Just as the Nazi destruction of European Jewry during World War II led to the dramatic dissemination of the realities of genocide in the 1940s, so a painful corollary to the more recent breakdown of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has been the all too familiar newsworthiness of the concept of ethnic cleansing, i.e., the forcible and unheroic eviction of undesired groups. The practice of applying varying degrees of coercion and/or violence to purge national, religious and other minorities, though, is far older than the inception of either of the aforementioned multiethnic states, let alone their disintegration, and it is not limited to these particular countries. Such a dilemma—the presence of implacable competitors for political supremacy over the same territory—is a position with certain similarities to that of Palestine and early Israel in the first half of this century, especially after binational and other minimalist solutions were deemed irrelevant by the respective mainstreams of the Jewish and Palestinian national movements.

Since early times civil and religious authorities of New Spain showed considerable interest in population statistics of New Mexico. Such an interest was directly related to the peculiarities of settlement in the province since the Reconquest, fourteen years after the bloody Indian uprising of 1680. From then on, control over New Mexico could only be sustained with great difficulty—final pacification could not be achieved until the late eighteenth century—for a purely geopolitical reason: keeping New Mexico for the Crown as a defensive bulwark in the northern approaches of New Spain against the penetration of hostile Indians and foreigners. In that sense, the Franciscan missions performed a decisive role in affirming the Spanish occupation of the territory.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and first three decades of this one, a small though increasing number of Middle Easterners–principally Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians–made their way to the Americas. Hitherto a little studied influx, the Arabic speakers were part of the largely southern European immigration that reached Latin America in general, and Argentina in particular. Included among the arrivals were the forebears of such future heads of state as Argentina's Carlos Saúl Menem, Bolivia's Juan Pereda Asbún, Colombia's Julio César Turbay Ayala, the Dominican Republic's Elías Wessín y Wessín, or Uruguay's Alberto Abdala, and of such presidential hopefuls as Paulo Salim Maluf (Brazil), Abdala Bucaram (Ecuador), and Jorge Dager (Venezuela). Their spectacular rise, in many cases achieved by the first generation of the immigrants' local offspring, must not obscure the fact that the Arabic speakers were generally undesired. That much was clearly spelled out in the legislation of various countries. Unlike some of her sister states, Argentina, the region's principal absorber, did not seek to block the Middle Easterners' entry before 1928. This was so irrespective of the Argentine constitution's bias in favor of European immigration, the preference for north Europeans shown by the country's elites and their illdisguised disdain for the Arabic speakers, among other ethnic and religious groups. Hence, as the numbers of Syro-Lebanese taking advantage of the absence of Argentine barriers rose, they became the victims of xenophobic attacks, especially since the 1880s.

The rebellion of 1932 in El Salvador is commonly described in the context of communism and the leadship role of the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS). Relying on previously unavailable archive materials from Russia and El Salvador, the present article demonstrates that the PCS played a limited role in the rebellion. Factional infighting and a strategy that collided with social realities in western El Salvador combined to inhibit PCS influence among western peasants. The evidence suggests that Indian communities were at the forefront of the rebellion, as an extention of their long history of political mobilization.

In 1773, a Mexico City expert in gold embroidery named don José Mariano Sánchez de Salazar Zitlalpopoca petitioned for a license to operate his own shop and take on apprentices. As handling precious metals was politically and economically sensitive, such professions were by law exclusive, open only to those of proven character, standing, and reputation—qualities understood to be inherited by blood. Thus, to establish his sufficiency for the license don José called forth witnesses to his family's honor, reputation, and good lineage.

No Revolution worthy of the name has stopped at its national borders. For good and for evil revolution is exportable. Numerous studies have been made of the international and even the global results of such modern upheavals as the English, American, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Although several treatises have been published on the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and its creation of the first Negro republic and second independent nation in the New World, there has appeared no full-scale survey of its foreign significance. Inescapably, many histories of the Dominican Republic indicate the pervasive postrevolutionary relations of Haiti and her eastern neighbor on Hispaniola. Dominican life has been moulded in every sense by reactions to Haitian events, particularly the Haitian attempt to assimilate that republic and several eastward migrations of Haitian people. Otherwise, studies of the Haitian uprising have been limited to internal changes or the extensive diplomatic relations of the Black Republic.

COLONIZATION of the Negro somewhere beyond the territorial limits of the United States had an irresistible appeal to many nineteenth-century Americans anxious to steer a middle course between abolitionist and pro-slavery extremists. Though united in believing the colored man to be an intruder impossible to assimilate into the predominant Anglo-Saxon culture, colonizationists could never agree on the methods or the agencies of removal, nor on the site for the new Negro homeland. Thomas Jefferson suggested the Louisiana Purchase; others spoke of Florida, Texas, the trans-Mississippi West. As the frontier pressed forward, Canada became a more favored spot, and Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. The American Colonization Society, a national philanthropic body with auxiliaries north and south, sent some twelve thousand Negroes to their protege state of Liberia on the west coast of Africa.

