Art work throughout almost the entire history of the Church has been primarily didactic. Man was taught through the arts of sculpture, painting, mosaic, and stained glass, all that he should know of the creation of the world, the dogmas of religion, the virtues, the hero-saints, and during the middle ages especially, the range of the sciences, the arts and crafts. Thus, in the latter half of the eighteenth century when the Franciscans came to the remote outposts in California, they brought with them the pictures and statues by which the simple and ignorant Indian might learn, through his eyes, much of what he was to know of his new faith. “Through the medium of art the highest conceptions of theologian and scholar penetrated to some extent the minds of even the humblest of the people.”

Thus Did the wife of the first Spanish Minister to Mexico describe, in October, 1840, the reception given a letter written by José María Gutiérrez Estrada and published in pamphlet form together with an essay which amplified and clarified his position. The letter, addressed to President Anastasio Bustamante, carried the date August 25, 1840, whereas the pamphlet did not appear until October 18, 1840. The letter pointed to the necessity for a convention to seek a remedy for Mexico’s problems. The remedy advocated by Gutiérrez Estrada in the essay which amplified his position, and which caused such a sensation— was a constitutional monarchy.

In the autumn of 1509 the explorer Alonso de Ojeda landed on the northern coast of South America, near where is today the city of Cartagena, and claimed the region in the name of Spain. As some of the natives appeared inclined to question the acquisitive proclivities of the Crown, Ojeda had read to them the principal articles of the Christian faith, hoping to demonstrate the benign nature of his invasion. Apparently feeling that his obligation to the Church was not yet fulfilled, he then informed the local residents “ especially of the supreme jurisdiction of the pope ” and required that they embrace the Catholic religion. Ojeda barely escaped with his life.

In 1807 the Commissary General of the Indies for the Franciscan Order, Pablo de Moya, appealed to the Spanish crown to lift a long-standing ban on the admission of novices at the Observant Franciscan community of Our Lady of Santa Clara (Nuestra Señora de Santa Clara) of Havana. Moya reported that the great majority of the clarisas had grown aged and infirm in recent years. The sad situation on which the commissary general reported was the result of four decades of convent reform at Santa Clara that successfully reestablished the common life (vida común), something seldom achieved in the large, opulent convents of the Spanish empire.

The Spanish political crisis of 1808 and the subsequent convening of the Cortes at Cádiz two years later helped crystallize certain political and philosophical concepts held by a number of “enlightened ”persons on both sides of the Atlantic. Their inherent faith in reason and progress made these delegates at Cádiz turn to a new instrument of government with confidence. In the end, however, strong vested interests thwarted the work of this liberal Cortes. This study examines the struggles, frustrations, triumphs, and failures of one influential and outspoken American in the Cortes at Cádiz, José Mejía Lequerica (1775-1813), who brought many ideas of the Enlightenment and of the French Constitution of 1791 to the new Spanish Constitution.

At his trial Socrates described himself as attached to Athens “as a gadfly to a horse.” In Sixteenth Century Spain the Order of Preachers played a similar role. Dominican friars freely criticized royal officials, conquistadors and fellow churchmen. At times their meddling in affairs of state drew down on them the wrath of the authorities. Charles V, though favorably disposed toward the Indians, more than once angrily rebuked their defenders, the friars, for letting zeal outrun prudence. One of the most effective of these critics was Francisco de Vitoria. Vitoria was renowned as the founder of the Salamanca Thomist school. Not content with the elaboration of scholastic doctrines, he carried them into the political forum, delivering public lectures on the problems of his time.

Royal officials of the Indies found the contraband trade one of the most critical and debilitating problems in their administration of Spanish America. Contraband existed throughout the colonial period, despite occasional strenuous efforts to stamp it out. Various ideas have been advanced to explain the failure of Spanish counter-contraband in America, and these largely reflect on the quality of Spanish administration of the Indies. The implication is that governors and royal officials were generally guilty of corruption, of passive or active connivance in the contraband trade, or, at the very least, of incompetence or inefficiency in preventing it.

Padre António Vieira commenting on the colonial government of Brazil to the Crown in 1654.

