When in the late eighteenth century the prelates of the Fourth Mexican Provincial Council ordered all clergy to stricdy employ their newly printed catechism, they provided a valuable description of the colonial Church and its relationship to unofficial ecclesiastical texts. The Fourth Provincial Council's call for the faithful to receive the doctrines of the Church in a sanctioned and uniform manner acknowledged the presence of a variety of Catholic discourses that stemmed from colonial religious works deemed to be “destitute of legitimate authority and revision.” Such unofficial ecclesiastical texts avoided the editing process that both the clergy and Crown established to ensure the orthodoxy of all printed religious material. In so doing, the texts could convey diverse, unorthodox interpretations of Catholicism. These unofficial ecclesiastical texts, and the role they played in producing multiple versions of Catholicism, constitute the focus of this study.

“Is fashion in fact such a trifling thing? Or is it, as I prefer to think, rather an indication of deeper phenomena—of the energies, possibilities, demands, and joie de vivre of a given society, economy and civilization?” So wrote Fernand Braudel in The Structures of Everyday Life.

During the period between the Brazilian declaration of independence from Portugal in 1822 and Brazil's abolition of the slave trade in 1850, Rio de Janeiro constituted the most important destination of Portuguese emigrants in the world. In 1841, the preponderance of these immigrants in that city was described by a representative of the Portuguese government in Rio, Ildefonso Leopoldo Bayard:

A number of factors made this city attractive to these migrants. The arrival of the Portuguese court and the opening of the city's port to foreign trade and foreign merchants, created an economic boom in Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century. This growth was also perpetuated by the increasing coffee economy after the 1830s.

One of the key policies guiding the regime of General Porfirio Díaz during its rule over an underdeveloped Mexico between 1877 and 1911 was to invite foreign participation in Mexico’s economic activities. At that very moment in history a rapidly industrializing Germany was anxious to find new economic opportunities in less advanced nations. German private entrepreneurs in Mexico could easily exploit both of these trends. A study of their fortunes suggests that commercial and industrial representatives of an economically advanced nation can earn the respect and personal friendship of citizens of a less developed country. This relationship was readily manifested because the Mexicans did not fear or resent German entrepreneurs since the German influence was large and tactful enough to be useful but small enough not to constitute a menace. There was no great possibility of a large influx of Germans into Mexico, because, by contrast to the opportunities enjoyed by German businessmen, Mexico’s latifundia system continued to limit German participation in Mexican agriculture to a few plantation owners. German professional people and workers avoided Mexico because of the depressed conditions that faced members of their calling there. Cautious German investors, afraid that Mexico’s political and economic stability might not last, limited themselves to extending occasional loans to the Mexican Government or to investments in Mexican private enterprises in conjunction with other foreigners, especially Americans.

Jemmy Button was an Indian of Tierra del Fuego who inadvertently inspired four generations of nineteenth-century English missionaries to risk their earthly lives to save his eternal soul. These earnest evangelicals made five expeditions to Jemmy's South American homeland to make Christians of him and his countrymen. One of these ventures was an embarrassing fiasco, another ended in death by starvation, and a third led to a treacherous massacre.

This young Indian's unintended influence also touched evolutionary thought. Jemmy Button was a friend and companion to Charles Darwin on the famous voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Jemmy's versatile personality was intriguing to Darwin. He could be a naked Indian hunter when in Tierra del Fuego, and a foppish English gentleman when in the company of British naval officers. His ability to change like this inspired Darwin's earliest written reflections on the human capacity to progress from savagery to civilization.

With the acceptance of the Federal Constitution of 1853 by the province of Buenos Aires in 1862 and the assumption of the presidency of the Nation by Bartolomé Mitre, the main constitutional problem besetting the region since independence was, in theory at least, solved. The permanent location of the capital had not been settled, but a national government was a reality. Leaders who had brought about the downfall of Rosas, negotiated an end to full-scale civil war, and organized the outline of the patria grande now faced new challenges. The spirit of anarchy, the rule of force, provincial allegiances, and a widely scattered, largely illiterate population were awesome impediments to the creation of a modern nation state. The response to these problems by the politicians, economists, scholars, technocrats, artists, and soldiers of Argentina during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, working towards the goal of a unified, peaceful and cultivated nation, is an enthralling topic.

