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.

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.

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.

Linguistic Science, like history, ethnology and epigraphy, is deeply indebted to the Franciscan missionaries who worked among the Maya Indians of Yucatan. About 1566 Fray Diego de Landa, later Bishop of Yucatan, not only wrote an ethnological treatise perhaps unique in the history of that science, but, as an outstanding contemporary epigrapher recently wrote: “Landa’s description of the calendar and his illustrations of day and month signs supplied a firm foundation on which to reconstruct Maya hieroglyphic writing; it is as close to a Rosetta Stone as we are ever likely to get.” Further development of our investigation of the Maya glyphs will in all probability be closely linked with our knowledge of the language.

The field of Latin American Studies owes much to Professor Howard J. Wiarda, whose pioneering work on “corporatism” and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped establish a new conceptual paradigm for interpreting the persistence of corporately defined, institutional identities throughout Latin America, despite the purported triumph of the “Liberal Tradition.” A child of Dutch parents, his early travels throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America sparked a keen interest in the question of “third world development.” Entering graduate school in the early 1960s, Professor Wiarda gravitated to the newly emergent field of modernization studies at the University of Florida, where he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Latin American politics. It was a time of tremendous social ferment in Latin America and his early fieldwork took him to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil, among other places. In each instance, he found recognizable patterns that transcended geographic locations, patterns that seemed to directly challenge the predominant arguments set forth in the modernization literature at the time.

“ A few days ago,” reported the newspaper El Bien Público (Quezaltenango), “in the town of San Juan Ixcoy…the Indians rose up, killing the ladinos, including several habilitadores (labor recruiters)”. As first news of this soon-to-be famous massacre filtered out of the Cuchumatán mountains, it became clear that some of the country's highland Indians had struck back, as many ladinos long had feared they might, against the intrusions of the rapidly expanding coffee economy. The sanjuaneros' tumulto was, in fact, simply a particularly dramatic instance of a struggle played out in various forms throughout the western highlands of Guatemala in the one hundred years after 1850. With the onset of the new crop of coffee, export monoculture threatened the integrity of Indian peasant agriculture as no crop before had done. If, in this case, the immediate target of the Indians' wrath was a hapless group of habilitadores, the more serious underlying problem for the indigenous population was access to and control of land. It is on land, and particularly on the land of San Juan Ixcoy as an example of the struggle, that this paper will concentrate.

The massive efforts of the Bourbon monarchs of the late colonial period to give their Spanish-American empire a modern state apparatus, extract more revenues from it, and defend it effectively from foreign interlopers involved an unprecedented assertion of royal authority at all levels of government, including the local one. Municipal government throughout the Americas became both an object of reform and one of the chief instruments of Bourbon reorganization at ground level. All the major activities and changes that required direct contact with the general population, from the taking of censuses and the establishment of militia units to the imposition of new taxes and the reorganization of the colonial financial structure, depended on municipal governments for their effective implementation. When the world wars for empires among Britain, France, and Spain reached a crisis stage for the Bourbons with Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, the municipal governments became even more vital to the maintenance of the viceroyalties and the survival of the Spanish monarchy.

How religion became a tool for integrating women into the modernization process in mid-nineteenth century Chile is the subject of this essay. The intense liberal assault on tradition in nineteenth century Latin America resulted in cultural warfare that benefited women as the abandonment of the Church in record numbers by men created opportunities for both religious and lay women to assume leadership roles. Perhaps for the only time in its history, the Roman Catholic Church identified religious women as a specie of clergy and actively encouraged their female apostolates to preserve the faith of women and children. In Chile this tension between traditional Hispanic and competing bourgeois values had a female dimension because included among the indicators of modernity was the social role of woman. Traditional Hispanic culture cloistered woman in the convent or home; she was a private person who left the public sphere to her male relatives. Independence, however, introduced the idea of republican motherhood and the notion became more pronounced when travelers to the United States and Europe noted the freedom and social contributions of women thereby giving credence to the new concept. Female apostolates provided women with the bridge to the modern age and provided a “feminine ideal of self-sacrificing women [to balance] Adam Smith's masculine gospel of enlightened self-interest.”

