Among the new publications tempting Spanish readers in 1785, alongside a comedy about jealous women, a how-to manual on forensic surgery, and a 600-page translation of the rulings of the Council of Trent, was a modest pamphlet about potatoes. Its author was an expatriate Irishman, Henry (or Enrique) Doyle. Doyle had for some decades resided in Spain, pursuing an undistinguished career in textile manufacturing. He had also drafted several essays on religious themes, with no impact whatsoever on the Spanish reading public. His writings on potatoes, however, were a phenomenal success. The 1785 pamphlet was followed in 1797 by a longer treatise issued with royal approbation at the behest of several important ministers, which was into its fourth edition by 1804. Newspapers and journals hailed Doyle as a patriotic and enlightened contributor to public happiness and seconded his ambition of extending potato cultivation across the length and breadth of Spain.

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.

IN 1630 FRAY ALONSO DE BENAVIDES, the former superior of the Franciscan missions in New Mexico, returned to Spain and wrote for Philip IV a report on the activities of the missionaries of his custodia. In this report is found one of the most interesting accounts in the whole history of the missionary Church in America. It is the strange story of the miraculous conversion of the Jumano Indians and of other tribes in the Southwest of the United States by a Spanish nun, Sor María de Jesús de Agreda. In 1622 Fray Alonso de Benavides had come to the missions of New Mexico with a large group of Franciscans. Being their superior, he assigned them to various missions. One of the group, Fray Juan de Salas, he sent to work among the Indians of Isleta near present-day Albuquerque.

No one who is entitled to speak with authority has ever questioned the well-known story that relates how in his hour of affliction, on landing at Palos, Christopher Columbus was befriended by the Franciscans of the friary of Santa María de la Rábida; how a Franciscan encouraged him to present his maritime project at the Spanish court; how, when all hope of royal support vanished, the Franciscan guardian of La Rábida intervened and thus made possible the voyage that resulted in the discovery of America. While this much of the story has always been accepted as properly established, students of American history have long been in disagreement and partly also in ignorance concerning certain details that bear importantly on the friendship that existed between the Genoese navigator and the sons of Saint Francis.

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.

“In Ecuador, the streets are paved with money. All you have to do is go there and pick it up.”

It was this rumor that lured Gabriel Manzur and Juan Adum into trying their luck in such a far-away, unknown land. Little did it matter that this meant a month-and-half journey by sea from Beirut with a stopover in Marseilles, then a train ride across Panama to get from the Caribbean to the Pacific because the Panama Canal did not yet exist. A sailor took pity on them and bought them a pineapple in one of the ports of call, and to Manzur and Adum, this strange fruit tasted like an orange.

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.

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.

Magellan’s abortive attempts to introduce baptism among the natives of the island of Cebu during the month of April of 1521 and the more successful efforts of the Spanish missionaries to preach the Gospel following the arrival of the Legazpi-Urdaneta expedition at Cebu on February 13, 1565 occurred during the initial and the culminating chapters respectively of the “spiritual conquest” of those native peoples of America and the Far East who were to enter the orbit of Spanish culture. During April of 1521, as Magellan was transforming himself into a lay missionary, Hernán Cortés was making the final preparations for the siege of Tenochtitlán. Its successful issue on August 13, 1521 laid the foundation not only of the Spanish Empire in the New World, but also it provided the Spaniards with the base of operations from which eventually they could extend their power to the Philippines. It was Cortés’ conquest of the Aztec Confederation in 1521 which enabled the Catholic missionaries of Spain to undertake one of the most extensive expansions in the history of the Christian Church. In 1565 the Spanish Church for its Philippine enterprise was able to draw upon a vast storehouse of missionary experience acquired in both North and South America. Magellan’s apostolic labors, ill-starred and brief though they were, exemplify many of the permanent features of the Spanish missionary enterprise. The Magellan episode also illustrates how his successors after 1565 did in fact profit from the Circumnavigator’s errors of judgment and tactics.