On Christmas Day, 1829, in a room in the National Palace in Mexico City, Joel Roberts Poinsett received official Mexican acknowledgement of his resignation as the United States minister to Mexico. Two days earlier, Poinsett had requested his passport, and this meeting was merely a diplomatic formality. Across the table from Poinsett were Lucas Alamán, Pedro Vélez, and Luis Quintanar, representing General Anastasio Bustamante, who on December 23 had forcefully ousted Vincente Guerrero from the Mexican presidency. Alamán, Vélez, and Quintanar were serving as an interim executive body until Bustamante's impending entry into the capital. The gathering was a cordial one, at which time Poinsett and Alamán in particular expressed admiration for one another. Such had not been the case in their previous dealings.

Last summer, during a vacation in Mexico City, I received a letter from Father Wyse inviting me to speak at this Annual Convocation of the Academy of American Franciscan History. The invitation did me great honor, and in view of the many courtesies extended to me by the Academy since its founding more than seven years ago, including election to corresponding membership, I also regarded it as a command. It gives me pleasure and satisfaction to participate once more in the academic exercises of the Academy and to renew association with old friends and comrades in the field of Franciscan studies. To Father Wyse, Father Wheeler and their associates I offer congratulations for their splendid contributions to historical scholarship relating to the Americas and best wishes for continued success in the enterprise to which they are dedicated.

It’s easier to make a revolution, than it is to make a revolution work,” Fidel Castro once told a packed audience listening to him discuss the progress of Cuba. His remark, made with characteristic candor, expressed the challenge that confronts all rebels who manage to achieve power. For the Anti-reelectionists in Mexico, the revolution had been made in the victory over federal troops at Ciudad Juárez in May, 1911. It then fell to Francisco Madero to direct the program that would make it work. He intended to justify the violent overthrow of the porfirian dictatorship by invigorating Mexican politics as a means to restore democratic government and to establish the mechanism for responsive reform of the economy and society. The critical element in his proposal was the redemption of the authority of the state governors, to whom he delegated the responsibility and the opportunity to reconstruct Mexico. This policy represented no casual abdication of authority, but a carefully devised scheme of decentralization. Madero’s opposition to highly-centralized government resulted from his birthright as a son of remote Coahuila, the native state of Mexico federalism, his political convictions, including an abiding faith in the confederated government posited in the 1857 Constitution, and his philosophic precepts, based on the ideals of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and a reaction to the governmental consolidation rationalized by Comtean Positivism (promoted in Mexico by the Positivists, the Científicos, and the dictator).

The Lautaro lodges of revolutionary South America had their roots in Spain and England where creole patriots dreamed and plotted the overthrow of Spanish colonial power. The name was that of an Indian chief of the Araucanians of Chile, immortalized by the poet, Alonzo de Ercilla y Zúñiga. There is general agreement among Latin American historians that the Lautaro lodges played a significant role in the struggle for independence. Still debated is whether or not they were masonic or merely resembled the Freemasons in organization and principles.

Upon the plantations themselves the laborers are not so badly treated, for there they are the property of their owners, and men treat their own property well, especially when it is of considerable value. But they are brought from a thoroughly healthy climate, where disease is almost unknown, to a feverstricken region. Within twelve months their numbers will probably be reduced to one-third, and at the expiration of the three years a woefully diminished number will return to their lovely homes in the Western Pacific.

In recent years much attention has focused on the labor migration of Pacific Islanders, and particularly Melanesians, during the second half of the nineteenth century for work on the export plantations of Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea, and Queensland. A smaller number, but a quantity nevertheless significant for the populations from which they came, went to labor in Latin America. In 1862-63, for example, vessels from Peru kidnapped perhaps 3,600 persons from the smaller islands of the eastern Pacific and ventured as far west as the Gilbert Islands, where they ensnared three hundred or more unsuspecting individuals. A larger migration from the Gilberts occurred almost thirty years later, when in 1890-92 some twelve hundred individuals signed up to work on the coffee plantations (fincas) of the Pacific piedmont (boca costa) of southern Mexico and Guatemala; this constituted almost fifteen percent of the Gilbertese who migrated for offisland labor after the middle of the century. Less than 800 of the 1890s cohort actually arrived, and perhaps a quarter to a third of these died in the first year, so that their impact on an industry which annually mobilized tens of thousands of local Indians was limited. Nevertheless, for the Guatemalan coffee elites the experience confirmed what they had long suspected, that there would be no solution to their labor problems outside of the republic itself. For the Gilbertese this was by far the largest instance of labor recruitment of the decade, a period of economic hardship and political changes in the archipelago.

