ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS of the Mexican Revolution was the Constitutional Convention that met at Querétaro from December, 1916, to February, 1917. To a Mexico that had been racked since 1910 by the forces of revolution, counterrevolution, and defection, the Constituent Congress called into session by Venustiano Carranza was the fulfillment of numerous promises that had been made in various declarations and decrees issued since the promulgation of the Plan de Guadalupe.

Between 1802 and 1849, cholera and influenza pandemics killed hundreds of thousands from Shanghai to Seville to New York, but these diseases did not dip below the South American portion of the equator. As a result, Brazil gained a reputation of good health, an opinion confirmed by European travelers and some provincial authorities. This rosy reputation wilted in 1849 when a yellow fever epidemic devastated several seaports, including the imperial capital of Rio de Janeiro. Following this outbreak, waves of epidemics swept the nation with unfamiliar and terrifying virulence. Brazilians were struck again and again by cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, and bubonic plague until the early 1900s.

In an anonymous circa 1754 portrait (Figure 1), fray Francisco de Santa Ana stands in a flowered crown and the brown and white habit of the Carmelite first order. The image commemorates the occasion of his final vows as a mendicant friar, and he is a rare if not unique example of a monk within the genre of the so-called crowned nuns. With eyes cast down, fray Francisco appears next to a table bearing an hourglass, skull, and book, symbols of his devotion and of his meditation on his own mortality. Painted as if tacked to the wall beside him is a print of the Virgin Mary, representing the Carmelite order's fervent Marian devotion. While she seems to gaze down at her follower, fray Francisco humbly looks away.

Julio Roca and the Generation of 1880 are best characterized by their liberalism. Indeed Argentine politics ever since the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas had adopted an increasing liberal tone. These beliefs included the encouragement of constitutionalism, federalism, freedom, and democracy. The last two points were rather vague; and democracy, especially, was interpreted in a more theoretical than practical way by the aristocracy that remained in charge of political, economic, and social affairs. However, efforts to stress the immigration of workers and capital from Europe, a relatively free trade policy, and public education for all were more clear and determined. On most of these points, the leaders of the nation seemed to agree. But on another point, that of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Argentine life, there was sharp disagreement. At no time was this more evident than during Roca's first administration, 1880-1886.

The American republics, for the sake of their own reputation and credit—if not for other humanitarian and altruistic considerations —“ought to intervene indirectly in the internal dissensions of the continent. Such intervention might consist, at the least, in the denial of recognition to de facto governments springing from revolution against the constitutional order.” Carlos Tobar, ex-foreign minister of Ecuador and the author of these views, thus expressed his concern over the problem of political instability in early twentieth-century Latin America. Constant revolutions and civil warfare he considered the curse of the region and the principal barrier to economic and social progress. His remedy was to put the combined diplomatic weight of all American nations against revolutionary governments, believing that such intervention would remove new, unconstitutional governments from power, and that, eventually, dissatisfied political factions in Latin America would give up their customary resort to violence. This pre-Wilsonian doctrine of legitimacy—known as the Tobar Doctrine—elicited little favorable response from Latin America’s leaders, already wary of any precept which could be used as justification for foreign interference in internal matters. Because Tobar’s anti-revolutionary entreaty ran directly counter to Latin American thought, it appeared headed for oblivion, except for a desperate situation in Central America in the first years of the twentieth century.

Juan, a literate black slave born and raised in the Spanish town of Cáceres, labored for at least five years during the 1560s in the Honduran gold mines of Guayape. Finally, growing tired of the arduous work of placer mining and taking advantage of his isolation, he made a bid for freedom. Upon hearing of Juan's flight, his owner, a wealthy Santiago-based merchant named Santos de Figueroa, immediately began the process of securing Juan's recovery. Eventually Juan made his way to Santo Domingo where unfortunately he was captured and Figueroa notified of his whereabouts. It remains unknown if Juan was actually returned to Santiago or if Figueroa instead preferred to sell him, a rather common occurrence in cases of runaway slaves.

The growth of the Spanish Empire and its governmental machinery in the sixteenth century created a demand for letrados, a uniquely Spanish form of civil servant. They were men who came mostly from the impoverished lower nobility and who were trained in law as preparation for serving in the burgeoning bureaucracy. Law, whether canon or civil, offered a young man in sixteenth century Spain entry into well-paying, secure and prestigious jobs in church and state. Doctores and licenciados (the holders of the highest professional degrees) from Salamanca, Valladolid, Alcalá de Henares and other universities could be found all over the New World where they held positions as magistrates, judges, bishops, canons, university professors and town councilmen. They constituted both an administrative elite and a class unto themselves. In the latter half of the sixteenth century the demand for letrados was increased by the growing insularity of the Spaniards themselves — away from the more cosmopolitan Flemish and European orientation of the days of Charles V and toward an hispanization of the civil service.

