With this lecture by Pablo Piccato, The Americas continues its collaboration with the New School for Social Research to publish its annual Lecture in Latin American History. The series features lectures by senior historians in the field of Latin American history across an array of topics. This is the fifth in the series.

On March 30, 1973, three weeks after Hctor Cmpora won the first presidential elections in which candidates on a Peronist ticket could run since 1955, rock producer Jorge lvarez, himself a sympathizer of left-wing Peronism, carried out a peculiar celebration. Convinced that Cmpora's triumph had been propelled by young people's zeal—as expressed in their increasing affiliation with the Juventud Peronista (Peronist Youth, or JP), an organization linked to the Montoneros—he convened a rock festival, at which the most prominent bands and singers of what journalists had begun to dub rock nacional went onstage. Among them were La Pesada del Rock- 'n'Roll, the duo Sui Gneris, and Luis Alberto Spinetta with Pescado Rabioso. In spite of the rain, 20,000 people attended the Festival of Liberation, mostly muchachos from every working- and middle-class corner of Buenos Aires, as one journalist depicted them, also noting that while the JP tried to raise chants from the audience, the boys acted as if they were untouched by the political overtones of the festival.

During the nine months prior to the writing of this report to the Guadalajara See, the parishioners of Santa Maria del Oro had presented a series of demands for money in the priest’s possession. Some 400 pesos had been gained from the forced sale of their lay brotherhood’s property, and they wanted the money so they could buy back the land. By August 1857, however, the parishioners’ attempts at legitimate reclamation, through both ecclesiastical and civil channels, had ended in disappointment. Rumors had long circulated that these Indian parishioners were allied with a prominent gang leader in the region, Manuel Lozada. Thus it likely came as little surprise when Martinez found himself huddled in his church in late September as Lozada’s gang ringed the town, accompanied by the town’s prominent Indians, and demanded that the priest and the local magistrate come out and surrender. Martinez was rescued only by the intervention of state troops, who scattered Lozada’s gang and allowed the priest to flee.

In 1960 the May 3 feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross was removed from the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church in order to reduce the number of major feasts and to focus devotion to the Holy Cross on September 14, the day commemorating its Exaltation. For many Mexicans, this change was more distressing than papal authorities had anticipated. People from various walks of life and places were not inclined to give up this favorite feast day, which they felt was a lifeline to well-being here and now and the promise of salvation hereafter. For them it was an essential practice, not a vestigial one Workers in the building trades were conspicuous dissenters. Virtually every construction site in Mexico must have its protective cross, to be decorated and honored on May 3. And communities all over Mexico, especially in rural towns and villages, celebrated the day by decorating their special crosses in public and private places, attending mass, praying for rain and an abundant harvest, and celebrating with food, drink, fireworks, music, and dancing. For many, it was the only Day of the Holy Cross they had known. To steer clear of a prolonged dispute over popular traditions of faith, Mexican bishops successfully appealed to Rome for May 3 to remain a major feast there.

In the middle of the seventeenth century a Spanish adventurer, dressed in a traditional Andean cusma tunic and wearing a silver diadem, convinced tens of thousands of Indians in a remote part of the viceroyalty of Peru that he was a direct descendant of the former Inca emperors. More than a hundred native chiefs accepted him as their overlord, carried him on a litter, furnished maidens for his service, and followed him in battle when he promised to liberate them from Spanish control. Although Indian rebellions occurred frequently in colonial Peru, this particular one is unique because a European led it. Initially this imposter secured approval for his actions from the Spanish provincial governor and Jesuit missionaries, but later.when the Indians rebelled, the fake Inca was apprehended, imprisoned for seven years, then hanged. The story of his “empire” is a ten year episode that has not been printed in English and is not widely known in Spanish.

On a warm December day in 1897 the political leadership of Minas Gerais converged on the small hamlet of Belo Horizonte to inaugurate a new capital for Brazil's most populous state. Foreshadowing the construction of Brasília six decades later, politicians and planners had transformed a rustic village of some 8,000 inhabitants into an enormous construction project. As with Brasília, those who promoted the move saw the new capital as a symbol and a catalyst. This planned city would symbolize the modernizing forces that were transforming Brazil and Minas Gerais at the turn of the century. More important, the rationally designed political center would also serve as a catalyst in the economic growth and integration of the state. In short, a modern, planned city would provide Minas Gerais with the dynamic economic and political capital that it so badly needed.