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 article examines why the first Chief Cosmographer-Chronicler of the Indies, Juan López de Velasco (c. 1530–1598), did not fulfill his historiographic duty of writing a general history of the Indies. It argues that although Velasco's tenure (1571-1591) at the Council of the Indies saw a high point in the accumulation of historiographic knowledge and information about Castile's Spanish-American possessions, the structural peculiarities of the cosmographer-chronicler's office disposed Velasco to prudently eschew writing an official history of the Indies. To appreciate and understand those peculiarities, the article focuses on three interrelated factors: the patronage networks at the royal court and their relation to monarchical bureaucracy; the Council of the Indies administrative reforms that led to the creation of the chief cosmographer-chronicler's office; and the climate of secrecy and censorship regarding knowledge of the Indies during Philip II's reign. The overarching emphasis, however, entails a consideration of the relationship between knowledge about Castile's American territories and monarchical bureaucracy, from the perspective of the Habsburg royal court in Madrid.

Revolution and women did not mix well, at least in the eyes of most leaders of the insurrection that swept Mexico in 1910-17. Moreover, common wisdom suggested that armies were no place for the “gentler sex” and hence the two kinds of women that did accompany men to the battleground–female soldiers and soldaderas–were generally regarded as marginal to the fighting and extraordinary, or strange, in character.

Female soldiers received much notice in the press and arts during the revolution and in its aftermath. They were portrayed as fearless women dressed in men's garb flaunting cartridge belts across the chest and a Mauser rifle on one shoulder. But they were invariably shown in the guise of curiosities, aberrations brought about by the revolution. Soldaderas received their share of attention too. They were depicted as loyal, self-sacrificing companions to the soldiers or, in less sympathetic renderings, as enslaved camp followers: “the loyalty of the soldier's wife is more akin to that of a dog to its master than to that of an intelligent woman to her mate.” But even laudatory journalistic accounts, corridos, and novels did not concede soldaderas a prominent role in the revolutionary process, much less in the success of the military campaigns.

The Caste War of Yucatán, beginning in 1847, was the most successful revolt by a native people in the new world. The Maya almost drove the whites from the peninsula, and although they were in turn forced back into the uninhabited forest of eastern Yucatán, they defended themselves there for many years, maintaining a certain independence to this day. Their successful resistance was based on the refuge zone of dense forest, on the availability of weapons and munitions from adjoining British Honduras, on the appearance of a prophet who created a new religion and on the subsequent appearance of a leader who used that religion to form an independent society. New information has become available in recent years on this important nativistic movement; this article reviews the origins of the Cross, the nature of its prophet, Juan de la Cruz, and the achievements of his successor, Venancio Puc, without whom the new religion would not have survived.

Fernando Cortés lived twenty-five years after his first, perhaps only, enterprise of grand design and gigantic proportion, the conquest of the Aztec Confederacy. In those remaining years, his were a multitude of endeavors; many, an outgrowth of his brilliantly successful triumph over the Aztecs, and most, dependent—for funds, materiél, and manpower—upon his great estate, a huge enterprise in itself.

Located in central and southern México, the estate comprised numerous, populous encomiendas, extensive landholdings, mines, Indian and Negro slaves and various commercial establishments. It was known as the Marquesado de Cortés after 1529 and in 1535 was constituted, with royal authorization, a mayorazgo, or entailed estate. Following Cortés’ death in 1547, it became the property of his legitimate son and designated heir, Don Martín.

Popular legend suggests that a mysterious curse fated Nina Rodrigues’ deathin 1906. Though a pioneer of Afro-Brazilian studies, he posited thatAfro-descendants possessed a genetic atavism predisposing them to crime andargued that widespread racial miscegenation had contributed to thefin-de-siècle “negro problem” in Brazil. Almost four decades following hisdeath, the curse was reborn, striking Arthur Ramos shortly after he hadrevived the stagnant field of Afro-Brazilian studies using a modifiedversion of Rodrigues’ methodology. Both Brazilian men died in Paris in theirmidforties, just as they were reaching the summit of their respectivecareers.

I. The Evolution of the Law of Recognition until 1913

To state that the United States imperialistically meddled in Mexican internal affairs in 1913 would scarcely surprise the scholarly community. The theme of United States imperialism in Latin America has been the subject of dispassionate scholarship and patriotic diatribes. Regardless of their perspective, writers have generally focused upon the political, social, strategic, and economic aspects of intervention. Considerably less attention has been given the United States' creative use of international law to affect the internal stability of Latin American nations. This article will contribute to bridging this gap by analyzing the manner in which Woodrow Wilson used the law of recognition to unseat Mexico's dictator, Victoriano Huerta; a man Wilson considered unfit to govern.