The highly visible change which took place in Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fascinated contemporary observers of the republic. The millions of immigrants, the formation of a large urban middle class, and the growth of the great metropolis of Buenos Aires all seemed to indicate that Argentina rapidly was emerging as a modern, developed nation. Equally impressive to foreign observers was Argentina's apparently booming economy, which was based on a flourishing export trade. With only brief interruptions, exports, nearly entirely composed of agricultural and cattle products, had risen from 22 million gold pesos in 1862 to 519 million in 1913. To produce the exports, total area under cultivation rose from 580,000 hectares in 1872 to 24.1 million in 1913.

Much has been written about the spread of Old World crops and livestock in the Americas. However, very little is known, except in very general terms, about the availability of different foods, diets and nutrition, particularly among the common people, in different regions of Spanish America in the early colonial period. This derives in part from the shortage of evidence, but it also reflects the difficulties of researching these complex issues, where environmental conditions, access to land and labor, income distribution, regulation of food supplies and prices, as well as food traditions, all interact.

There is probably no more controversial issue in the United States today than that which is being debated, quite inaccurately, under the heading of “socialized medicine.” Public interest in the question has been crystallized by the introduction in the Congress of the United States of the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill. At the same time, the champions of State sovereignty have prepared legislation aiming to provide medical care as well as hospitalization for low-income groups, without excessive extension of Federal power in a domain that touches intimately upon personal rights and local liberties.

Writers have long claimed that Costa Rica has achieved standards of popular, constitutional government unusual for Latin America. A few recent commentators have attempted to modify the unstinted praise which others have been prone to lavish upon Costa Rican political institutions and processes.

To evaluate properly the assumption that Costa Rica is somehow more “democratic” than her neighbors, there must be examination of a number of elements of Costa Rican political life—that is, press and public expression, individual rights, political parties, roles of judicial and legislative bodies, role of the military, and the like. Some studies have touched upon a few of these elements. Scholarship has yet to cover all of them. The present paper will confine itself to a further aspect of Costa Rican political life—that is, the presidential history of the country. By what means and under what circumstances have presidents secured and left office? How many have been long-term dictators? What have been the backgrounds and characteristics of leading Costa Rican presidents? How many have come from the military profession, and how many from civilian life?

The enormous native state which Cortés overthrew August 13, 1521, is commonly called the Aztec Empire. This is true more of the English literature than of the Spanish, which sometimes prefers the half-correct “Imperio de los Mexicanos”. The writer has no quarrel with the word “Empire”, which has been questioned from time to time, but he does have with the word “Aztec” used in this connection. This originates, apparently, with Clavijero and was diffused by Prescott, a mere hundred years ago. The latter speaks initially of “the ancient Mexicans, or Aztecs as they were called” and after that uses “Aztec Empire” incessantly. This nomenclature, vulgarized through such dross as Bancroft, has swamped everything else. Nevertheless, neither Cortés nor Bernal Díaz nor Tápia, all actors in the Conquest, ever so much as mention the word “Aztec”, much less say “we conquered the Aztec Empire”. Nor does Sahagun in his encyclopedic work use the term “Aztec Empire”, nor does Motolinía. If it appears in any of these works, or anywhere among the first generation of conquerors and settlers, it is so subordinately mentioned that it has escaped the writer. Below we shall see what its conquerors did call the Empire they overthrew.

Even if the narrative is ornate, elegant, and copious of words
Even if persons, places, and times are conveniently displayed
Even if the shape of towns and the site and order of battles are fully described
Even if the mind of the reader is artfully attracted to the material
If the truth is missing it can never be called history.

The historical writings of Garcilaso Inca de la Vega (1539-1616) have evoked varying responses since they appeared. Consideration of his work has concerned its historical value rather less than it has examined Garcilaso's literary style, indigenist perspective, ambicultural dilemma, and irrepressible imagination. In turn most of this commentary has concentrated on Garcilaso's account of Inca history and customs as embodied in the Comentarios reales. Garcilaso's integrated, coherent, and circumstantial account was long regarded as the orthodox version of Inca matters, if only because it so congenially mirrored European ideas of what historical writing should be all about. Of late, however, it has come under fire as it becomes increasingly apparent that the weight of archeological, ethno-historical, and cultural evidence fails to sustain Garcilaso's projection of imperial status, utopian social norms, and quasi-Christian habits to the very beginnings of the Inca polity.