Captain Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, whose proud boast it was (as he never tires of reminding us) that he was the great-great-grandson of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in his erratic, rambling, and frequently delightful Recordación Florida (c. 1690), has this to say about the ancient town that will be the subject of this article:

In 1808, confronted with the latest in a lengthy series of legal challenges to its corporate landholdings, the municipal council of the Indian town of San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala, in the northeastern province of Coahuila in New Spain, dispatched a blistering note to its counterpart in the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo. The question of the moment concerned the right of Saltillo residents José Miguel and Juan González to route water they claimed in one place to property San Esteban had earlier allowed them to farm in another. But to do so meant that the water would be directed across lands belonging to San Esteban. When the Indian town denied them this right, the brothers protested vigorously. They contended that agriculture was, after all, the mainstay of the local economy. It benefited the public, the king, the church, and particularly the families of the pueblo itself. To deny these two farmers access to their water was to jeopardize agricultural production in the area. Further, they argued, San Esteban possessed much uncultivated arid land; perhaps the pueblo should consider renting some of the Gonzálezes' water as it flowed across the town's properties. Implicit in this suggestion was the assumption that San Esteban residents could not deal with what they had, that they were wasteful in utilizing their resources, and that Spaniards, in this particular case the brothers González, were better equipped to exploit the resources of the community.

In the eyes of many North Americans, Mexico is above all a country of immigration from which hundreds of thousands hope to pass across the border to find the promised land in the United States. What these North Americans do not realize is that for thousands of Latin Americans and for many U.S. intellectuals, Mexico after the revolution of 1910-1920 constituted the promised land. People persecuted for their political or religious beliefs—radicals, revolutionaries but liberals as well—could find refuge in Mexico when repressive regimes took over their country.

In the 1920s such radical leaders as Víctor Raúl Haya De La Torre, César Augusto Sandino and Julio Antonio Mella found refuge in Mexico. This policy continued for many years even after the Mexican government turned to the right. Thousands of refugees from Latin American military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay fled to Mexico. The history of that policy of the Mexican government has not yet been written.

As she lay bleeding to death from an accidental knife wound, María Josefa Vargas said to her husband: “Look what the Devil has done (Mira lo que hace el diablo).” María Josefa and her husband, José Rosario, were both indigenous, natives of Almoloya and Tenancingo respectively, and at the time living in Malinalco in the Valley of Mexico. They had been fighting playfully over some meat that María Josefa had bought to make cecina Mock anger and a very sharp knife made for bad companions, and José Rosario accidentally cut María Josefa in the leg.

María Josefa's words are one of those elusive examples of the key place occupied by the Devil in Mexican popular culture in the late eighteenth century. By the late colonial period the Devil seems to have become more of a concern for rural Mexicans, particularly within indigenous communities, than he had been before. Once a European import, the Devil had become a more evident part of the symbols used by Indians in the countryside. He had become less of a concern to Church and State authorities and was rather used to explain accidents, such as the one cited above, but more frequently as an excuse or a reason for unacceptable conduct, such as violence or illicit sexuality.

The centennial of the founding of the Brazilian Republic, which coincides with the bicentennial of France's republican revolution of 1789, has not aroused the same debates as the French Revolution. The extent to which France's eruption represented a bourgeois revolution has been much questioned. Indeed, bourgeois revolutions everywhere have been subject to greater scrutiny and skepticism. This debate has excited much less passion in Brazil.

Most historians have viewed the Brazilian Republic's birth as a rather unimportant event—and a failure. It was neither bourgeois nor a revolution. Rather, the overthrow of the Emperor on November 15, 1889 was a palace coup that replaced one authoritarian rural regime with another. According to this interpretation, no social change occurred as the population stood by “beastlike.” Historians often argue that although the army, which launched the coup, was able to maintain some autonomy in policy formulation for five years, it soon succumbed to the revived agrarian export elite, leaving behind few positive achievements. Yet at the time, the London Statesman declared that the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy to be the world's most significant event in a very busy 1889. Historians are now starting to echo this sentiment, reasserting the importance of the early 1890s. Décio Saes, for instance, asserts that the 1889-1891 period marked the advent of the “bourgeois state” which confirmed on the political level the transformation set into motion by the emancipation of slaves in 1888.

In 1787, a group of Indians from the town of Almoloya, part of Apan in the Intendancy of Mexico, aired their grievances against several prominent local leaders. The petitioners claimed that their predominantly Indian community was plagued by a group of free-colored people who were masquerading as Indian nobles, or caciques, and enjoying privileges to which only those with noble lineage were entitled. One of these was exemption from the economically onerous and socially stigmatized royal tribute that had symbolized the relationship between the Spanish monarch and free-colored subjects since the sixteenth century.

The Zimmermann telegram of 1917, the attempt of the German government to bring Mexico into World War I on the side of the Central Powers, is a well-known diplomatic episode because it is generally conceded to be one of the series of factors which convinced President Woodrow Wilson of the efficacy of abandoning his policy of neutrality. In return for her co-operation, and upon the successful conclusion of the war, Mexico was to “recover the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” On March 1, 1917, when the incident was recorded in the United States press and before either the State Department or the White House issued a confirmation or a denial, many congressmen and a good percentage of the United States public considered the note to be a brazen forgery and a great hoax. Had they realized that Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann’s proposal to Venustiano Carranza was not a bold and newly devised scheme but rather the climax of several years of intrigue with various Mexican officials and exile groups and had they been aware that the idea of restoring the territory lost in the middle of the nineteenth century was a Mexican rather than a German idea, there would have been but little reason to dispute the validity of the document in question.

