Within recent years there has been increasing interest in those aspects of Spanish American history which represent a growing political consciousness among the inhabitants of those lands especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Perhaps nowhere can the growth of this sentiment be studied with greater ease than in the religious orders. By their development, the religious orders, the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, and Mercedarians, came to consist almost exclusively of criollos (descendants of Europeans born in America) and Chapetones (friars born in Europe, in particular in Spain): the two groups which were to be the leaders of the two contending parties in the wars of independence. The ultimate estrangement of these two groups developed during the colonial period in the course of which the rising creole desire to manage their own affairs encountered increasing opposition from the Spanish Crown. The encounters were not always peaceful. The participants, on both sides, in good faith held to their principles with a deep conviction of which the incidental vehemence is perhaps the clearest proof. Neither side yielded readily. This is true also of the friars.

The process of Spanish colonization in Northwestern New Spain, here roughly defined as Sonora and the Californias, set into motion a complex set of factors that contributed to demographic change; absolute population decline among the Indian groups involved, the growth of a largely mestizo settler population, and a number of different types of social and economic interactions between the two populations. Scholars in recent years have debated the causes and the nature of change. Alfred Crosby established a framework for the debate in his provocative book entitled The Columbian Exchange, which discusses, as the sub-title implies, the consequences of interaction between the Old and New Worlds after 1492. In a recent study Henry Dobyns elaborated on one of Crosby's principal themes, the introduction and impact of Euro-Asiatic diseases, and prepared a chronology of epidemics between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries that affected Native American populations. Dobyns applied his “epidemic mortality” model to Florida and calculated both a high contact population and the rate of population loss due to each of the major epidemics. The model when applied to all of North America has major implications for our understanding of the course of Native American history. In a recent bibliographic article historical demographer Shelia Johansson cast doubt on the high contact population estimates and the degree of demographic collapse.

The Indian is an inexhaustable layer of exploitation and his best song is his taciturnity…. Guatemala is sad; a desperate, horrid, fearful sadness … a sad people living with a totally alien world within us. (Ernesto Juan Fonfrias, “Guatemala: un pueblo triste,” Diario de Centro América, Sept. 1, 1950.)

Fonfrias’ assessment of Guatemala in 1950 contains important clues to understanding the “revolution” from 1944 to 1954 and its overthrow. The revolution has been extensively studied; but most works have concentrated on American involvement in the overthrow of the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 and have thus only provided us with limited views of the various conflicts that developed during the two revolutionary administrations (Juan José Arévalo, 1944-51, and Arbenz, 1951-54). This has most certainly been the case with studies of rural Guatemala during the revolution. Despite the importance of the agrarian reform initiated in 1952, the reform and the conflicts that it fostered are not clearly understood. Recent research has suggested, however, that the tensions were more complex and more deeply rooted in Guatemala's rural history than earlier works had indicated.

In mid-July 1594 a notary recorded the last wishes of an elite woman on her deathbed in Quito. Ysabel de Baeza was a native of the old Kingdom of Granada, a four-time widow, owner of some houses in Seville and a modest estancia in Ambato, a few days' ride south of Quito. She also claimed five slaves: Magdalena and her four children, Luisa, Felipe, Juan, and Antón. Doña Ysabel's real estate was to go mostly to her children and grandchildren in Quito, but the fate of the slaves was more carefully circumscribed. Magdalena would serve her dying master's daughter for four years, after which she would be freed. Luisa was to serve Baeza's granddaughter, Leonor de Ayala, and Felipe a great-grandson, Alonso Bonifaz, both “until the time when they ransom themselves (se rescaten) and give each one on their own behalf four hundred pesos of current silver.” The younger Juan and Antón were to stay in the household of Baeza's executors until they also freed themselves, each for 300 pesos. The slaves were not to be sold by these temporary masters, and the 1,400 pesos thus collected was to be placed in a chaplaincy fund (capellanía) administered by Quito's Augustinians. The masses thus financed by the self-redemption of Ysabel Baeza's slaves would in turn help release her soul from the temporary captivity and untold pain of Purgatory.

