Since the fall of Nicaragua's Somoza dynasty in 1979, nearly 900 books dealing with Central America have appeared. They repeat the themes of imperialism, paternalism, and security that traditionally have characterized studies about Central America and its relations with the U.S. The imperialist theme is pursued by Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions and Karl Berman's Under the Big Stick. They assert that the United States economically exploited and politically controlled Central America in general and Nicaragua in particular. A sense of moral righteousness is found in Tom Buckley's Violent Neighbors and Richard Alan White's The Morass while the security theme is pursued by John Findling in his Close Neighbors, Distant Friends. Histories about Central America reinforce these themes. For example, the Dean of the U.S. Central Americanists Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., and Costa Ricans Edelberto Torres-Rivas and Hector Pérez-Brignoli, and Honduran Mario Argueta demonstrate that the American businessmen capitalized upon the ignorance of region's elite for their own economic gain. Despite their diversity, all of these volumes demonstrate that the United States dominated the relationship and criticize it for so doing.

In February 1948 a spirited presidential race sparked a political powderkeg in normally tranquil Costa Rica. The opposition candidate, Otilio Ulate, unexpectedly defeated former president Rafael Angel Calderón. Calderón's National Republican Party, the Communist Partido Vanguardia Popular (Vanguard), along with incumbent President Teodoro Picado immediately overturned the results. The opposition responded by launching an armed struggle to install Ulate in power. Led by José Figueres, the rebels defeated the government army and its auxiliaries composed primarily of calderonista and vanguardista militiamen. In late April Figueres victoriously entered San José and established a revolutionary junta that ruled the country for eighteen months. At the end of this period, he stepped down and allowed Ulate to serve his full four-year term.

“Not a pastor, but a wolf who gains sustenance from the blood of his sheep” is the way in which a parish priest was described in a petition written on behalf of the town council of Jonacatepec, an important indigenous community in what is now the state of Morelos. Addressing the ecclesiastical authorities in 1818, the petitioners sought to discredit the priest who like a wolf, they claimed, “gains sustenance from the blood of his sheep” by charging too much for his services, for refusing to perform those services in the first place if it was inconvenient, and by keeping a mistress.

These three articles, originally presented as papers at the 1992 American Historical Association meetings, represent a new direction in Mexican legal history. Whereas most legal histories have concentrated on a textual analysis of the law, these articles go beyond the laws to explore how they were implemented (as in Charles Cutter's and Michael Scardaville's pieces) and how they were made (as in Linda Arnold's piece). To do so the authors supplement printed sources with rich and previously neglected materials from local court proceedings, police logs, and supreme court archives. Taken together, the articles present a fascinating picture of how the Mexican legal system worked in practice, be it through the provincial courts of New Mexico, the lower courts of Mexico City, or the Supreme Court visitas of prisons.

Despite its fundamental importance, Spanish colonial law, derecho indiano, has remained something of a mystery to modern scholars. Perhaps the great chronological and ideological distance between us and the antiguo régimen plays a role. We often listen more sympathetically to those who espouse political ideas similar to our own, and we make assumptions based on the institutions with which we are familiar. As a result, modern historians often have joined with nineteenth-century patriots and foreign observers in denouncing the colonial legal system. Judicial administration is still depicted as ponderous, tyrannical, arbitrary, and corrupt. Clearly, many scholars have failed to appreciate the essential qualities of derecho indiano. A more careful scrutiny of the historical record reveals an intricate legal system that proved to be adaptable to the peculiar needs of the diverse regions of empire. Local modification of Hispanic law–derecho vulgar–was an important element of this flexibility and constituted a legitimate expression of local self-governance.

During the presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920), the exploitative and exclusive nature of Guatemalan society became increasingly obvious. Instead of real development, what emerged was a landed oligarchy, engaged primarily in the production of coffee, who utilized their economic might to construct a state that protected their dominant social and political status. Although economic growth and modernization proceeded at a moderate pace in the first two decades of this century, political and social problems associated with increased economic activity and the altered fabric of Guatemalan society arose. Significant among these were the rapid growth of the capital's middle sectors, the emergence of incipient labor organizations, and a vocal and politically conscious student population; all of which were refused a forum for political expression, not to mention an equitable share in the profits of the republic's lucrative coffee industry. The cumulative effect of these forces, augmented by the extremely repressive nature of Estrada Cabrera's Administration, presented the republic with a rare opportunity to implement real and significant reform.