Between 1840 and 1847 the Mexican province of Yucatán witnessed a remarkable explosion of rural political violence. Contemporaries were well aware of the trend, for they referred to it through vivid phrases such as “uprisings,” “murder and other excesses,” “restless and turbulent spirits,” and “the storm which threatens us close at hand.” And by all accounts these episodes were something new to the society. Indeed, Yucatán had suffered a good deal less violence than had other regions of Mexico. Until 1847 nothing here had remotely approached the chaos of the Hidalgo revolt or the Morelos insurgency. It is impossible for historians, just as it was for contemporary observers, to avoid connecting the violence to the Caste War, the massive rural rebellion which would erupt in 1847. But what was the connection? And what does the political violence tell us about the nature of rural Mexican society?

The Document entitled “Conversión de los San Luiseños de la Alta California,” by the Luiseño Indian, Pablo Tac, who was born at the California Mission of San Luis Rey de Francia in 1822, and who died in Italy in 1841, is of unusual interest both as an historical and ethnographic record, but perhaps most of all because it is the unique instance of an account of California Mission Indian life written by an Indian. It may also be claimed as the first writing of a literary nature produced by a native of California, even though there may be legal instruments, commercial notes and personal letters by native Californians bearing earlier dates. Although the culture of the Luiseño Indians is fairly well known from the work of modern anthropologists, Tac’s account is certainly the only written description of it by a Luiseño, brief and incomplete though it is.

The mystical and supernatural experiences that many nuns faced in seventeenth-century convents in Puebla shaped New Spain's spirituality. These experiences and the way they were recounted provided the elements for an archetype of conduct and for socially accepted virtues. Using their imagination, these nuns, servants of God, enlightened and morally exemplary, maintained a direct relationship between the convent, the supernatural world, and colonial society.

Anthropological studies of popular religion have emphasized, almost exclusively, the collective and public aspects of religious expression but have ignored private, individual piety. Yet collective and private religious expressions have been linked throughout history. When individual manifestations of religious expression were socially endorsed, these private forms of piety influenced the creation of identity and models of behavior. Because these archetypes of religious conduct were so important within colonial culture as a whole, it is important to gain an understanding of the events that led to their formation and the way in which they travelled from the culture of the convent to that of the larger society.

On October 8, 1930, on her way to the Plaza Hidalgo in Mexico City to purchase alfalfa for her employer's poultry, Elvira C. was forced into a police truck. Despite her protests, she was taken to a detention center known as El Carmen. The 28 year old widow from Puebla was arrested for begging and placed in the custody of Mexico City's Public Welfare Agency. After four-and-a-half months in welfare institutions, a social worker recorded Elvira's work history, inquired into her living situation and drinking habits, and visited her place of residence and her place of work. The social worker finally concluded that Elvira was not a beggar and should be released. On March 18, 1931, over five months after being detained, Elvira was ordered released.

Women played a significant but, until recently, largely overlooked role in the complex and destructive civil war known as the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. A number of women trained and educated in the vocational and normal schools and molded by the incipient feminist movement of the Porfirian era actively sought involvement in the struggle during its various phases. A much larger number of women of the rural and urban lower classes found themselves caught up in the struggle and had no choice but to become actively involved, especially in the military aspects of the Revolution. Still others, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and including women of every class, were among the victims and casualties of that conflict. Lastly, women of primarily but not exclusively middle and upperclass origins who strongly identified with the Catholic Church became active and bitter enemies of the decidedly anti-clerical leadership of the Revolution.

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda epitomizes in many ways, both personally and intellectually, the cosmopolitanism of Spanish political thought in the sixteenth century. Educated in Italy, disciple of Pomponazzi, translator of Aristotle, chronicler of the Emperor and mentor of his son Philip, Sepúlveda is best known—and often misunderstood as the defender of the more unsavory aspects of the Spanish conquest and colonization in America—for his bitter controversy with Bartolomé de las Casas. To that debate Sepúlveda brought a humanist's training and outlook anchored in his devotion to Aristotle, but strongly tempered by his attachment to Saint Augustine. It is the purpose of this paper to examine Sepúlveda's ideas on the nature of the American natives, particularly the question of whether the Indians are natural slaves. Considerations of space, of course, rule out the possibility of undertaking here a detailed scrutiny of the foundations upon which those ideas rest. It can be said, however, that they are typically Renaissance views, a blend of traditions characteristic of the composite nature of the age's intellectual milieu.

Much has been written about race and race stereotyping in Brazil in relation to African-Brazilians and their mixed African-European descendants. The situation of Indians and their mixed-blood descendants has been studied much less. In fact, the word mestizo as it is used in Spanish America does not translate well into Portuguese, for in Portuguese a mestiço can be any mixture. In the case of Brazil, it can mean either a descendant of Indian-European parents or of African-European parents.