This analysis and survey of economic activities in Rio Grande do Sul aim to shed new light on the crucial importance of the southernmost captaincy to overall Brazilian development at the close of the colonial period. Rio Grande do Sul was unique in economic growth, compared to the Center-South, Northeast and North, because the extreme South produced for a variety of markets: the internal Brazilian, the internal Portuguese, the Portuguese reexport to Europe and the Rio de Janeiro reexport to Angola. This market diversification made Rio Grande do Sul less dependent on the commercial vagaries of any particular geographical area. The focus of this article is the importance of economic growth in Rio Grande do Sul prior to 1808.

Among other treasures, the tidy, compact municipal archive of Pátzcuaro houses a document of genuine antiquarian interest: the will of Juan José Codallos, recorded on July 9, 1831, just two days before he was executed for his role as the instigator and chief caudillo in Michoacán of the War of the South. Codallos began by stating that he was 41 years old, the son of Felipe Codallos and Andrea de Ponce; that he was in good health (considering that he was condemned to die); that he was married to a woman named Dolores Domínguez, with whom he had four children (the oldest was seven; the youngest, one); and that his worldly goods consisted of his clothes, two horses, a fancy saddle, and a silver-trimmed bridle. [“peno” is bridle? I have been unable to confirm this translation]

Juan Bautista Alberdi is a name not often heard in the United States, even among students of Hispanic-American affairs. Many of his Argentine compatriots and contemporaries are well known to us; we repeat their names as easily as we do those of our own national heroes: Sarmiento, Mitre, Echeverría. Yet the position of Alberdi in the historical development of the Argentine Republic is one of high honor and extreme importance. He is called “The Father of the Argentine Constitution,” and, indeed, such he was. Yet, even more important than this, Alberdi’s arguments in favor of a vast, all-encompassing program of immigration, was the impetus that stimulated his native country and made Argentina the most forward-moving and politically successful nation in Latin America.

By the end of the nineteenth century the American public, if it had cared to enlarge upon its knowledge of the Empire of Brazil, could easily have done so without even the necessity of learning a foreign language. From 1822 to 1888, beginning with the independence of Brazil from Portugal and ending with the abolition of slavery— a period corresponding almost exactly with the life span of the Brazilian Empire—about twenty books on Brazil were published by Americans. These were obviously not the only books on the subject in the English language because Britishers wrote about Brazil too (indeed they wrote more about it than we did) and these books on Brazil were also available on this side of the Atlantic. The combined output of the two nations was, therefore, considerable, and the curiosity of the Anglo-Saxon mind which it for the most part reflected presented Brazil to the American reader under a great variety of aspects. There were the solid three volumes on the colonial period of Brazilian history by Robert Southey, the poet laureate of England who was much better as a historian, and the two-volume sequel by John Armitage, who was neither a historian nor a poet but a lover of liberty.

The Franciscan Province of the Holy Cross was the first major administrative unit organized by the Franciscans, or by any religious, in the Americas. Begun at the relatively early date of 1505, this province faced the task of aiding in the establishment of the Church in a new world inhabited by only several thousand Europeans and hundreds of thousands of other people so completely unknown that the Europeans could not even call them by their proper name.

Before the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, Protestantism and Cuban nationalism coexisted relatively comfortably and even naturally, the function of a Protestant movement under Spanish colonialism that, unlike the rest of Latin America, was run not by North American or English missionaries, but by Cuban ministers. After United States intervention in 1898, U.S. interests were imposed on virtually every sector of Cuban society, including organized Protestantism, influencing Cuba's development for at least the next half-century. Preempted by U.S. intervention, Cuban nationalism, in both its ecclesiastical and secular dimensions, endured and intensified with the deepening of Cubans' dependency on the U.S. Politically, Cuban nationalism was expressed in growing protests and demands for a more genuine independence by abrogating the Platt Amendment and otherwise ending U.S. interventionism. Ecclesiastically, Cubans pushed for a greater role in Protestant church affairs, and toward Cubanization of the Church. Protestant missions thus confronted a rising nationalism within and outside the Church. By 1920, eastern Cuba, the cradle of Cuban independence, became the epicenter of this struggle.

Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance was in a state of political and economic shock. Governmental institutions were shattered, their functions practically ceased, and the very basis of political life had to be reconstituted. Fertile fields lay uncultivated, livestock had all but disappeared, buildings were in ruins, orange groves were untended, and the remnant population survived on the bare edge of subsistence. Land titles, never very clear, became further tangled in a welter of conflicting claims. Well might a Buenos Aires editor observe: “The future of Paraguay is so dark that none can read it.”

