This brief communication will try to show the attitude of the Dutch Calvinists towards the other religious groups in Portuguese America, during the period of the occupation by the Dutch West India Company of northeast Brazil, from 1630 to 1654. At the time of their greatest expansion, the Dutch controlled all the coastal region from Sergipe to Maranhão.

Liberty of conscience had been announced beforehand for all Christians and Jews of the captaincy of Pernambuco in Brazil, which that company proposed to conquer. De facto, in the “Secret Instructions to General Lonck,” commandant of the squadron which took possession of that captaincy, instructions dated Middelburg, August 18, 1629, this liberty of conscience was immediately promised, although, at the same time, it was determined that “all the Jesuits, fathers and friars and other religious must be embarked with all their baggage.” Liberty of conscience was again promised by the Dutch in a manifesto addressed in 1632 to the owners of the sugar-mills and the inhabitants of Pernambuco, and, in 1635, when at the capture of Paraíba not only was this liberty promised but also liberty of cult.

The seventeenth century opened with a bang, literally. In the year 1600, on the first Friday in the season of Lent, sometime between noon and 3:00 PM (that is, at the hour of the accustomed Lenten penitential processions), the Peruvian volcano of Huaynapudna began a protracted series of explosions and eruptions. It was the largest recorded volcanic eruption in the Western Hemisphere, greater by far than that of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, or Mount St. Helens in 1980, and only slightly smaller than the colossal eruption of Krakatoa, Indonesia, in 1883. The event sent both Christian Spaniards and neo-Christian Indians searching for answers to apocalyptic questions. On that same Friday, February 18, 1600, several other violent earthquakes leveled buildings nearby.

The three papers included here, written by Ana de Zaballa, Pilar Latasa, and Gabriela Ramos, constitute a highly professional effort within the study of canon law in colonial Spanish America. These papers allow us to perceive how closely linked pastoral concerns, legal imagination, and judicial practices were during that period. To fully appreciate the importance of these four investigations, we must first briefly lay out the current state of academic studies in canon law in “las Indias Occidentales,” what today is generally called viceregal or colonial Spanish America.

Juana Tapia did not know how to sign her own name. Yet, on September 12, 1900, Tapia successfully initiated a suit in federal district court for her son's release from military service. Her son, Miguel Álvarez, had been imprisoned by a local prefect during the recent municipal elections in the city of Hermosillo, Sonora, for alleged criminal activities. Instead of consigning Álvarez to a criminal judge to be prosecuted for these alleged crimes, the local prefect had ordered Tapia's son to nearby Torim to serve in the Mexican army's twelfth battalion.

In March of 1929, die young Peruvian poet and political activist Magda Portal departed from die Yucatan in Mexico to give a series of lectures in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. She traveled as an emissary of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA), a recendy founded political organization that sought to transform Latin America by creating a united front against foreign imperialism. On July 14, in Santo Domingo she gave a lecture titled “Latin America Confronted by Imperialism,” at “the largest theater in town” to an audience of about 200. Her presence as an intelligent, energetic, and beautiful woman, standing on stages normally reserved to men, enhanced the power of her words, and she was well aware of the striking effect on audiences of seeing a woman in the traditionally male role of political orator

The year 1976 was a violent one in Nicaragua. In an effort to quash the Sandinista guerrillas, the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle had declared a state of siege, suspending constitutional guarantees, muzzling the press, and unleashing the Guardia Nacional. Despite the dangers of dissent, thousands of students across the country walked off their secondary school campuses that year to protest poor funding, inept teachers, and oppressive administrators. This article examines this series of strikes to uncover the ways in which teenagers managed to organize their schools and communities in spite of the repression that marked the final years of the Somoza regime. Analyzing student documents, Ministry of Education records, and newspaper reports, this article argues that in the context of a decades-long dictatorship, student demands for more democratic schools opened a relatively safe pathway for cross-generational activism that forced concessions from the Somoza regime. By the 1970s, secondary schools had come to reflect the state's authoritarianism and mismanagement, and widespread educational deficiencies brought students and parents together in a joint project to demand better schools. Battles over the quality of education, thus, showcased the power of an organized citizenry and laid the groundwork for the revolutionary mobilizations that were to come.

The Cartilla para enseñar a leer (1569), attributed to Flemish Franciscan Pedro de Gante, was one of the most important primers from the early years of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Nevertheless, the primer's importance during the process of cultural contact has been largely ignored. As did other primers of the period, the Cartilla contained the most important prayers, but what sets the Cartilla aside is that its selection of prayers is presented in a trilingual version, in Castilian, Latin, and Nahuatl. The content of the Cartilla invites the question as to why Gante, a missionary focused on writing doctrinal works in Nahuatl, would compose a primer that is trilingual, but raises another that is perhaps more perplexing: Why were most of the prayers in Castilian? In this article, I intend to shed a light on Gante's decision to create a complex tool that could be employed by a mixed audience of Castilian, creole, mestizo and Nahua children. By doing this, Gante unwittingly started a process of cultural contact in which language played a pivotal role. The Cartilla thus presents itself as a multifaceted tool that helped shaped the culture of the Basin of Mexico during the early years of the viceroyalty.

On January 14, 1954, Bahians gathered in the city of Salvador, in Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia, for the Lavagem do Bonfim, the annual ritual washing of the Church of Bonfim and its front patio and steps that was for them a highlight of the Festival of the Senhor do Bonfim. The archbishop of Salvador, Augusto Álvaro da Silva, had recendy banned the syncretic ritual, primarily because it combined elements of popular Catholicism and an important ritual obligation to Oxalá, a principal deity or “saint” in the religious practice of Candomblé, an African Brazilian religion that grew out of West and West Central African antecedents. The water for the lavagem, for instance, was ceremonially prepared and transported in vases during a procession by African Bahian mães-de-santo (priestesses) and filhos-de-santo (initiates) of Candomblé, known together as “baianas” and dressed entirely in white.