As dawn broke in Mexico City's streets, steamy pots opened to offer the delicious smell of hot tamales and atole. Lupita woke up early that morning to sell tamales in the usual corner of Niño Perdido street in Mexico City's downtown. In that year, 1947, the construction of the Latin American Tower had just started. Lupita observed the builders digging deeply in the foundations while she sipped her atole and served red and green sauce tamales to her customers. In 1940s and 1950s Mexico City, workers and low-ranking bureaucrats started their day with this popular meal, as they had done since colonial times. Reformers, however, questioned the nutritional value of the working-class diet and considered it as a threat to the construction of modern Mexico.

No satisfactory account exists of how Jesuits functioned in Mexican society; nor has any assessment been made of their Jesuits importance to the Spanish crown; nor has anything been written evaluating the extent of the Jesuits' role in molding and maintaining, throughout most of the colonial period Mexican adhesion to Spanish culture, civilization, and political arrangements. Previous writing has, in fact, tended to obfuscate the Order's attitudes and activities in Mexico by stressing special aspects of them, notably missionary activity, and slighting others, particularly formal education—paying little attention to its effects on Mexican society. Moreover, while many specialists in sixteenth-century Mexican history acknowledge that of course Jesuits in New Spain supported the empire, none have explained and substantiated just how they did so. In addition, historians of the same period in Europe, unacquainted with the special situations in Spain and colonial Mexico, would argue from a more general point of view that the assertion that Jesuits may be thought to have contributed at all to loyalty to any monarchy other than the papacy needs strong evidence to support it.

Late one December afternoon in 1731, Antonio Méndes and his friend Joseph Miguel de Alcaras made their way through the west central Mexican city of Pátzcuaro toward the plaza mayor. Their course took them past the house of the Spaniard don Vacilio Botello Mobellán. There, don Vacilio called out to Antonio and Joseph, inquiring after a harness and several other items he said Alcaras had borrowed from him and not yet returned. According to Don Vacilio, he presented his request jovially, but Alcaras denied still having the goods on loan, the two “mulattos” responded to him discourteously, and Méndes even brandished a knife. In their own defense, both Alcaras and Méndes mentioned don Vacilio’s accusations, insisted that Alcaras had previously returned the materials in question, and emphasized that Méndes did not pull the knife, but rather that it was taken from him by don Vacilio’s two assistants who had intervened in the exchange. Ultimately, don Vacilio leveled criminal charges against Méndes, who he and the criminal authorities labeled a “mulatto,” for threatening him with a knife since “being of inferior calidad” he should never have carried the weapon.

By comparison with the rest of Latin America, Mexico's post-revolutionary political stability has long fascinated historians and social scientists. One explanation for relative political peace is the comprehensive land and labor reforms President Lázaro Cárdenas implemented in the 1930s. These created a base of social support for post-revolutionary elites. In contrast, the absence of significant land reforms and the failure to devise hegemonic labor regimes in South America resulted in class stalemates, forcing elites to fall back on the militarized state. Land and labor explain the difference between Mexican stability and South American instability since 1920.

Third Sergeant Wenceslau Martins Leal may have misunderstood his orders for 18 July 1888 but his greater mistake was, in fact, carrying them out too well. With his patrol from the Sixteenth Infantry Battalion, he reported to the police subdelegate of Salvador’s São Pedro parish at 7:00 p.m. and received orders to arrest and take to the fort “all the vagrants that he could find, for the time had come for impressment [recrutamento forçado].” Because the subdelegate did not limit the number of men to be impressed and pointed out the best places to find such “vagabonds”—Dois de Julho Square and the nearby alleys—Leal concluded that he had unlimited authority to put his ten men to work on this “arduous task.” It only took an hour. In a first sweep, they picked up thirty-five men; in a second, seventeen more. Two resisted “tenaciously” and had to be forcibly subdued. By 8:00, the duty officer had developed serious misgivings about the large number of prisoners arriving at the fort. He checked with the subdelegate who denied having given such orders in the first place and released the detainees. An indignant Leal justified his actions on the grounds that he had merely followed orders to the best of his ability.

