in the 1920s. Not only were Catholic women of a traditionally oriented society capable of assuming leadership in a violent enterprise, but they were equally capable of falling back into their conservative patterns once the crisis had ended. Nevertheless, the vital role women played in the church-state conflict prepared them for the emerging role of women in the twentieth century.

A theme common to all regions of the Portuguese seaborne empire was dependency on non-Europeans for the creation, consolidation and survival of empire: for defense, labor, construction of towns and forts, transportation, production of raw materials, sexual gratification and, in the case of the Estado da India (Portuguese forts, towns, cities and factories from the Swahili coast to Japan and Timor), on merchants, brokers and interpreters to provide access to suppliers, distributors, commercial networks, and even vessels and capital. Through conversion, peoples from Japan to Africa and America, contributed to the flock of the church militant and, in some more limited cases, as missionaries, catechists, and secular priests. One exception was Brazil where Amerindians were not admitted into the regular or secular clergy. The one area in which the Portuguese crown was not willing to countenance indigenous participation was appointment to public office, be this in the imperial bureaucracy, or election to city or town councils other than in Cape Verde and São Tomé. In Asia and Angola persons other than of exclusively European parentage on both sides and even New Christians may have served on town councils, and some non-Europeans held clerical positions, but the policy forbidding persons of African descent to hold office in church or state was adhered to in practice. Brazil was unique in at least two regards. First, perhaps in no other European colony was dispossession (from an indigenous perspective) so complete. The Portuguese assumed sovereignty over indigenous peoples and their territories and saw Brazil as a tabula rasa where the Portuguese were free to establish cities, institutions, governance, commercial practices, and to implant their religious beliefs, writing and numeracy systems, values, and mores. Secondly, among European overseas colonies in the early modern period, Brazil was unique in that by the end of the colonial period (1822), a transplanted population of African-born and their American-born descendants comprised a demographic majority which exceeded the indigenous population and persons of European origin or descent.

Throughout the centuries of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, Africans and their descendants struggled against a social system that sought to reduce them to chattel. They found that their struggle was to continue, albeit in different forms, long after abolition. In Brazil, emancipation in 1888 was followed the next year by the demise of imperial government and the installation of the First Republic. This created a new political and legal framework for Afro-Brazilians to negotiate positions in society. Racial relations in former slave societies are not the simple result of imposed identities and social spaces by a dominant group upon an oppressed group. They evolve from a dialectical power struggle in which blacks as well as whites affect the outcome.

To observe that events are determined by historical antecedents is hardly informative. What is difficult about history is that it is rarely equally easy to find out how the past shapes the future. Central America presents an interesting case in which indigenous cultures and Spanish conquest have succeeded in reproducing old geographical patterns while the cultures and societies therein have changed in extraordinary ways. The present paper suggests how it is that some of these cultural and social relational continuities, perhaps difficult to understand apart from this long tradition, may have continued down from the pre-Columbian period to the present. A key element in the process seems to lie in the ethnic relations, those relations that have been retained between Ladinos and the state on the one hand, and the highly populous Indian population of Guatemala.

The first years of independence in Bolivia, as in all of the nations born of the Latin American wars of independence, were times of significant and often accelerated political, social and economic change. The republic created in 1825 in what was known in colonial times as Upper Peru participated fully in this important transformation. During the administration of Bolivia's first president, Antonio José de Sucre, (1825-1828) a program of ecclesiastical reform, educational and social innovation, and economic reorganization of far-reaching implications was undertaken. Upper Peru's chronic poverty, the concentration on silver mining and subsistence agriculture, excessive military expenses, hostility from neighboring countries, and the unbridled political ambitions of the military and civilians resulted in the failure of most of the reforms which might have radically altered the course of Bolivian history.