On the Tagus River approximately eight kilometers from the center of Lisbon stands a monument to Portuguese overseas exploration and expansion—O Padrão dos descobrimentos — erected in 1960 on the 500th anniversary of Prince Henry the Navigator. Facing the Tagus is Prince Henry. Flanking him on each side and representing the reasons behind the success of Portuguese exploration and expansion are several symbolic figures. King Manuel, during whose reign many of the discoveries were made, illustrates the complete support of the Crown that many of the expeditions enjoyed. A priest carrying a cross depicts the religious motives behind expansion—the spreading of Christianity to the heathen. There are also a caulker and a carpenter both important in the production of new sailing vessels. A pilot with an astrolabe portrays the significance of the scientific aspects of overseas exploration. Luís de Camões holds his Os Lusiadas, the epic poem that depicted the triumphs of Portuguese expansion. There are even widows in tears to remind viewers of the great loss of men that Portugal suffered during her conquests. Another important figure depicted on the monument is the conquistador with drawn sword, the symbol of the military—“the backbone of the empire.”

It is often assumed that the most creative aspect of Latin American thought, since independence, has been revolutionary. To a considerable degree this is true, as this author has himself pointed out in previous writings. But Latin America has also felt the impact of a different stream of creative thought, Spanish in origin to a considerable degree, though not completely so—the stream of Hispanic and Christian traditionalism. But this traditionalism is a mixed current. Thus, Pablo González Casanova of Mexico has shown that while reactionary forces often opposed it, “modern” Christian thought in Spain and New Spain was absorbing the new philosophy and science of the eighteenth century. Alberto Caturelli and Enrique Zuleta Álvarez. of Argentina, in somewhat different ways, have pointed out a mixture of Christian traditionalism with liberal streams of thought in that country. Moisés González Navarro of Mexico found in the historian-statesman, Lucas Alamán, a mixture of Christian traditionalism and economic liberalism. Carlos Valderrama Andrade of Colombia has found that traditionalists such as Miguel Antonio Caro (1843-1909), and his father before him, mixed with the conservative elements of traditionalist thought progressive elements not unlike those of modern Christian democracy.

In 1891, Luther H. Gulik, a prominent member of the international leadership of the YMCA of the United States, established the triangle as the YMCA symbol. He saw the triangle as a symbol imbued with Christian beliefs that would become the spearhead of a worldwide missionary movement. About the Triangle, Gulik wrote:

This article looks at popular responses to the zarzuela Chin-Chun-Chan and the issues that surfaced around its timely subject in early twentieth-century Mexico City. The principal source is the Mexico City satiric penny press for workers, supplemented by somewhat less polemical broadsides, both sold on the streets of the capital. Aimed mostly at working-class Mexicans, these sources offer a glimpse at popular attitudes circulating in a public sphere otherwise dominated by the perspective of educated elites. The article has four sections. First, it briefly reviews social commentary on the democratization of musical theater. Second, it examines Chin-Chun-Chan as a political symbol that crystalized around working-class complaints about the Porfirian regime, especially its alleged disregard for Mexican workers and Mexican national identity. Third, it analyzes the ways in which the phrase “Chin-Chun-Chan” entered popular language as a racial signifier for a range of things, some of which bore little relation to its theatrical origins. Finally, it links popular Sinophobia in late Porfirian Mexico City to the virulent anti-Chinese campaigns in northern Mexico, which played a key role in defining national identity after the 1910 Revolution, and to the “hemispheric orientalism” that has characterized anti-Asian sentiments throughout the Americas.

This article mines archival sources and published accounts from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to highlight the extent to which enslaved men, women, and children in the South Sea came into contact with British corsairs. It does so in ways that lend to three important observations: that people of African descent occupied a central role within the history of British corsair activity in the South Sea; that British corsair activity in the South Sea forms part of the history of the slave trade; and that there are important differences between British corsairs’ use of enslaved and free people of African descent in the South Sea as compared to the Atlantic World. The latter point, which rests on the recognition of the particular linguistic skills and geographic knowledge held by people of African descent in the South Sea and British corsairs' particular vulnerabilities, also provides a useful framework for future research on both the specificity of black life in the region and the meanings those skills and knowledge held for Africans and their descendants themselves.

In 1556 Franciscan missionaries from the city of Mexico arrived in the then remote area of Zacatecas to begin what was expected to be a crucial but difficult evangelization of the area. They had been preceded by several other brothers who had not settled there despite having spent several years in catechizing the indigenous. The intention of these four missionaries was to stay and found a convent. Along with Fr. Pedro de Espinareda and Fr. Diego de la Cadena came one lay brother, Fr. Jacinto de San Francisco, and one donado simply called Lucas. Fr. Joseph Arlegui, chronicler of the order, assumed the presence of those friars would lay the foundation for the difficult task of evangelizing such distant lands and such unwilling peoples.