Thus began the experience of many nineteenth-century slaves upon their arrival in the New World. Hundreds of thousands of people from West and West Central Africa, bozales as Spaniards called newly arrived slaves, were torn from their own lands and plunged into a system that not only enslaved their bodies but also, through a system of physical violence and social control, re-inscribed personal and group identification.

The student of history who is concerned with the historical past of the American Indian and who is also a reader of general American historical works is faced with a provocative problem which apparently does not seriously bother other members of the historical profession. That is, he is aware of the question of defining what is meant by the concepts of “United States history “and “American history.” Most historically minded people would solve the problem very simply: American history is the story of America’s past (meaning by “American “the United States of America only) or, Unįted States history is the story of the development of the United States as a nation and as a region.

The important role in world affairs played by Spain during the period from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth contrasts sharply with the utter neglect of the writings and theories of great Spanish scholars by those who have written about the development of social thought in western civilization. Almost never has the present writer seen a reference to the work of any Spaniard by those who have prepared the compendia dealing with the history of social and sociological theories which are in general use as texts and references in colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada. This neglect seems to be paralleled in the writings of most European sociologists; and even in Latin America there appears to be little familiarity with the work of important Spanish social thinkers, exception made of the comparatively recent writings of José Ortega y Gasset.

The majority of leaders who participated in the 1910 Mexican Revolution agreed that educational reform was essential if the laboring classes were to be assimilated into Mexican society. Despite these deepfelt concerns, in the arena of social reform, education during the years 1910-1920 played a tertiary role behind agrarian and labor reform, issues which received the greatest national attention. Thus, at the national level education failed to attract serious reform until the 1920s. There were, however, other reasons that explain the lack of support for educational change. The political instability that existed due to revolutionary internecine warfare, the shortage of revenues, and the lack of a national education policy further obstructed an educational reform movement. The shortcomings in governmental direction were compounded even more because in 1914 the central government adopted an educational policy of decentralization that gave the states control over education. This experiment in decentralization, lasting from 1914 to 1920, was a fiasco and left little doubt that the national government should assume control over education.

On December 1, 1920, General Álvaro Obregón of Sonora became President of Mexico. During the previous May, his supporters had staged a popular coup d'etat which paved the way for his constitutional election. Mexico was then in the throes of revolutionary ferment, and the instability which had accompanied Obregón's ascendancy to Executive Office also threatened to attend his demise. Obregón thus sought to achieve political and social reforms which would strengthen his regime and allow for a peaceful Presidential succession in 1924. As the major institution of coercion during a time of revolutionary violence, the Army had emerged as the most important political institution in Mexico. Although part of a broader political effort which included labor, agrarian and administrative reforms, Obregón's military reconstruction can be viewed as the important keystone in his attempt to consolidate control of Mexico. Obregón’s military reforms sought to insure, first, Army loyalty to the office of President, and, second, military effectiveness when the Army would be called upon to defend the Federal Government. His reforms grew out of the Agua Prieta movement of May 1920, and continued throughout his own administration. As President, Obregón gave intensive attention to military affairs and his military reforms were the most significant achievement of his broadly based effort to consolidate the Mexican Revolution.

While historians have shown unusual agreement in their critical assessment of the results of Philander Knox's Central American policy, they have frequently disagreed on the reasons for this failure, as well as on the goals of the Secretary of State. An examination of one of Knox's loan projects — the Guatemalan refunding scheme — throws light on these two issues. The record of this futile four-year attempt to reorganize the country's financial structure reveals a State Department approach relying eventually on the use of coercive diplomatic methods. These techniques were resourceful, but ineffectual, and contributed to an unproductive and acrimonious diversion with the British Foreign Office. The negotiations suggest that the Secretary and other Department officers sought goals broader in nature than national economic or strategic interest. The extent of their objectives may have contributed to the unsatisfactory outcome of the case.

It is necessary to study the political status of Latin American merchants because we have so long heard that they were largely without franchise during the colonial period. We have been told that the creoles were the landowners, that the peninsulares were the merchants, and that the creoles generally controlled the cabildos. Though several writers have been investigating the merchants for some time now there are still historians who do not recognize the presence of a dynamic, influential group of creole merchants at the end of the colonial period. The Conceptión merchants (those who maintained residence in the town of Concepción) have been singled out for case study, but I am fully convinced that the patterns we see among them will apply also for the Santiago and far-northern merchants. By 1790 the town of Concepción was the capital of Chile's southern intendency, it was as it would demonstrate time and again in later years the capital of the south; and the south was the keystone of early nineteenth-century Chilean political life.