This paper studies racial classifications in seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth-century São Paulo. São Paulo was a unique region in colonial Brazil and, because of its unique history, these findings cannot be automatically extrapolated to all other parts of Brazil. São Paul was very poor, especially if compared to the northeast, and later to Minas Gerais, the center of the gold and diamond mining region. Though the town was founded in 1554, it lacked exportable natural resources until the late eighteenth century, so that the economy was partly based on the raising of a few cattle and crops for subsistence or for sale locally or to other regions of Brazil. The labor needs of Paulistas (inhabitants of São Paulo) were met through exploratory and slaving expeditions called bandeiras that replenished their Indian labor force or else provided captives to be sold to other parts of Brazil. Though there were a few African slaves in São Paulo in the seventeenth century, the settlers could not afford them in substantial numbers until the second half of the eighteenth century.

In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Spanish officials of Florida, both religious and civil, became convinced that a certain game of ball played by the Christian Indians was detrimental to their bodies, their souls, and the peace of the provinces of Apalache and Ustaqua. During a ten-year campaign this time-honored custom was investigated, argued over and finally outlawed. The story of this crusade against a ballgame is valuable for both the ethnologist and the Spanish colonial historian. For the ethnologist it is important because among the documents is a lengthy description of the game and its associated myths and magic: “Origin and beginnings of the game of pelota which the Apalache and Ustaqua Indians have played since pagan times up to the year 1676, brought to light by the Reverend Father Fray Juan de Paiva, Father of the mission of San Luis de Talimali. September 23, 1676.” For the colonial historian, the campaign demonstrates the identification of conversion with sovereignty long past contact and conquest, as well as the interwoven relationships among civil and religious authorities, unofficial Spanish residents, and native nobility.

On August 23, 1931, the galleries of Lima's bull ring, the Plaza de Acho, rang with deafening applause. The object of this public tribute was Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a young provincial politician who had just finished exhorting his fellow countrymen to join him in a movement for the regeneration of Peru. This day truly belonged to Haya, for it symbolized his return to the lists of Peruvian politics and the resumption of an active national political career that would be stilled only by death almost half a century later. This moment of triumph in the Plaza de Acho must have been especially sweet, for a little over eight years before, on May 23, 1923, Haya, as a young student leader, had organized a protest against the government of President Augusto B. Leguía. Military forces, however, dispersed the demonstrators killing several and wounding many in the process. Haya's reward for this manifestation of anti-establishment behavior was arrest, imprisonment, and ultimately, in October of 1923, deportation. Thus Haya's triumph of 1931 served, at least in part, as a vindication for the events of 1923 and the subsequent years of exile.

In José Lins do Rego's 1936 novel, A Usina (the sugar refinery), the penal colony of Fernando de Noronha Island emerges as an incongruous Utopia. The novel's young black protoganist Ricardo serves a three year sentence there as a result of his involvement in a Recife labor strike. Upon his return, he is disillusioned by what he finds on the mainland. He recalls his penalcolony stint with a mixture of nostalgia and shame, especially the tender relationship he had had with the former black bandit Zé Moleque, the respected convict in the citation above. The island, some 220 miles off Brazil's northeast coast, initially appears to be an exotic criminal community of dishonored men, the antithesis of life on the mainland. But, as the plot progresses, it becomes a bucolic foil with which the author highlights hypocrisy, injustice, indifference, and corruption on the modernizing Brazilian mainland of the 1920s.

The history of the Church in Mexico has seen an ongoing confrontation between the secular and the regular clergy. During various periods one or the other side would achieve ascendency, only to decline at a later date. The religious orders have chronicled the exploits of their brothers and friars, yet to this day the activities of the secular clergy have remained largely unknown. One critical period in the development and expansion of the secular clergy occurred between the promulgation of the Ordenanza del Patronazgo in 1574 and the end of the sixteenth century. In this quarter century many of the basic institutions of the diocesan establishment came into being, and in general the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy felt the changes. This essay specifically will focus on the implementation of the Ordenanza del Patronazgo and its effect on the secular clergy.

Spanish preoccupation with what seemed to be the inexhaustible mineral resources of the Andes contributed to the collapse of the highly developed agrarian economy of the Incas. The disruption of stable food production and the end of Inca political authority, which had prohibited the indiscriminate chewing of coca, led to the extensive use of the leaf among the Indians as a stimulant, a nutritive substitute, and a fetish. Within a generation after the conquest, several missionaries began to oppose the use of coca by the indigenous population. The leaf soon became the center of a controversy in the Viceroyalty of Peru, which endured in varying degrees of intensity for nearly a century.

Alfredo Méndez Medina, writing from Belgium in January 1911, was possessed by the idea that Mexico's social and economic organization required radical change. Méndez Medina, a Mexican Jesuit priest and developing labor activist, had spent just a few years in Europe, sent by his superiors to learn the techniques, strategies, and ideology of Catholic social action. What he saw and experienced there helped shape his vision for Mexico and guided his work upon his return in late 1912. In Europe, the young Méndez Medina observed firsthand the Catholic unions, ministries, and propagandists of L'Action Populaire, an influential French social Catholic institution founded by Gustave Desbuquois, S.J. (1869-1959) in Reims. In a few brief notes, Méndez Medina wrote that Desbuquois's earthy, no-nonsense way of speaking to ordinary workers, and his profound spirituality, had impressed him deeply. To Méndez Medina, Desbuquois appeared to link seamlessly his religious faith, his social commitments, his sense of duty, and his politics.