Labor questions put their indelible stamp on colonial life, whether in Brazil, Spanish America, or the North American colonies. Methods of labor recruitment varied among these regions, however, as did the social consequences of enslavement, race mixture, and destruction or modification of native cultures.

The poverty of the Amazon region, the old state of Maranhão e Grão Pará, prevented a system of black slavery such as characterized the Brazilian Northeast. Indians, whether slave, or held as free men in mission villages, dominated the labor market. The perennial lay-ecclesiastical fight for jurisdiction over the Indian has been vividly documented by historians such as Boxer, Kiemen, and Leite. This ground need not be retraced. What may be of interest is to examine the variety of sources from which labor was supplied to the plantations, cities, and fortresses of Maranhão e Grão Pará during the first half of the eighteenth century, just before the disruptions brought by Pombal's reforms.

Yerba mate, a primitive forest industry, demonstrates the interaction of private and state enterprise in nineteenth century Paraguay. A low capital investment industry based upon utilizing seasonal and unskilled labor, yerba mate was financed, collected, and sold by the private entrepreneur and the state. Demand for yerba in both internal and external markets assured satisfactory profits for businessmen, above average wages for laborers, and necessary revenues for government. As a major export of Paraguay from the end of the seventeenth century until the War of the Triple Alliance, The Great War of 1864-1870, yerba mate provides insight into government regulations, taxation, price controls, and foreign trade policies. Because of the significance of yerba mate for the Paraguayan economy, the state was involved in both production and trade, although government interest primarily assured revenues rather than state control. A description of the organization of the yerba mate industry and an analysis of government policies supports revisionist studies that the governments of José Gaspar de Francia, 1811-1840, Carlos Antonio López, 1844-1862, and Francisco Solano López, 1862-1870 were pragmatic and rational rather than dictatorial and monopolistic.

In the winter of 1791-1792, meetings were being held in all of the principal towns of the Mexican province of Tlaxcala. Decisions had been reached that something had to be done about the recurring flooding of the Zahuapa river in central Tlaxcala and, independently, about the lack of an adequate water supply for the southeastern provincial town of Huamantla. As a result of these meetings, two independent projects began both of which were locally conceived and, more importantly, locally funded. In a burst of civic pride groups of Spanish vecinos (landowners and merchants who claimed Tlaxcala as their home) and Indian communities collaborated in constructing and financing these improvements. The work on the Zahuapa lasted until 1802, and the work to supply water in Huamantla was ongoing in 1810 when the Hidalgo revolt interrupted it. What is interesting about these decisions is not the success of the projects themselves—the first failed badly and the second was foundering when aborted—but rather what they highlight about the way Spanish and Indian leadership in local communities interacted politically in the late Bourbon period, both with each other and with Bourbon officialdom.

When Brazilian troops occupied Asunción on January 1, 1869, the worst war in South American history appeared to be nearing its end. This was a conflict caused by power politics, boundary disputes, and traditional animosities in the Plata basin. In a very real sense, the Paraguayan War was a climactic event in the evolution of nationalism in all of the four countries involved. A fortuitous combination of circumstances found Brazil and Argentina supporting the same party in Uruguay; although still intensely suspicious of each other's intentions, they had come to realize that an independent Uruguay was essential for the maintenance of peace between them. Argentina and Brazil had long sustained territorial disputes with Paraguay; indeed, if their desires had been satisfied, Paraguay would have been reduced to the territory she now has between the Paraná and Paraguay rivers.

As it has been suggested in a previous article, by the middle of the 1830's, the Mexican government had started to put into effect a policy of stricter control over the sources of income of the Church and, at the same time, it had started to tap clerical resources with demands for loans, both forced and voluntary. In addition, Liberal politicians had put forward plans to restrict the political and economic power of the Church, not to mention its more subtle influence on areas such as education. These restrictive policies were embodied in the laws decreed by Vicente Gómez Farías during his ephemeral administration. Although the majority of these laws were later revoked, the ideological challenge of the Liberals remained alive, awaiting more propitious times. In the interim, the Conservative régimes which ruled the country from 1835 to 1855 had to face some of the most difficult political and economic crises experienced by Mexico up to that time. In trying to solve them, the Conservatives, although friendly to the Church, continued attempting to exert some form of control over clerical property, and continued to regard the Church as a source of possible funds.