In 1958, Roque Dalton, a young poet affiliated with the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), won the first prize in a poetry contest at the University of El Salvador. A few days later, members of Salvadoran Catholic University Action, a student organization known as ACUS or simply Catholic Action, published a demolishing but carelessly written critique of Dalton. The anonymous writer of an article titled Under the Empire of Vulgarity turned his disgust with the poem written by Dalton into a diatribe against Dalton's political persona. Dalton's raw allusions to double standards in the sexual morality of priests and his remarks about the Catholic practice of fasting seem to have especially upset the leaders of ACUS. A month later, ACUS published a rejoinder written by Dalton, along with excerpts of the controversial poem. In his retort, Dalton stated that ACUS dodged debates on substantial political and aesthetic issues by engaging in insults, quick and facile judgments, and rude pigeon-holing that closes all means of intellectual comprehension.

In 1549, after 11 years of slavery, and exile, an indigenous woman made it home to her people. In the time of her captivity, she became one of the most geopolitically important and well-traveled indigenous women in the Spanish Empire. Her name—or the name Spanish society gave her—was Madalena, and she returned home to Tocobaga, in what is now Tampa Bay. From bondage in Havana, she was taken to be the translator for a missionary expedition that sought to peacefully convert her people into citizens of the imagined Spanish colony of Florida. That mission, like every other European attempt to settle the region up to the nineteenth century, would fail, but this latest failure of Spanish colonialism meant that Madalena could return to life among her own people, unlike most indigenous slaves of the sixteenth century.

During the presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920), the exploitative and exclusive nature of Guatemalan society became increasingly obvious. Instead of real development, what emerged was a landed oligarchy, engaged primarily in the production of coffee, who utilized their economic might to construct a state that protected their dominant social and political status. Although economic growth and modernization proceeded at a moderate pace in the first two decades of this century, political and social problems associated with increased economic activity and the altered fabric of Guatemalan society arose. Significant among these were the rapid growth of the capital's middle sectors, the emergence of incipient labor organizations, and a vocal and politically conscious student population; all of which were refused a forum for political expression, not to mention an equitable share in the profits of the republic's lucrative coffee industry. The cumulative effect of these forces, augmented by the extremely repressive nature of Estrada Cabrera's Administration, presented the republic with a rare opportunity to implement real and significant reform.

What makes a man—or the public memory of a man—into a a legend? The Western world has always had legendary heroes, men who in life waged vigorous campaigns against terrifying odds, and who, in death, bear reputations burnished and embellished and gloriously expanded by the stories their admirers tell. Dietrich of Berne, Frederick Barbarossa, Alexander of Macedon, Charlemagne, the Cid, Russia’s Prince Igor, Cordoba’s Great Captain, and others, live on in legend centuries after their physical lives ended. The stories of these heroes are told in sagas, epics, and lays, in ballads and folksongs, romances and myths. There are also heroes more newly-made. Their stories are broadcast through the media of twentieth-century communication: popular biographies, historical fiction, diplomatic telegrams, reports of senatorial committees, newspaper accounts, magazine articles, motion pictures. Mexico provided the pre-eminent legendary hero of modern times: Pancho Villa.

The social milieu in which slavery took place in Latin America, especially colonial Colombia and Ecuador, was markedly different than in Brazil, the Caribbean, or the thirteen colonies. Paternalistic attitudes of church and government, protective legislation, a slow, even stagnant, pace of economic development and other factors created a situation which a knowledgeable and enterprising slave could often turn to his advantage and even manipulate.

From the beginning the Catholic Church took the position that slavery was a contractual arrangement whereby the slave placed his time and the result of his labor at the disposal of his master, but that he remained a human being with certain innate rights: the right to life, limb, body and reputation. A master could not keep his slaves from marrying, for example, for to do so deprived him of the rights of the body. For a violation of any of these rights the master must make restitution to the slave, as if he were a free man. Moreover, in Catholic theology the soul of the black man was equally as important as the soul of any human being.

The International slave trade which developed between the African slave depots and Spanish America during the sixteenth century has been the subject of several significant studies. These indicate in considerable detail the origins of the slave trade, the sources from which Negro slaves were obtained, and the historical development of the commerce within the Spanish imperial system. There emerges a broad view of the flow of human merchandize, in generally increasing volume, across the Atlantic and of the increasing refinement of its regulation. Other studies of mining, agricultural and pastoral occupations, the encomienda, and the urban guild system reveal the utilization of the Negro slaves as a labor force in New Spain. The distribution of the slaves among the various occupations resulted in a dispersion which makes classification by type of work or location tenuous. This combination of a unified pattern of international trade and a disparate utilization of the slaves suggests an area of fruitful investigation. That area is the domestic trade by which the slaves arriving at the ports of New Spain ultimately reached the consumers who used their labor.

