By the late seventeenth century, the cult of San Felipe de Jesús (ca. 1572-97), native of Mexico City and martyr in Japan, had taken a stable form in Mexico City, where he was born. Each year on February 5, the dignitaries of the viceregal capital gathered for a procession through the city center and a liturgical ceremony in the cathedral to praise the saint and his city, but for the rest of the year, residents largely ignored him. A multitude of social interests had led to this less-than-wholehearted embrace, among them rivalry between religious orders, civic self-promotion, and religious beliefs.

One of the most popular and enduring legends in the Andean city of Quito recounts the vivid tale of a young Indian named Francisco Cantuña, the son of a powerful Inca captain, who lived and died in the sixteenth century. Maimed and horribly disfigured when the Inca general Rumiñahui burned the city of Quito, Cantuña was present when the general hid the treasure of Atahualpa before the arrival of the conquering Spaniards. In the aftermath of occupation, the young Cantuña was adopted by a benevolent Spaniard who taught him to read, write, and live a good Christian life. In return, Cantuña rewarded the Spaniard, as well as several local churches and chapels, with large sums of gold, which he secretly melted down from Atahualpa's hidden treasure. News of Cantuna's beneficence prompted all manner of speculation and suspicion among the local populace, to the extent that he was called before a tribunal to account for his mysterious wealth. In order to preserve the secret of the Inca treasure, Cantuña testified that he had acquired his riches by signing a pact with the devil. On this point, the earliest published version of the legend affirms that his testimony was a deliberate lie intended to quiet the gullible authorities, because Cantuna “was in reality a good Christian” who was very devoted to a local image of the Dolorosa (Virgin of Sorrows).

During slavery in the Americas, whether plantation, mining or urban, captives, Creoles, freedpersons and Africans invented various forms of socialization, in part through family arrangements. The slave family is one of the most prominent themes in recent studies of Brazilian slavery. Until the 1970s, several authors claimed that such families did not exist; however, contemporary studies have revised many of the arguments about slaves' experiences and daily lives. Based on statistical sources (post-mortem inventories, lists of names, population censuses, and parish records) historians have demonstrated that, despite their living conditions, workdays, specific demographics, illness, mortality, etc., a considerable part of die slave population was able to establish families and compadrio relations by employing various strategies.

Political patronage was at the very basis of society's functioning in nineteenth-century Latin America, yet we still know very little about its inner dynamics. Recent analyses of national politics have questioned the idea that Latin American elections were restrictive and fraudulent, or that there was no effective citizenship. These studies have widened the understanding of political participation, and have argued persuasively for the agency of those who had been previously reduced to the background. Leading scholars have stressed the importance of early widespread suffrage and electoral mobilization in Latin America, noting that detailed analysis of local power struggles promise to reveal the dynamics of social structures and electoral politics. This new literature has also firmly established that in Latin America the process through which this happened was not linear, as generous voting rights were often restricted over time.

In 2006, the Newberry Library in Chicago announced its digitization of the ancient Maya-K’iche’ myth, the Popol Vuh. While digitization ensures the preservation of the document and easier access for researchers, it is also significant in that it marks a new stage in the long historical trajectory of the manuscript itself. The Popol Vuh, or “Maya Bible,” is the most studied indigenous document of Mesoamerica. Contemporary scholarship has considered it, among all the early colonial documents, to best reflect a pre-Hispanic native voice. It provides a breadth and depth of detail concerning Maya religion, cosmology, and society, and its contents have been generalized to apply to virtually all of the ancient Maya religions. Additionally, the text has been used as a source for numerous ethnohistorical studies, and its mythological context has profoundly influenced most Guatemalan literature from the early nineteenth century to the present. More important, the Popol Vuh has become a symbol of Guatemalan national “indigenousness” and was officially declared Guatemala’s national book in 1971.

