The First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas, held in Cali, Colombia, in August 1977 and organized by Afro-Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella, was the first Pan-Africanist conference held in Latin America. This paper examines the obstacles Afro-Latin American activists faced in organizing a racially defined event and analyzes how they articulated their own interpretations of black radical politics. It shows that a Pan-Africanist event in Latin America had to account for ideologies of racial harmony and mixture. Observers throughout the region mobilized these ideas to discredit the First Congress as a racist and illegitimate threat to mestizo nationhood. Afro-Latin American activists used it as a platform to debate and denounce ideologies of racial harmony and mixture which many argued cloaked racism and impeded black mobilization. However, for many of the delegates engaging with black radical politics did not imply an absolute rejection of these ideas, but instead highlighted the varying ways in which Afro-Latin American activists understood and contested these concepts in the 1970s. Many Afro-Latin American delegates, even those who were openly critical of ideologies of racial harmony, called for multiracial forms of solidarity and expressed support for culturally mixed visions of the nation-state.

In a famous account of his travels, titled El destino de un continente, the Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte describes his somewhat disconcerting encounter with the Cuban ex-president Jos Miguel Gmez while traveling through Latin America during the 1920s. Ugarte, a committed advocate of panhispanismo—the idea that Spanish America was and should be unified by its shared Spanish heritage, especially in light of the threat from Anglo- Saxon culture—had come to Cuba to give a series of lectures. Shortly after one of his presentations, the Argentine was introduced to Gmez, who took Ugarte to task for his criticism of Cuba's close relationship to the United States. You reproach us, Gmez said, for not defending our legacy of Spanish civilization, but what have all of you [Latin Americans] done to encourage us, to support us, to make us feel that we are not alone? Taken aback and made suddenly self-conscious by the accusation, Ugarte concluded that the Cuban was admonishing him for failing to uphold the very principles he was espousing in his lectures. It seemed as if, through the voice of her representative, all Cuba was saying, It is not we who broke the link; it was you who broke it in allowing it to be cut. After some time and much thought, Ugarte came to the realization that Cuba was not alone responsible for the Cuban situation. Some responsibility was also borne by Latin America. Through his encounter with Gmez, Ugarte was forced to recognize the limitations of framing what he referred to as the Cuban situation exclusively in the context of a cultural war between the United States and Spain. Indeed, the expresident's challenge inspired him to reconsider Cuba's nineteenth-century struggles with both Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism in a distinctly inter-Latin American context.

This article examines the relationship between ritual specialists, nanahualtin or nahualistas (pl.) and nahualli or nahual (sing.), and healing practices, adding context to the social roles they fulfilled and the range of feats they performed. The cases examined here reveal that nanahualtin operated as intellectuals in their communities because of their ability to control animals, prognosticate, and heal or harm individuals at will. Some nanahualtin shapeshifted from humans to animals while others possessed animal companions. The elevated status of nanahualtin led commoners to seek their advice, which conflicted with the established orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Because clergymen championed the sacraments as the best way to access the divine, non-orthodox rituals performed in mountains, rivers, and caves were derided as idolatrous devil worship.

The 11 criminal and Mexican Inquisition cases examined here range from 1599 to 1801. Two seventeenth-century cases (1678 and 1685) and one eighteenth-century case (1701) contain Nahuatl phrases and testimonies from Chiapas and Tlaxcala, respectively. The cases from Chiapas demonstrate the use of Nahuatl as a vehicular language outside the central valley of Mexico. This article examines the gender of the animals into which ritual specialists transformed as an emergent category from trial records, which provides insight into Catholic officials’ understanding of the nahualli. Last, this study notes social divisions between rural and urban clergy regarding the power of nanahualtin and the efficacy of their magic.

In this paper I carry out a microphilological study of a section of the Codex Indianorum 7, a colonial devotional manuscript in Nahuatl preserved in the John Carter Brown Library. It contains wisdom teachings derived from the biblical Book of Tobit and directed to both parents and their children. I argue that this hitherto unstudied text reveals the Native author's liberty to creatively mold and adapt a culturally remote European prototype into the Native genre of oratorical art—the huehuehtlahtolli, or “words of the elders.” The author also skillfully embedded and contextualized the content of the biblical instruction in local cultural meanings understandable and valid to an Indigenous audience. As an example of cross-cultural translation and colonial textual production, this source provides new insights into Native forms of agency, intellectual autonomy, and acculturation strategies reflected in creative dialogues with European traditions, developed and maintained despite the seemingly substitutive Christianization policies imposed on Indigenous people in the sixteenth century.

