WITH the death of Herbert E. Bolton in December, 1953, we close the circle of an important epoch in inter-American cultural relations. We come to the end of a period that, in the United States, had its beginning about the middle of the 1890’s and which eventually culminated with the Good Neighbor Policy and the close collaboration of the American nations during the Second World War.

One of the major obstacles preventing Argentine national unificacation in the 1870s was the hostility of the poor interior provinces, victims of the ravages of civil wars and economic stagnation, toward the richer and more powerful coastal area dominated by export-oriented merchants and cattlemen. From 1874 until the first decade of the twentieth century, a major attempt was made to resolve longstanding grievances. A definitive political compromise and program of economic integration emerged in 1880 when a group of politicians, representing both the interior and the littoral, joined together and made their slogan a reality: Peace and administration. This group, known as the Generation of Eighty, brought a national capital and a modicum of peace to Argentina in 1880. Eventually they helped create a new Argentina linked by networks of transportation, communication, banking facilities and other trappings of modernity. They courted regional industries with protective tariffs and political favors in hopes of providing an economic stimulus to the interior which would complement rapid growth in the littoral. But even though Buenos Aires and surrounding areas flourished, by the turn of the century most interior provinces remained as destitute as they had been thirty years earlier.

On September 27, 1821, Mexico achieved its de facto independence from Spain when Agustín de Iturbide led his 16,000-man “Trigarante” Army into Ciudad México, thus culminating the revolution inaugurated by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo in 1810. In December 1822, the United States gave official diplomatic recognition to Mexico, followed shortly thereafter by Great Britain in 1823. Despite such action on the part of the United States government, however, no official minister was dispatched to Mexico until May 1825. Based upon the circumstances of this delay and upon conditions in Mexico, when a United States minister did arrive in Ciudad México to meet with Mexican officials, the stage was set for a significant confrontation which would determine the tenor of Mexican-United States relations until the twentieth century. This was the confrontation between Joel R. Poinsett and Lucas Alamán.

To one who studies the career of Fray Isidro Félix de Espinosa, the strangest fact of all lies in finding that so little was known of him for a century and a half after his death. When Don José Beristain y Souza finally issued his Biblioteca Hispano Americana Setentrional in 1819, all his knowledge of Fray Isidro was summed up in these few lines:

Espinosa (Fr. Isidro Félix)—Native of the city of Querétaro, of the Province of S. Peter and S. Paul of Michoacán, of the Order of S. Francis. Preacher, missionary apostolic, guardian, and chronicler of the College de Propaganda Fide of the Holy Cross of Querétaro; censor of books for the Tribunal of the Inquisition. He was as tireless in his preaching of the Divine Word as he was in perpetuating the apostolic deeds of his brethren; and due to that fact was worthy of being termed “the Julius Caesar of the Gospel in New Spain.” For, like that Roman, he fought by day (though better battles) and wrote by night.

The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 acquired for the United States one-half of Mexican territory, while the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 secured a more level route for railroads destined to connect the south and the far west. Impatient investors, however, sought immediate union with the west, and the shortest route at hand was across the isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. The Department of State advanced these interests, and only on failure turned their efforts to an overland route across Northern Mexico. This latter route would have connected Matamoros on the Rio Grande and Atlantic with Matzatlan on the Pacific. To this goal, Delphy Carlin, an American long-experienced in trade with Mexico, urged Secretary of State Lewis Cass. He was convinced that a line skirting the mountains and connecting these ports would be an ideal boundary; that “all north of that red line is a nuisance to Mexico.”

This will be a short account of the origin, growth, and death of the great parliament of Castile, the Cortes. That sounds a bit dramatic, but there’s nothing to be done about it, for the history of the Cortes of Castile has the elements of a proper tragedy: the self-destruction of a nation by pride, parochialism, and arrogance. One of my colleagues, now deceased, used to account for the aberrations of Spanish collective behavior by ascribing them to “Spanish individualism.” I can only guess that what he had in mind was that Spaniards, when they act in groups, act differently from the rest of us—in which he was certainly correct. Now, when group actions become consistent, formalized, and ritualistic, I call that pattern of conduct an institution, regardless of whether or not someone has taken the trouble to codify it. Institutions, then, have their origin and their being in the minds of men acting collectively.

As trade between Spain and her American colonies declined in the seventeenth century, interprovincial commerce increased. This change within the Spanish Empire and some of its multiple implications have only recently been recognized and given scholarly attention. Consequently, little information is available on the part colonial municipal governments played in the imperial economic realignment. A case in point is the role of the Santiago cabildo in regard to the export trade which tied Chile's Central Valley, the region administered by that city council, to the Peruvian market economy. Although various studies provide supportive data on this subject, a close scrutiny of the council minutes, focused on policies that regulated outbound commerce and the production from which it flowed, can more clearly delineate the extent of creole initiative and cabildo participation in policy formulation and enforcement. A correlative theme pursued through this appraisal of the records concerns the socio-economic attitudes of the upper levels of society in the last century of Hapsburg rule.

Students of the famous first contingent of Yankee Hispanists and of North American literature in general, during the national and revolutionary periods, are prone to overlook the pronounced influence of British, American, and French travel books about Spain and Spanish America. The popularity which travel accounts enjoyed in the nineteenth century is attested by a well-known publisher’s observation to the distinguished pioneer explorer of Central America, John L. Stephens, author of the recently reprinted Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas & Yucatan (1841, 1949). On the latter’s query as to what forms of literature Harper Brothers favored, Harper is said to have replied: “Travels sell about the best of anything we get hold of. They don’t always go with a rush, like a novel by a celebrated author, but they sell longer, and in the end, pay better.”

For three centuries the Church in colonial Spanish America was the primary cultural institution affecting the lives of all Spain's overseas subjects. Education, charity, art, architecture, all the humane arts had been the legacy of the Church as well as its greatest gift to the New World, the Christianization of the Indians. In all these pursuits the Church was ably and dutifully supported by the Crown. Concurrently, clerics of all ranks and occupations were tied closely to the civil authority by the Royal Patronage.

The achievements of the orders of the Church were out of proportion to their numbers. Franciscans, Dominicans, Mercedarians, then Jesuits and others all left their mark on Spanish America and often expanded the empire through missionary activities. Paraguay, an isolated province in the Río de la Plata, was a striking example of the successful toil of various orders. However, in 1767 by command of the regalist Carlos III, the Jesuits were expelled from this region (and the entire empire) and at the turn of the century there remained but three orders in the province, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Mercedarians. Of the three the Franciscans were the most important in the colonial era. Ever since the 1530's, this order was concerned with the conversion and welfare of the Indians. Reductions of the Guaraní were established by the Franciscans long before those of the better known Jesuits. Among the great figures of the Franciscan first century in Paraguay were Fray Martín Ignacio de Loyola and especially fray Luis de Bolaños, the “Apostle of Paraguay.”

In the course of the residencia of the Second Audiencia of Mexico, Licenciado Vasco de Quiroga was charged with having overburdened the Indians of Mexico City with the work of constructing his hospital-town of Santa Fe near the city. The official charge (cargo XXVI), as formulated by Francisco de Loaysa, judge of residencia, has been published twice, together with some of the questions that Quiroga drew up for his witnesses in answer to the charge, the answers of the witnesses, and the final decision of the judge, which absolved Quiroga of any guilt in the matter. But the source of the charge, as well as Quiroga’s personal reply to it, have remained unpublished.