In 1657, the marquis of Villagarcía was appointed as president of the Audiencia of Charcas. Although, he eventually declined the post, his nomination generated an unusual trail of private documents. Using my study of this correspondence as a base, I will discuss how the networks of patronage were built and sustained, how they operated, and how they impacted the global mobility of imperial officials. Patronage networks were indispensable to itinerant officials who relied on their clients, patrons, and brokers to help them govern distant regions by gathering resources and information, and implementing their objectives. Moreover, this particular case gives us a glimpse into the relationship between Villagarcía as husband and his wife, and the private assessments and negotiations surrounding the transatlantic journey.

This article is a study of the controversial role of Portuguese military orders in Brazil, starting from that nation’s independence in 1822 and continuing through the nineteenth century, under both the first Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro I, and his son, Dom Pedro II. The debates around the presence of the orders, whose mission was rooted in both Portuguese colonial power and the authority of the Holy See, on Brazilian soil are important because they shed light on the process and nature of the growth of that nation’s independence. The government’s struggle to maintain the orders in Brazil, in spite of ongoing criticism, and only with the exertion of great diplomatic effort, demonstrates how necessary they were to the functioning of the state. The orders constituted an important source of income, yes, but they were valuable even more as ways of granting honor and prestige. Their presence allowed Dom Pedro I to unite the empire of Brazil by decorating local elites, thus securing their services and loyalty.

Whether they be the painted walls and highly ‘dressed’ altars of Andean churches, or the collective knotted strings and litigation proceedings housed in locked chests in local Indian municipal councils, artifacts conjure up cultural interstices instrumental for discerning the “fine grain” of Spanish colonialism in the Andes. After the early years of the Spanish presence, the Andes became a mosaic of multifarious articulations of indigenous, European, and African ways of thinking, living, and weaving a social order that continued to change over time and across the geographical space of the viceroyalty of Peru.

Although several Colombians of varying prominence had suggested the possibility of an imminent Isthmian revolt, it seems that the events of and immediately after November 3, 1903, took most of their countrymen by surprise. Certainly there is no evidence of significant prior planning for such a contingency. The achievement of Panamanian independence was followed, in turn, by a Colombian failure to establish a consistent and coherent policy designed either to regain the lost province or to implement terms by which the loss could be made more acceptable. This is not to say that Colombians, officially and unofficially, did nothing in response to the Panamanian separatist movement. Yet what is impressive is not what happened, but what did not happen: There was no sustained military movement against the Isthmus, no break in diplomatic relations with the United States, no serious reprisals against Americans and Isthmians, or their property, in Colombia, and no vigorous protest against the incumbent Colombian political leadership. Panama was apparently not a major issue even during the Presidential campaign and election of 1904. The lack of preparation alluded to above was surely a factor in determining this limited response, but it was a small factor and offers, at best, an incomplete explanation. In fact, the mildness of the Colombian reaction was the product of the unique interaction of domestic and international, contemporary and historical conditions which this article seeks to illuminate.

The reputation of Fr. Agustín de Vetancurt, one of the better known Franciscans of colonial Mexico, derives largely from his fame as a historian. He is the author of the monumental Teatro mexicano (1698), a historical description of the most important events of colonial New Spain. Fr. Agustín was also an accomplished scholar of Nahuatl, and published several works in that language. This essay will take a preliminary look at his life and times by focusing on a small work written by him in Nahuatl. It is a guide for the ceremony of the Stations of the Cross, celebrated throughout the year but especially on Good Friday.

This article discusses the role played by the production of sugar and cane liquor (aguardente) in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Amazon region. It shows how the development of sugar production had a double significance: sugar plantations had to produce a commodity that could be exported so as to generate revenues for the Royal Treasury, but they also had to produce aguardente for domestic consumption (including by those Indians who worked for the Portuguese). This domestic production provoked distrust on the part of the Crown, since it was believed to threaten sugar production overall. Nevertheless, aguardente production became a central element in the Portuguese dominion of the sertões (or sertão, the hinterland), while continuing to increase the revenues of the royal treasury.

The prosperous state of Peruvian historiography partly reflects the parlous condition of Peruvian historians. With full professors' takehome pay just over 200 dollars a month at Lima's Pontificia Universidad Católica rather less at the University of San Marcos, and with prices not that much lower than in industrialized countries, scholars scrounge for additional support. Moonlighting as a cabby is risky though definitely known among academicians; high schools offer extra hours to about a fifth of San Marcos' lecturers; and the Católica historians staff the university's general studies program for freshmen and sophomores. But the most attractive solution lies in promoting projects for foundations. That is one way for history to be written.

The Peruvian educational reform law of 1972, promulgated by the military regime of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, was considered at the time one of the best to date in the history of Latin America. With the dismantling of many of the reform laws of the “First Phase” (1968-75) of the revolution during the “Second Phase” (1975-80), and the nearly total repudiation of the entire military period by the democratically elected government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980-85), there was no change more regretted than the undoing of the educational reform. One of the main reasons for the reform's setback was the intense opposition it aroused among private upper-class schools which resented the social aspects of the law. Half of these schools were church-run. But contrary to what has happened in other Latin American countries, the battle in Peru was not between an authoritarian laicist state and the Roman Catholic Church. The real forces that lined up against each other in Peru were, on the one hand, the government, the official church and progressive groups within the church, which in the wake of Vatican II and the bishop's conference of Medellín not only came out in support of the law but even participated directly in composing it, and on the other hand, the powerful cluster of upper-class religious and lay schools which represented the traditional and rightest groups in the church. The educational reform, therefore, was the occasion for a clash among Catholics themselves. At the same time it forced the church to make a fundamental choice: between continuing its uncritical support for upper-class religious education or openly siding with the many state-supported church schools for the middle and lower classes, especially in cases of conflict between the two systems.

IT WAS NOT UNTIL 1651 that the first history of the Franciscans in Peru appeared. Its author complained even then of the lack of contemporary accounts of events and of the paucity of conventual archives; an unknown chronicler who is there referred to had died without leaving any record behind. Fray Fernando Rodriguez Tena, to whom the Archives of San Francisco of Lima are indebted for their present organization, has left copious examples of his activity as a historian in the second half of the eighteenth century; it is, however, hardly possible to discover anything new relating to the origins of the Franciscans in Peru in the long and repetitious writings of this indefatigable copyist and compiler, whose real merit is still difficult to assess.

By The 1920's, the Brazilian population included a rich spectrum of racial and national groups dominated by an elite profoundly European in origin and outlook. At the same time, it was marked by extensive intermixture among the lower classes and public lip-service to racial tolerance, a condition attributed by Gilberto Freyre and others to Brazil's heritage, its physical environment, and its paternalistic division of labor. Most Brazilians believed that economic achievement and ability, not color, determined class standing, subscribing to the hypothesis of Brazil as a racial democracy unique among the nations.

In order to have avoided the criticism of most writers priding themselves on their progressive and modern spirit, the Catholic Church in the nineteenth-century Hispanic world would have had to accept religious toleration, would have had to surrender much of its material goods, and would have had to reconcile itself to secularism by relinquishing influence in the temporal order. Various circumstances, many of them arising as much from social conditions as from theological viewpoints, caused the Church first in nineteenth-century Spain and somewhat later in Spanish America to set itself resolutely and militantly against these three desiderata of its liberal critics.