In Editing The Bandeirantes, The Historical Role of the Brazilian Pathfinders, Richard M. Morse points out that on many points of interpretation neither the readings he has presented “nor the whole of bandeirante history can furnish conclusive answers.” He states that “although the chronology and geography of the bandeiras have by now been fairly well pieced together by scholars, most other aspects of their history still lie open to speculation.” He concludes with a statement from a Brazilian source: “In spite of the fruitful results of research in this century, the study of bandeirismo as the combined process of political, economic and social evolution of the colony has not yet been attempted.” While thinking over Professor Morse’s introductory comments it occured to me that a careful review of all available facts concerning the seventeenth century Paulista, Domingos Jorge Velho, might contribute a useful piece in the challenging, historic puzzle.

The creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776 by Charles III of Spain and his Edict of Free Commerce two years later brought unprecedented commercial prosperity to the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Unlimited trade was now allowed between this region of South America and Spain. Exports—mainly silver from Alto Perú and pastoral products from the pampas—flowed in ever greater volume to the Iberian Peninsula. In return, merchants of the estuary received from Spanish commercial houses European manufactures and luxury items. This trade which spanned the South Atlantic depended upon a complex web of credit and merchant associations between the Old World and the New, and also upon the unobstructed traffic of Spain's merchant marine. In the 1780s and early 1790s with the Empire at peace Platine commerce contributed to both government revenues and the growth of a dynamic immigrant merchant community recently arrived from northern Spain. By 1794 the booming trade of the new viceroyalty justified the creation of the Real Consulado de Buenos Aires, essentially an official merchants guild to regulate the business affairs of this region.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Eric Van Young for inviting me to give this speech today. It is a great honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts concerning the development of gender studies in Latin American history as well as the issues that need to be addressed in future years. When I first became interested in gender history in the 1970s, it seemed unlikely that journals such as Luso-Brazilian Studies would ever dedicate an entire issue to women's studies. Yet this year there is such an issue. It helps us appreciate how accepted gender studies have become for Latin American historians.

In 1575 Juan de Ovando, the president of the Council of the Indies, wrote to Mateo Vázquez de Lecca, Philip II's secretary, about the maestrescuelas (headmaster of the cathedral school) of Mexico City who was under consideration for a position as chaplain to the king. The Council of the Indies believed that he lacked the proper limpieza de sangre, that is, that he may have had a tainted lineage that disqualified him for the post. Ovando declared that this was not true. However, despite the fact that the candidate was indeed an “Old Christian” of unblemished stock, he was not to be given the position. Because it was a royal position, wrote Ovando, it should be given only to one whose purity of blood was “notorious.” In 1590 Vázquez de Lecca expressed a similar sentiment when he wrote of a candidate for the royal council that “It is a pity that Agustín Alvarez is not considered to be pure of blood because … I consider him the best of all possible candidates.”

The exploitation of Andean villagers under the forced labor regime for the mines of Potosi is almost as infamous as the silver they extracted from the cerro rico is famous. Established by Viceroy Toledo in the 1570s, the mita, as the system of forced labor was known, remained in place until the smoke and shot of Latin American independence struggles were in the air. For over two centuries, Spain forced thousands upon thousands of naturales (a common colonial term for indigenous people) from communities throughout the southern Andean highlands to lend their muscle and sweat, and all too often their blood and their lives, to keep Potosi's veins open and flowing. Through this work the mitayos and their communities not only drove the colonial economy, but also were a major force in sustaining the Spanish empire and in helping forge the modern world's dominant economic system. Conversely, mita exploitation threatened the very survival of the communities subject to it. The mita was so onerous that virtually all indigenous peoples subject to the labor draft, regardless of ethnicity or class, raised an almost continuous voice of protest from their communities against the mita and its abuses. Tensions created by the mita also severely strained the bonds that linked community, curaca, and the state, which were primary ingredients in the social glue that kept colonial Andean society from coming apart. To avoid descending into the mines, and to escape such horrors as laboring over mercury vapors, many people permanently fled their communities, giving up the status of originarios (community members with rights such as access to land and subject to state obligations) to become forasteros (indigenous person not living in community of origin, or descendant of the same, without communal rights but exempt from many state obligations). In this way the mita, one of the few forces that had potential for uniting Andean peoples in opposition to the state also fractured them. Communal solidarity was severely strained and neither the shared experience of the mita nor the commonality of experience in Potosi created sufficient cohesion to overcome the ethnic and regional differences that divided them.