Carlos Martínez de Irujo y Tacón was first secretary of the Spanish Embassy in London, when he received a promotion and transfer as minister plenipotentiary of the Spanish legation in Philadelphia, replacing the chargé d'affaires, José Jáudenes y Nebot, who returned to Spain for a new assignment. Carlos Martínez de Irujo arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1796 and assumed his duties. Soon after arrival, the diplomat met, and apparently was captivated by, Sally McKean, the vivacious sixteen-year old daughter of Pennsylvania's chief justice and one of the state's most respected citizens—Thomas McKean. Two years later the couple married at St. Augustine Parochial Church in Philadelphia. Sally McKean, being from an influential American family, along with her own charm, grace, intelligence and beauty, contributed greatly to the success of her husband's mission in the United States. In 1802, as a result of his diplomatic services in Philadelphia, Martínez de Irujo received the Spanish aristocratic title of Marquis of Casa Irujo, with his Philadelphia-born wife becoming the first Marquise of Casa Irujo. He served as Spanish minister in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., until 1808, when he was reassigned to Spain, accompanied by his wife and their six year old son. This Spanish diplomat culminated a brilliant professional career when he was named Secretary of State in 1819.

WE know little in the United States about the man who, as Spain's Ambassador in 1898, dared to call President McKinley “a low politician catering to the rabble.” The purpose of this article is to shed light on Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, his views, and his hitherto unstudied role as Spain's envoy during the critical period leading up to the Spanish-American War.

The first striking characteristic about our subject is his very name, being French instead of Spanish. The genealogy of the Dupuy de Lôme family originated in France in the sixteenth century. There is record of a Jean Dupuy fighting against the Turks in one of the Crusades. The Spanish branch had, up to the nineteenth century, used only the Dupuy part of the surname. Then, as evidence of his great admiration of his French uncle, the designer of France's first cruiser, Dupuy chose to reestablish the full French surname by adding the de Lôme.

The political legacy of Lázaro Cárdenas is marked by a striking paradox. On the one hand, Cárdenas as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940 presided over the most radical phase of the Mexican Revolution or what some historians call the “Second Revolution.” He was instrumental in organizing industrial workers and peasants at the national level and incorporating both groups into the reorganized government party, the Partido de la Revolutión Mexicana (PRM), that had as its declared purpose the establishment of a “workers' democracy” in Mexico. Under his leadership the government supported the demands of industrial workers for higher wages and improved working conditions, greatly expanded the distribution of land to the peasantry, established new welfare programs, nationalized the railroad and petroleum industries and inaugurated a program of socialist education in the public schools. The prestige of Cárdenas as the foremost leader of the radical phase of the Revolution was enhanced by the fact that he, unlike many of his contemporaries, never attempted to use political office for personal financial gain; he was not a rich man when he completed his term of office as president. At the time of his death in 1970, Cárdenas was eulogized as “the greatest figure produced by the Revolution… an authentic revolutionary who aspired to the greatness of his country, not personal aggrandizement.” On the other hand, Cárdenas was the architect of the corporatist system of interest representation, including labor, peasant and business organizations, that provided the institutional framework of what Crane Brinton has called the “Thermidor,” i.e., the conservative reaction to the radical phase of the revolutionary process, that began in Mexico in approximately 1940. The institutions developed by Cárdenas were utilized by his successors to curtail the very reforms, such as agrarian and labor reform and socialist education, that had been central to his reform program. Moreover Cárdenas facilitated the transition to a more conservative era by naming as his successor Manuel Ávila Camacho, who was known to favor a moderation of the reform process, rather than Francisco Múgica, the preferred candidate of the radicals in the government. In short, Cárdenas played a decisive role both in presiding over the radical phase of the Revolution and in launching and shaping the relatively conservative post-1940 era. The paradox of the political legacy of Cárdenas is that though the seemingly radical reforms he carried out had a lasting impact upon Mexican politics, the impact was predominantly conservative rather than radical. This essay will endeavor to explain the paradoxical political legacy of Lázaro Cárdenas by focusing upon his ideology, the institutional reforms he carried out while president, and the impact of those reforms after 1940.

Although he lacked express authority to do so Federico Larrañaga used official funds to create, and then sustain, a newspaper in Panamá. He was then the Peruvian Consul General and his journal, named El Canal de Panamá in honor of the then-current effort of De Lessups and his company to open a route across the Isthmus, first appeared in early 1881 and continued to be published under his management until April 1883. Originally designed to be a tri-weekly, published in three languages (Spanish, English, and French), it offered, first in a tri-weekly form and then later in weekly and daily versions, a vigorous rivalry to the long-established Panama Star and Herald, at that time basically an English-language daily with a Spanish section.