The landing of marines in Haiti on July 28, 1915, was the climax to more than a century of political, financial, and diplomatic problems on that unhappy island. The Haitians had not been prepared for the hard-fought independence proclaimed on January 1, 1804. In the intervening years, they had been theoretically governed under fourteen constitutions. Only two of their twenty-six chief executives had managed to serve a regular constitutional term of office and then retire alive. Indeed, the occuption forces landed when an enraged mob was cutting President J. V. Guillaume Sam into pieces.

The “Armenian renaissance” in Brazil is a process of the simultaneous establishment of a network of community entities, the diffusion of the Armenian language and religion, and the creation of a nucleus of entrepreneurs of Armenian origin in the shoe industry in São Paulo. My central argument is that not one of these three processes can be understood in isolation, since the economic activities only exist when rooted in a cultural substrate which gives them meaning. The production of Armenian identity on Brazilian soil is a collective project, where each individual included in the identification of “Armenian” has an interest in being included—an interest inextricably emotive, cultural, religious and economic—in the collectivity of the Brazilian Armenian community. The convergence of the individual interests of the “average” Armenian with those of the diverse leadership of the community, who extract their strength precisely from their position as spokesmen, provides the elements for the “production of identities.”

On November 27, 1902 Colombia signed an agreement with the Vatican that established parameters for the evolution of the mission as a frontier institution in the twentieth century. Renewed in 1928 and again in 1953, the Convenio sobre Misiones granted to religious orders chosen by the Vatican absolute authority to govern, police, educate, and control the Indians in the peripheral regions of the republic, which at that time accounted for sixty-five percent of the national domain but only two percent of the population. An exchange for substantial state subsidies, the orders were to carry out such government functions as administering a rudimentary judicial apparatus, providing primary education for whites as well as Indians, and promoting colonization through unlimited access to public lands. Another provision assured the ascendancy of the religious over civilian authorities by granting the former the right to reject nominees for positions in civil government if they regarded the candidates as unsuitable or as threatening to the Indians or the missionaries. Under these terms, the Augustinian Recoletos (Candelarios) in Casanare and the Capuchins in Putumayo expanded their operations, while between 1903 and 1918 the Montfort Fathers, Lazarists, Claretians, Carmelites, and Jesuits took control of apostolic prefectures and vicariates in other parts of the country.

As the American Revolution matured, foreign intervention on behalf of the Thirteen Colonies against Great Britain became increasingly important. Nowhere in that struggle was outside assistance more significant than at the seige of Yorktown during the autumn of 1781. It was here that a French army under the Count de Rochambeau and a French fleet under the Count de Grasse enabled George Washington to force the surrender of Lord Cornwallis. Historians have always recognized how crucial French participation was for this last important battle in the English colonies. Indeed, it would not have taken place without their aid. Yet there was another ally of the Continental army at Yorktown whose contribution has often been belittled or ignored. That ally was Spain.

We pray [any reader] not to nibble with critical teeth at this work of ours, which has been diligently twisted into shape by love rather than knowledge…

Since its discovery nearly two centuries ago, Las Casas' summary of the diario de a bordo of Columbus' first voyage has fascinated, beguiled, and exercised historians, who have used it time and again in attempting to recreate the events, course, and atmosphere of this momentous occasion. In doing so, most have treated the summary as a quintessential day-by-day account of the events it describes, despite the fact that the document as we have it is at least a third-hand transcription by Bartolomé de las Casas, who was effectively its author, or at least its senior co-author. Despite this tendency to treat the diario as a primary source then, in truth it is, even more than most historical sources, a prism rather than a window on the past, and a prism unfortunately not governed by any known laws of historical optics.