Puppet theater was considered a marginal form of entertainment during Mexico's colonial era. People saw puppet plays on temporary stages outside of churches, at various fairs, and in private homes. The puppet groups were officially overshadowed by the theater performances, especially those at the Coliseum of Comedias, one of the financial channels for the Hospital Real de Naturales. Leasing the coliseum provided one of the major sources of income for this royal charity for indigenous health care. In order to maintain the Coliseum's profitability and the benefits derived from it, colonial authorities prohibited most theater groups from performing outside of the Coliseum. The lease owner often called for government assistance against puppet troupes, in particular when they threatened attendance at the theater. This resulted in the so-called “League Comedy” (Comedia de la legua), which was a performance given at least five leagues outside of the central theater district of Mexico City, Puebla, and Guadalajara.

In February 1724 two municipal councils (câmaras) in Brazil wrote to the Portuguese crown. Although presiding over the faraway cities of Belém do Pará and São Luís do Maranhão, they claimed the right to advise the king in matters of state. “[T]he first obligation of aldermen (vereadores),” they explained, “is to act as defenders of the cities and peoples that they represent, or in other words, to be councilors to the sovereign prince, … instructing him in what is necessary for the increase and conservation of the people.” In their capacity as councilors, the aldermen proposed a forty-point plan that would turn colonial administration in Amazonia on end. Among other changes, they recommended that missionaries should no longer have temporal jurisdiction over indigenous villages, that the power of overseas governors and justice ministers should be diminished, and that their own children and grandchildren should be given preferential treatment to serve in local positions. Concluding with a flourish, they promised that their recommendations would generate a “superabundance of wealth” and be inexpensive to boot, not costing a penny more than the price of paper (to print a royal decree).

On April 18, 1773, in the town of Teziutlán in the eastern mountains of Mexico, Captain don Raphael Padres participated in the baptism of his godson in the local church. He stood watching as Father Francisco Flandes leaned over the baptismal font to daub oil on the head of Joseph Philipe. As the priest performed the sacrament, reciting the script of baptism, the boy's parents, don Cristóbal Hernández and doña Isabel Pérez, followed along. After anointing the child, Father Flandes turned to the militia captain to inform him of his responsibilities as godfather, explaining the spiritual kinship that Padres now had with the boy. After the rite was completed, the priest recorded his actions in the church's book of baptisms. He noted the boy's age and that he had been legitimately born the previous day. He also listed the names of the boy, his parents, the godfather, and the godfather's wife, doña Josepha Fernández. The priest also pointed out that all the adults were españoles (of pure Spanish ancestry).

A significant segment of the Argentine intelligentsia experienced the Revolution of September 1955, which overthrew General Juan Domingo Perón, as a moment of liberation. With some exceptions, such as Arturo Jauretche and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz among others, the cultural politics of Peronism had not managed to gain many followers in the course of its ten-year experiment. During the two consecutive Perón governments (1946-1955) the often implicit, and occasionally explicit, opposition between intellectuals and Peronism only intensified. I contend that an analysis of this opposition is indispensable for understanding the redrawing of crucial definitions within the intellectual field at that time. Due to its profound social and cultural impact, the experience of Peronism compelled Argentine intellectuals, whether or not it was their original intention, to enter the political arena, not so much because their interests shifted from culture to politics, but rather because they came to conceive the cultural world as political.

In a paper presented to the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Havana on December 14, 1923, Dr. Jorge LeRoy y Cassá identified the “unsanitary immigration” to Cuba of Haitians and British West Indians as his country's most pressing health problem. “Those undesirable elements,” he contended, had introduced malaria, smallpox, typhoid fever, and intestinal parasites into eastern Cuba, maladies which then spread to the rest of the island. Through their “vices,” “violent crimes,” and “nefarious practices of brujerí;a [witchcraft],” in fact, Afro-Caribbean immigrants constituted a “double threat”—moral as well as physical—to the health of the Cuban nation. Somewhat surprisingly, the man who was later hailed as the “Father of Cuban Sanitary Statistics” mustered no direct evidence to support his condemnation of West Indian immigration on medical grounds. But such proof was hardly necessary for his esteemed audience. Although the medical doctors and public health officials assembled before LeRoy y Cassa at the Academy of Sciences may have differed on the issue of prohibiting.