The purpose of this article is to examine some aspects of the evangelization of New Spain in the sixteenth century and the natives’ responses to it. This is a subject of tortuous complexity and one that cannot be adequately treated in a brief essay. Rather, this will be an attempt to highlight some of the more important and interesting aspects of this phenomenon. In doing so I will use some of my own researches into the Virgin of Guadalupe of Mexico to illustrate it and to show some of the pitfalls inherent in the topic.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and first three decades of this one, a small though increasing number of Middle Easterners–principally Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians–made their way to the Americas. Hitherto a little studied influx, the Arabic speakers were part of the largely southern European immigration that reached Latin America in general, and Argentina in particular. Included among the arrivals were the forebears of such future heads of state as Argentina's Carlos Saúl Menem, Bolivia's Juan Pereda Asbún, Colombia's Julio César Turbay Ayala, the Dominican Republic's Elías Wessín y Wessín, or Uruguay's Alberto Abdala, and of such presidential hopefuls as Paulo Salim Maluf (Brazil), Abdala Bucaram (Ecuador), and Jorge Dager (Venezuela). Their spectacular rise, in many cases achieved by the first generation of the immigrants' local offspring, must not obscure the fact that the Arabic speakers were generally undesired. That much was clearly spelled out in the legislation of various countries. Unlike some of her sister states, Argentina, the region's principal absorber, did not seek to block the Middle Easterners' entry before 1928. This was so irrespective of the Argentine constitution's bias in favor of European immigration, the preference for north Europeans shown by the country's elites and their illdisguised disdain for the Arabic speakers, among other ethnic and religious groups. Hence, as the numbers of Syro-Lebanese taking advantage of the absence of Argentine barriers rose, they became the victims of xenophobic attacks, especially since the 1880s.

The Holy Office of the Inquisition in colonial Mexico had as its purpose the defense of Spanish religion and Spanish-Catholic culture against individuals who held heretical views and people who showed lack of respect for religious principles. Inquisition trials of Indians suggest that a prime concern of the Mexican Church in the sixteenth century was recurrent idolatry and religious syncretism. During the remainder of the colonial period and until 1818, the Holy Office of the Inquisition continued to investigate Indian transgressions against orthodoxy as well as provide the modern researcher with unique documentation for the study of mixture of religious beliefs. The “procesos de indios” and other subsidiary documentation from Inquisition archives present crucial data for the ethnologist and ethnohistorian, preserving a view of native religion at the time of Spanish contact, eyewitness accounts of post-conquest idolatry and sacrifice, burial rites, native dances and ceremonies as well as data on genealogy, social organization, political intrigues, and cultural dislocation as the Iberian and Mesoamerican civilizations collided. As “culture shock” continued to reverberate across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Inquisition manuscripts reveal the extent of Indian resistance or accommodation to Spanish Catholic culture.

Mexicans during the early national era actively grappled with identifying, clarifying, and defining core republican political values, principles, and doctrines. Throughout the first federal republic (1824-1835), the central republic (1835-1846), the second federal republic (1846-1853), and into the years of the Revolution of Ayutla (1853-1855) and the Wars for Reform (1858-1861), defining and protecting individual rights, delimiting the rights and prerogatives of corporations and their members, and limiting the power of the state became the fundamental challenges Mexicans confronted as they endeavored to create a republican political society and their own republican political culture. As in many, if perhaps not all, countries in transition from a corporate model to a republican model, the issues polarized public opinion; and militant elements procured arms and pursued civil war, not just once but several times. Simultaneously, el pueblo mexicano actively clamored for justice. Because of that clamoring, jurists, litigants, legislators, and executives all came to recognize that colonial jurisprudence was no substitute for new and innovative republican jurisprudence. The men on the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice persistently counselled politicians that extant jurisprudence contained their competence and impeded them from administering justice when individuals, corporations, and local and national government officials sought protection from perceived wrongs. Significantly, in seeking protection from perceived wrongs, in seeking justice, el pueblo mexicano initiated defining those values, principles, and doctrines that ultimately could unify the society and mystify and mythicize the meaning of the nation.

In 1579 King Philip II selected the presiding inquisitor of Granada as the second archbishop of Los Reyes, or Lima. Countering precedents which favored the episcopal nomination of priests who had spent time in the New World, Philip chose Toribio de Mogrovejo, a man totally lacking in both clerical and missionary experience, to preside over the most important episcopal see in the Southern hemisphere. That curious choice revealed Philip's strategy for the future of the church of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Philip presumably named the young jurist to implement a rigorous organization of the Church in the territory that retiring Viceroy Francisco de Toledo had only recently brought under effective civil governance. This article will demonstrate that, contrary to Philip's expectations, Toribio de Mogrovejo not only failed toinstill a Toledan spirit in the Church, but that he actively developed a mission methodology in accord with that promoted by Bartolomé de Las Casas and his followers in Peru.

The United Mexican States are the advance sentinels of Latin America and guard their northern frontier, the plow in one hand and the rifle in the other.

Mexican diplomat José Manuel Gutiérrez Zamora, 1909

Mexico has long been the principal rival of the United States in Central America. Throughout the past century, the country has, to the measure of its ability, steadfastly resisted U.S. interference in the area. Because of Mexico's geographical location and its experience with U.S. intervention, the strengthening of nationalist forces in Central America has always been a subject of paramount importance for any Mexican regime. Both before and after the Revolution of 1910, Mexico frequently resorted to intervention of its own in attempts to create or maintain a counterweight to U.S. influence. The country has pursued its goals mainly by providing encouragement, diplomatic protection, money, and sometimes arms to Central American governments and factions that have portrayed themselves as opponents of U.S. hegemony.