The study of marriageways in colonial Latin America has altered and deepened our understanding of the societies and cultures within the Spanish and Portuguese empires of the New World. During the last thirty or forty years a series of studies have explored the complex and varied patterns of marriage and family formation in colonial Latin America. Inspired by the work of Peter Laslett, Lawrence Stone and Louis Flandrin among others, historians of the region have produced a rich historical literature on the demographic, social and cultural aspects of colonial marriageways. Most studies have focused on the late colonial period, and the years after 1778 when the Pragmática sanción de matrimonios (first issued in Spain in 1776) was extended to Spanish America. One effect of the new law was an astonishing outpouring of reports, questions, lawsuits and regulations concerning marriage, which in turn have been seized upon by historians to reconstruct important aspects of late colonial Latin American societies. Despite the frequent use of these sources, the legislation itself has received little serious attention, and several basic misunderstandings prevail regarding its background and meaning. As a consequence, the political implications of marriage have been poorly understood.

The relatively small degree of racial discrimination against the Negro in Latin America generally has been traced by North American historians to Spanish acceptance of the African Negro as a human being, not perpetually destined for slavery nor inferior to other races. In contrast to the status of the Negro slave in colonial North America, Spanish laws and attitudes are thought to have provided in colonial Spanish America a climate of opinion which promoted miscegenation and afforded the slave a variety of legal avenues to freedom. In support of this explanation of reduced racial discimination, notarial records of manumission from the colonial period and the thirteenth-century legal code, Las siete partidas , are prominently displayed as evidence of the Spaniards' belief in “equality among men” and the transformation of the principle of equality into practice.

THE Spanish overseas empire was not won in a fit of absent-mindedness nor was it developed in a mood of salutary neglect. It was won with a conscience as well as with a sword.

Some disagreement has recently been expressed as to whether the ideas of Francisco de Vitoria, prima professor of theology at the University of Salamanca at the time of his death in 1546, exercised any appreciable influence on the actual development of events and ideas in the New World. One thing is beyond contention. Vitoria’s thought had a decisive impact on the Philippines. The ideological controversy precipitated by the conquest of the archipelago often assumed the character of a creative commentary on the lectures of that great Dominican theologian.

Colonial New Orleans was a community, like so many others in Latin America, in which the upper sectors desired to maintain order and “toda tranquilidad,” preferably by way of legislation and judicial compromise but through force and authoritarian measures if necessary. Challenges to this tranquility came from those groups considered marginal and thus often subordinated, oppressed, and made generally unhappy with the status quo, among them workers, women, soldiers, slaves, and free blacks (libres). Free black women— the focus of this paper—drew upon multiple experiences as members of several of these subjugated groups: as women, as nonwhites, sometimes as former slaves, and usually as workers, forced by poverty to support their families with earnings devalued because they were gained doing “women's work.” But they did not suffer silently. Condemning the patriarchal order, racist, sexist, authoritarian society in which they operated, libre women vigorously attacked it both verbally and physically, employing such elite-defined legal and illegal methods as petitions, judicial procedures, slander, insults, arson, and assault and battery.

The pulpería, a country store and tavern, stood with the estancia as the most important socio-economic institutions of the Argentine pampa. The store served multiple social and commercial functions (both licit and illicit) and survived into the twentieth century despite virulent verbal attacks and calls for legislative restriction from the colonial era on. Some commentators lauded the pulpería as the outpost of civilization on the savage frontier and projected the pulpero or proprietor as civilization's lonely representative in a barbarian world. He supposedly embodied patriotism, culture, and free enterprise in a hostile, alien environment of anti-social, localistic, unlettered gauchos—the itinerant horsemen of the pampas. Evidence weighs heavily in the opposite direction; however, and the pulpero of fact rather than myth functioned as a contraband capitalist exploiting the landless rural masses and preying upon ranchers whose livestock provided the goods for illicit trade. Far from encouraging culture and civilization on the vast pampa, the pulpería housed excessive drinking and gambling, prostitution, and served as an arena for violent, often fatal, knifefights.