El Salvador, the smallest but most densely populated country of Central America, experienced one of Latin America's bloodiest civil wars, accompanied by widespread human rights violations. State repression was especially brutal against opposition groups such as peasant associations, unions, students, and religious people. Twenty-five church people were murdered and many religious workers were persecuted, expelled, or tortured. Several U.S. missionaries were among those murdered or expelled victims. Although the number of religious victims is relatively small in comparison to the tens of thousands of people who were killed in the three civil wars of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, the murders of religious personnel had a profound impact on the religious community in Central America, and particularly in El Salvador. This impact also reached religious groups in the United States. Given the traditional alliance between the Catholic Church and the political and economic elites throughout most of Salvadoran history, the murders of religious leaders by government or government-linked forces symbolized a remarkable shift.

By 1860, racism had taken its toll on the psyche of thousands of free blacks. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the South's demands for the extension of slavery and the re-opening of the African slave trade, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 and the denial of suffrage, the right to hold public office, the right to be a juror, policeman or judge convinced thousands of free blacks to seek dignity away from the country's shores. Liberia, which had attracted Afro-Americans since the 1820's, was too far away and considered unhealthy for expatriates. But Haiti, jewel of the Caribbean, was near and most importantly, she beckoned to her northern brothers to come south.

In 1859 Fabre Geffrard, military hero of the wars with the Dominican Republic, overthrew the despotic regime of Emperor Faustin I and formed a republican form of government with himself as president for life. Haiti needed to be developed. President Geffrard looked to America's black agriculturists to replace the thousands of Haitians killed in the nation's wars and revolutions.

In a contribution made some time ago, I stressed the diversity of factors which came together in the anticlerical constitutional articles and paragraphs that were approved during the Constituent Congress at Querétaro of 1916-17. The first of these factors—I argued—was the not unreasonable belief held by many Mexican revolutionaries that the Catholic Church had collaborated with the government of the military usurper, Victoriano Huerta, in 1913-14. In this regard, the political participation of the National Catholic Party had also been decisive in influencing anticlerical opinion.

The obrajes of the Sierra and the plantations of the Coast are the poles around which, in different eras, the economy of the Audiencia of Quito seems to revolve. Woolen cloth and cacao are the two products that allowed this territory to participate in regional and international commercial circuits, and have attracted the most attention from historians in the last two decades.

In a region lacking large mining centers, encomenderos were from early times compelled to develop activities that would allow them to move in the Andean colonial sphere, which was dominated by the “Rich Hill” of Potosí, the actual force behind the formation of this great interregional market, as Carlos Sempat Assadourian has demonstrated. The inter-Andean corridor and its plateaus, suitable for the raising of sheep and a source of ready Indian labor, facilitated the development of the obrajes that were set up in Indian communities, on private haciendas, and in urban areas.

Brazilian hygienist Dr. Alfredo Ferreira de Magalhães proclaimed his view of child welfare to an elite audience of medical, legal, political, military, and business leaders during the opening ceremonies at the 1922 First Brazilian Congress for the Protection of Childhood held in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time in Brazil, children had become a distinct focus of teachers, lawyers, military leaders, politicians, police, priests, judges, journalists, and novelists who struggled to incorporate liberal and positivistic ideas into public policies and institutions. Members of all classes of Brazilian society had cared for children and had lamented high rates of infant mortality well before the turn of the century. The 1920s movement, however, differed significantly from previous approaches to child welfare in Brazil. This was the first time that elites from such a wide variety of professions and positions of power insisted that the state assume responsibility for funding, implementing, and enforcing child welfare legislation and institutions.

As regards the slave societies of the Americas, it is hard to imagine a more palpable example of social mobility than manumissions. The fact that exslaves were able to carve out a space for themselves within the larger slave societies attests to their resilience—a resilience that must have played a role in obtaining freedom in the first place—and demonstrates that a considerable measure of social and racial flux existed in at least some of those societies. Manumission and miscegenation, independendy or in association with one another, decisively contributed to the sometimes explosive growth of colored and mestizo populations, which came to characterize large parts of Latin America. Few better examples exist than Brazil, where it was not at all uncommon for ex-slaves to become slaveholders in their own right.

The Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century are important in understanding the fiscal, economic, and political structure both prior to and following the independence of Latin America. Although these measures have been generally analyzed in great detail, the decrees and compliance with them varied from region to region. This becomes quite obvious when one views Central America during the period. Considered a “backwater colony” by contemporary historians, the Reino de Guatemala still was strongly affected by fiscal reforms and subsequent political changes. An inordinately strong merchant class controlled not only commerce, but equally prices, trade regulations, and tax collection. The area was more a fief than a kingdom, with Spanish and Guatemalan merchants ruling over the Central American domain. The new Bourbon measures represented more than an attempt to gather additional fiscal resources, but to actually regain that sovereignty which earlier Spanish monarchs allowed to dwindle.