Father José María Luis Mora, infamous as an advocate for political liberalism during inchoate Mexico’s struggle for nationhood, worked through a myriad of channels to bring about change in his country. Educated and ordained as a secular priest, he was both professor and librarian at the prestigious Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City, but found time to author five volumes of collected essays and edit three periodicals. His national acclaim rests with his career as lawyer, politician, and political theorist. Not all of his contemporaries recognized that he also became a Bible merchant during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

The relative absence of riots in colonial Mexico City is an intriguing phenomenon which has attracted the recent attention of scholars interested in questions of social stability and conflict. While the Mexican countryside experienced over 130 rebellions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the cities by comparison remained calm. The most cogent explanation of urban lower class passivity during the late colonial period has been formulated by Eric Van Young, who suggests that a number of short- and long-term social and economic forces converged to keep the cities, most notably Mexico City, relatively quiet during the wars for independence. Among those he noted were the existence of urban social service and food-distribution institutions, the presence of security forces, an atomized and fluid social order, the lack of traditional communal rights to defend, and weak organizational means to focus discontent.

For the study of Spanish Florida's missions and natives the 1630 memorial by Fray Francisco Alonso de Jesus is a most important document that, strangely, has been little used to date. It ranks in significance with the 1675 letter of Bishop Gabriel Díaz Vara Calderón covering his pastoral visitation of Florida, published in 1936 by the Smithsonian Institution Press in a translation by Lucy N. Wenhold. Fray Alonso's memorial covers some of the same ground as the bishop's letter, but contains additional information dating from almost a half century earlier just before the beginning of the formal evangelization of the province of Apalachee. Fray Alonso covers topics such as the characteristics of the land, its trees and plants and minerals, its Indians and their customs, appearance, clothing, houses, council house, languages, government, inheritance system, tribute payment to native leaders, games, music, and dance, burial practices in heathen times, heathens who were clamoring for baptism in 1630, the number of doctrinas and villages and places belonging to the doctrinas, the number of Christians and catechumens, and the manner of construction of the churches.

In 1791 the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue became the site of the only successful slave uprising in the history of the New World. As the French Revolution reshaped the political and social institutions of the mother country, Saint-Domingue's free people of color, led by an indigo planter from the island's southern peninsula, began a campaign for civil reform that helped destabilize colonial slave society. Despite their pivotal role in what would become the Haitian Revolution, relatively little is known about this important population. Widely acknowledged to be the largest and wealthiest group of its kind in the New World, this class comprised a remarkable 47 percent of the colony's free inhabitants in 1788. While elsewhere in the eighteenth-century Caribbean free coloreds tended to be urban based, most of Saint-Domingue's gens de couleur dwelt in the countryside and a number were successful planters. By 1790 members of this class owned enough slaves and plantations that they were said to possess one-third of the colony.

The land tenure arrangements of missions in Latin America have received insufficient attention. Given the vast extent of land the missions controlled on the Latin American frontier and the effect that land tenure arrangements had on the functioning of the missions, this is a serious oversight. Rather than focus on land tenure, most studies of the missions have examined primarily issues such as evangelization, the labor regime, and demographic patterns. While these topics are also important, indeed vital, to an understanding of missions, an analysis of land tenure arrangements is a useful way for understanding the economic and even the political dimensions of mission systems. For example, the control that the missionaries imposed on their charges should have been reflected in a majority of the land controlled directly by the missionaries rather than holdings controlled by individual Indian families. In this sense, the land tenure system reflected the missionary regime in important ways and helps test hypotheses about economic resources as well as power within this controversial institution. In addition, the changes in ownership and use of land became a key ingredient in determining the survival of indigenous groups once the government secularized the missions.

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the use of history by social scientists. It is less and less common that studies in anthropology, sociology, and political science evaluate variables without attention to their antecedents. There still survive, however, concepts and theories built originally on synchronic assumptions. One of these theories, ladinization, has been the subject of considerable contention.

“Ladinization” derives from “Ladino,” a term used in Guatemala and adjacent areas of Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras to refer to the non-Indian natives of those countries. I am not sure when “ladinization” entered the social science vocabulary, but it may have been with the work of North American anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s. It described what observers thought of as a process whereby Indians were becoming Ladinos or more Ladino-like. The term was not favored by Guatemalan Ladinos, who generally spoke of “civilizing” the Indians, by which they meant that Indian customs should be discarded in favor of Ladino. In espousing this theme, Guatemalan indigenistas of the “generation of the 20s” often blurred the relation of race to culture; some argued that Indians were capable of being “civilized,” others that such changes could only be secured by introducing Europeans to interbreeding.