Were one to sit down to compile a list of the great cities of the African diaspora, Montevideo, Uruguay, would not be one of the first names to come to mind. Yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of Africans arrived in the city, brought on slaving vessels from Africa and Brazil. By 1810, the population both of Montevideo (9,400) and the larger colony of the Banda Oriental (an estimated 30,000) was one-third black and mulatto. Two centuries later, as a result of large-scale European immigration during the 1800s and early 1900s that proportion had fallen to 6 percent, with Afro-Uruguayans numbering approximately 180,000 people in a national population of 3 million.

Professor Josefina Zoraida Vázquez has made an indelible imprint on the discipline of the history of Mexico. Her publications have provided an analysis of the Mexican experience through such diverse themes as the U.S. invasion (1846-1848), the evolution of national education programs, and the struggles to establish federalism and republicanism in the first decades of independence. She has written official textbooks used by all Mexican school children, appeared on numerous television programs, taught dozens of doctoral students, and assisted many scholars in both Mexico and the United States. She has been an active member of the historical profession; she organized the Congress of Mexican Historians from Mexico, the United States, and Canada in Patzcuaro in 1977 and served as the President of the same organization in Monterrey in 2003.

Upon assuming office in 1784, Viceroy Nicolás del Campo, Marqués de Loreto, observed that ruin threatened the Guaraní missions in the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. Scholars concur that after the Jesuit expulsion in 1768, the missions fell into disrepair and lost their important role in regional affairs. This change marked a significant shift. Until the late eighteenth century, the Guaraní missions attracted the largest indigenous population of all of Spain's Catholic missions and served an important economic and political role in the Río de la Plata region. During the last third of the century, the Guaraní missions declined as a result of Crown reforms that spurred transatlantic trade and reshaped the missions. Expenses far surpassed revenues, buildings and infrastructure deteriorated, distributions of material goods to the Indians decreased, and fewer Guaraní inhabited the missions.

Ahush fell over the gathering of fidgety kindergarteners on a May morning in 1934 in an Ixtapalapa schoolyard, as stage curtains drew apart to reveal an animated stereotypically black hand puppet (El Negrito) laboriously hauling firewood back and forth at the behest of his patrón. El Negrito complained about his plight, and the children's eyes widened with terror, reflecting the fear demonstrated by the puppet when the patrón threatened the arrival of the Devil if he did not keep working. Enter Comino, a cheeky young boy puppet, whose grandmother, accusing him of slothfulness, had brought him to the patrón to learn some work ethic. A Devil puppet loomed large on the makeshift stage, bellowing out vague threats. Two kindergarteners burst into tears. Not wanting to disturb the rest of the captive audience, the teacher removed the terrified girls and brought them around to the back of the stage so that they could see the puppeteers manipulating the cloth, felt and wooden dolls. Despite her efforts, the girls remained inconsolable and refused to watch the rest of the show.

The Mexican government's National Indigenist Institute (Instituto Nacional Indigenista, or INI) was at a crossroads in early 1954. Three years after opening its pilot Indigenist Coordinating Center (Centro Coordinador Indigenista, or CCI) in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, the INI had managed to launch several development projects in the highlands despite the hostility of local ladinos (non-Indians) and the indifference and distrust of most Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya communities. The INI operated nearly fifty bilingual schools, called Literacy Centers, but attendance figures were low, especially for girls. It had built four medical clinics, but most highland Maya still turned to shamans when they fell ill. Although water-borne and flea-borne diseases ravaged the indigenous population on a seasonal basis, most Tzeltals and Tzotzils resisted the INI's vaccination and hygiene campaigns and refused to permit the encasement of their sacred springs. The INI also had trouble selling its consumer cooperatives. In short, it had established a foothold in a complicated region, but most Tzeltals and Tzotzils were reluctant to embrace its development programs.