During the quarter-century following the conquest of the Aztec Confederacy in 1519–1521, Fernando Cortés, the major figure in that epic achievement of Spanish arms in the New World, acquired a great estate in central and southern México consisting of the tributes and labor services of populous Indian towns, extensive land holdings, mines, Indian and Negro slaves, and business enterprises. In 1529 Charles V conferred upon Cortés the title of Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, and subsequently these properties and interests were collectively designated in colonial records as the Marquesado de Cortés. The Marquesado, which Cortés, with royal authorization, set up in 1535 as a mayorazgo, or entailed estate, was inherited at his death in 1547 by his legitimate son, Martín Cortés, born of his second marriage. Subject to various modifications and vicissitudes, the Estate remained in the hands of Cortés’ descendants during the entire colonial period.

A monarchy based on the slave plantation labor of Africans until the late nineteenth century, vast Brazil offered little appeal to European immigrants except in the far south of the country, where smaller plots of arable land became available as the coffee frontier expanded. Facing shortages in slave supply after mid-century, when the British forced the Brazilians to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade, provincial governments attempted to lure European immigrants by granting subsidies to pay for transport and for initial costs of settlements. In 1881, the Imperial government joined in the effort to recruit immigrants who, in addition to providing a replenished work force, could also be counted on to “whiten” the population. Germans predominated among immigrants until 1886, followed by Italians, Poles, and some Japanese until the 1930's, when rising xenophobia led Brazilian officials to curtail immigration and to install a restrictive quota system.

The Dominican Republic, which has once again exhibited the fragility of its political institutions by taking over two weeks to ascertain a winner in its last presidential election, is, in many ways, a land of shared commonalities with other peoples. Its merengue rhythms point to a common musical bond with West Africa; its language and cultural institutions suggest a heavy Spanish stamp and its affiliations with other regional entities such as Puerto Rico and Venezuela are well known. Unfortunately for the Dominicans, however, they share their own island with another society — a decidely unique situation, especially since this schism represents an antipathic clash between different languages, histories and racial philosophies.

Despite its fundamental importance, Spanish colonial law, derecho indiano, has remained something of a mystery to modern scholars. Perhaps the great chronological and ideological distance between us and the antiguo régimen plays a role. We often listen more sympathetically to those who espouse political ideas similar to our own, and we make assumptions based on the institutions with which we are familiar. As a result, modern historians often have joined with nineteenth-century patriots and foreign observers in denouncing the colonial legal system. Judicial administration is still depicted as ponderous, tyrannical, arbitrary, and corrupt. Clearly, many scholars have failed to appreciate the essential qualities of derecho indiano. A more careful scrutiny of the historical record reveals an intricate legal system that proved to be adaptable to the peculiar needs of the diverse regions of empire. Local modification of Hispanic law–derecho vulgar–was an important element of this flexibility and constituted a legitimate expression of local self-governance.

Muffled by the night and sobered by their unexpectedly serious task, Corregidor José Manrique y Guzmán and two squads of militia quietly approached the Jesuit college of Arequipa at four o'clock on the morning of September 17, 1767. Manrique had secretly gathered his scribe and the troops during the night after receiving an astounding royal decree from Viceroy Amat in Lima. The top-secret dispatch ordered Manrique to detain all Jesuits within the province of Arequipa in preparation for their expulsion from the Spanish empire. Similar orders had gone out to royal officials throughout Charles III's domains. In Arequipa Manrique found all but three of the local Jesuits housed within the college. He read them the royal edict, placed them under house arrest until provisions could be made for transporting them to Lima, ordered the detention of the three padres absent from the college, and confiscated all the Jesuits' properties.

Until the 1980s, Catholic elements in Haitian culture tended to be interpreted exclusively in connection to the forced conversion of the enslaved population under French rule. This changed following John Thornton's groundbreaking research into the development of Christianity in early modern Africa—Kongo in particular—and the awareness that a significant number of enslaved Africans already identified as Christian before their arrival in Saint-Domingue. This article's goal is to go beyond Thornton's research by showing that we can acquire a better understanding of Catholic elements in Haitian culture if we start our analysis in late medieval Iberia. To illustrate this, the article focuses on one of Haiti's most enigmatic cultural traditions, known as Chariopié, Lwalwadi, or, most commonly, Rara. Although this performance has received abundant scholarly interest, questions relating to the origin of its Catholic elements have remained largely unanswered. This is regrettable considering that Rara parades follow the liturgical calendar of Lent and intensify in frequency during Holy Week. Moreover, a key element of Rara consists of the destruction of an effigy of Judas Iscariot, in accordance with the Biblical account of the Easter story. Using a comparative analysis, this article presents a number of remarkable parallels between Rara and late medieval Iberian Lent traditions. To explain these parallels, it claims that enslaved Africans who were familiar with Iberian practices prior to their arrival in the Caribbean established, by their own initiative, a network of mutual aid and burial societies modeled on Afro-Iberian Catholic brotherhoods.