About twenty years ago, the Mexican SepSetentas series published La historia económica en América Latina, the proceedings of a symposium held at the thirty-ninth International Congress of Americanists. For many novice historians of Mexico, the SepSetentas collectionavailable for ten (very old) pesos each at fine shops in the Metro, or at Sanborns-were Penguins or Pelicans of a lesser sort. Graduate students eagerly awaited new volumes, and scoured the streets for older ones. SepSetentas published some first-rate items, and, alas, some not-so-first-rate ones. La historia económica en América Latina was a keeper. Its second volume contained useful bibliographies and historiographical essays by Enrique Florescano, David Brading, Woodrow Borah and Sherburne Cook, and Jan Bazant. To take just one example, Brading noticed that no one had reconciled Chevalier's Land and Society with Borah's New Spain's Century of Depression. “Where should one look to study domestic industry or commerce?” Brading wondered. The accounts of the Royal Treasury had not been systematically exploited. The tobacco industry had yet to find its historian. The costs of Spanish colonialism were essentially unknown. The proper scope of rural history was the regional study. And so on. Obviously, Brading's essay proved remarkably prescient. Historians in Mexico, Great Britain, Western Europe, the United States and Canada have all had a hand in carrying out the agenda that Brading proposed. We have, as the song says, come a long way. The latest and most comprehensive measure of our progress is the long-awaited appearance of Richard Garner's (with Spiro E. Stefanou) Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).

The African came to know Christianity, in this part of the New World, as a system of values (the Christian ideas), and as a normative structure (the Catholic Church). These two were interrelated, although frequently in conflict with other values and other structures emerging from the social system which was established as a consequence of Portuguese colonization. In his quality as slave he was integrated into an inter-relational combine which included new forms of ecologic adaptation, of economy, of inter-personal relationships and their regulation, on a rural basis, and of a slave-holding, latifundiarian and senhorial orientation.

During slavery in the Americas, whether plantation, mining or urban, captives, Creoles, freedpersons and Africans invented various forms of socialization, in part through family arrangements. The slave family is one of the most prominent themes in recent studies of Brazilian slavery. Until the 1970s, several authors claimed that such families did not exist; however, contemporary studies have revised many of the arguments about slaves' experiences and daily lives. Based on statistical sources (post-mortem inventories, lists of names, population censuses, and parish records) historians have demonstrated that, despite their living conditions, workdays, specific demographics, illness, mortality, etc., a considerable part of die slave population was able to establish families and compadrio relations by employing various strategies.

In 1825, a Maxakali Indian and soldier named Inocencio walked several hundred miles from northeastern Minas Gerais to the royal court in Rio de Janeiro, seeking an audience with Emperor Dom Pedro I. Accompanying him were 14 Indians from the vicinity of Belmonte, a town located on the border of Bahia and Minas Gerais. The journey, requiring several weeks, took Inocencio through thickly forested hilly terrain with few established roads.

In a paper presented to the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Havana on December 14, 1923, Dr. Jorge LeRoy y Cassá identified the “unsanitary immigration” to Cuba of Haitians and British West Indians as his country's most pressing health problem. “Those undesirable elements,” he contended, had introduced malaria, smallpox, typhoid fever, and intestinal parasites into eastern Cuba, maladies which then spread to the rest of the island. Through their “vices,” “violent crimes,” and “nefarious practices of brujerí;a [witchcraft],” in fact, Afro-Caribbean immigrants constituted a “double threat”—moral as well as physical—to the health of the Cuban nation. Somewhat surprisingly, the man who was later hailed as the “Father of Cuban Sanitary Statistics” mustered no direct evidence to support his condemnation of West Indian immigration on medical grounds. But such proof was hardly necessary for his esteemed audience. Although the medical doctors and public health officials assembled before LeRoy y Cassa at the Academy of Sciences may have differed on the issue of prohibiting.

Every year during the second half of the eighteenth century, as river levels dropped, an average of 1,500 Indian crewmen departed nearly 50 villages for the remote interior forests and waterways of the Amazonian sertão. During the next six to eight months, as they searched for cacao, sarsaparilla, nuts, or turde eggs, the crewmen might experience all manner of hardships—epidemics, tribal attacks, famine, mutinies, or the loss of the village canoe and its cargo, to name just a few. Then, upon arriving home, they might find their families reduced to utter poverty or sickness, their wives taken in by other men, or their crops abandoned and devoured by pests. Yet despite the arduousness of the state-sponsored collecting expeditions and the hardships imposed upon those left behind, the trips offered a range of opportunities that other kinds of compulsory labor did not. Some of those who were not required to participate, such as the native officials, even did so voluntarily.

During the conquest of New Spain the Tarascan kingdom of Michoacán was one of the richest areas to submit to Spanish control without significant resistance. Shortly after the capitulation of Tenochtitlán the native king of Michoacán, called the Cazonci, exchanged ambassadors of peace and friendship with Henando Cortés. The Spanish commander gladly accepted the submission of this strong Indian nation which had repelled all attempts at conquest by the Mexican Empire.