The centenary of the birth of Doña Emilia Pardo-Bazán in 1852 is being celebrated with an enthusiasm which indicates that at last her remarkable qualities are properly appreciated. Most of the centenary celebrations stress her creative work as the author of the novels Los Pazos de Ulloa and La Madre Naturaleza. Her fictional writings are so distinguished that there is a tendency to forget that her historical and critical works are unusual and worthy of study. It may be relevant to note here that she wrote several books about the Franciscan movement and that she was a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis. Her two-volume San Francisco de Asís (1882) was highly praised by Pope Leo XIII, and she celebrated the fourth centenary of the discovery of America in her study Los Franciscanos y Colón (1892).

If the reading of an author’s work, allusions, imitations and dedications are an index to popularity, Walt Whitman was one of the most popular among the poets of Latin America. The number of times he is mentioned in their works alone indicates the extent of interest aroused by him and their attitude toward him.

An attempt will not be made to show that Whitman was more popular than Poe or Longfellow, but the writer will endeavor to show the extent to which he was known, imitated and emulated by Spanish American poets.

Early on the Morning of January 30, 1953, the telephone brought the sad though not unexpected news of the death of Herbert Eugene Bolton at his home in Berkeley. There, since a few days before his eighty-second birthday in July, he had lain ill from a cerebral hemorrhage. Though he made a partial recovery in the ensuing months and was able to converse with friends, he finally came to the end of the long trail that he had pioneered in Western and Latin-American history. From humble beginnings on the American frontier, but stimulated by the forces it generated, he became one of the most productive scholars of the century and the ablest interpreter of the essential unity of the peoples of the American nations.

THERE ARE SEVERAL motives for giving a course in Latin-American philosophy. Of these, the most immediately practical in intent, and the one which directly led to the formation of the course at the University of Missouri, was a desire to furnish a relevant course in philosophy for the use of students in Spanish, history and the Latin-American studies area. This factor has turned out to be of secondary importance at Missouri, since only a small part of the students who take the course are from the fields named. The value of this motive will necessarily vary from campus to campus, and it may well be of considerable magnitude in many situations.

In the Issue of January, 1946, the editor of THE AMERICAS published in the form of an article an extended review of mine of a book that had appeared the year before. This was the first volume of the Historia del arte hispanoamericano, written by Diego Angulo Iniguez and Enrique Marco Dorta. Now, five years later, I have been invited to review for the same journal the second volume of this monumental work. It is not often that such a privilege is accorded and I am duly grateful for this opportunity to continue the consideration of a major work of Spanish and Spanish American scholarship, which in its gradual development is bound to be increasingly a subject of prime interest and usefulness to all who are concerned with the culture of Latin America.

There was a race on, in 1914, to cross Uspallata Pass over the Andes—which would get across first, an automobile or an airplane? Man’s feet had worn trails across the high mountains, but neither of these two vehicles had ever crossed the dizzy heights of this Pass. Both were comparatively new means of transportation, and both faced great hazards in this undertaking. For the auto there was only an old, winding, dirt road; for the airplane there were the formidable, twenty-three-thousand-foot-high snow-capped mountains with their treacherous wind currents. It seemed as if Nature had had a prevision of these new inventions, and, to guard her inviolability, had thrown up insuperable physical barriers. The mountains hampered and impeded communication between various South American countries, and particularly between Chile and Argentina the Andes formed a tantalizing barricade. The ranges were like an ocean separating the two countries, and the same spirit which spurs man on to see what is over the horizon, or around the next bend in the road, would not let him rest until he had flown himself over the Andes.

NACIMIENTO IS THE NAME given in Spain and Spanish America to the plastic representation of the Nativity of Christ at Yuletide. These Nacimientos are of very ancient origin; they go back, in fact, to the days of St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century. In December, 1223, St. Francis, who had just obtained from Pope Honorius III the approval of the Order he had founded, left his abode and set out for the Monastery of Monte Colombo, where, shortly after his arrival, we are told that he addressed his friend, Giovanni Vellita, in the following manner:

I am desirous of celebrating with thee the feast of the Nativity of our Lord in a special and hitherto unusual way. Go, therefore, to the cavern that is near this monastery and set up therein a manger full of hay, having taken with thee an ox and an ass, which thou wilt place close by, as they were in Bethlehem that blessed night, for I wish to recall with due solemnity the coming of the Son of God into this world, and to see with my own eyes how poor and miserable He appeared, and all for the love of us men.

The Important Role of the religious orders in the evangelization and colonization of Spanish America is recognized by all historians. In both Mexico and Peru the Franciscans, Dominicans and Mercedarians were the earliest friars upon the scene. They traveled down from Panama to Tumbez and to San Miguel de Piura in Peru as early as 1531 when the conquest of that country was scarcely under way. Those were heroic days, when men braved the incalculable terrors of the unknown, the hostility of the natives and the rigors of extreme altitudes swept by angry winds and snows in the bitterness of winter.

SPAIN AND THE SPANISH conquerors still are, too often, the scapegoats of too many would-be historians. The Spaniards, according to them, were the grasping, greedy, bloody and cruel destroyers of the wonderful Indian civilizations. They murdered or enslaved the mild, long-suffering Indians, practically decimating them in all the countries of Latin America. This, of course, will not stop the same authors from telling us a little later, in their well-informed books, that Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, etc., suffer from indianismo and are predominantly peopled by Indians. The “Black Legend,” while tottering under the blows of writers like Bandelier, Lummis, Bolton, Simpson and others—who, knowing Spanish, were able to consult primary sources—still fascinates the textbook writers of the time. They seldom can find a good word for anything Spanish—agriculture, industry, commerce, culture, religion—while every flaw in the Spanish system is played up for the scandal of the weak and the joy of the wicked.

President Polk’s message to Congress on December 5, 1848, informed that body—and thus the country—that the reports “of the abundance of gold” in California, though “of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief,” had been “corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.” The President’s message touched off the gold mania in the East. There were, of course, by this time thousands in the “diggings,” but they were mostly from California or Oregon.

Most of the Argonauts traveled to California by the various overland trails, but many, especially from the East, went by sea. In 1849 almost all those who traveled by ship either went “round the Horn” or by water to Panama, across the isthmus, and then again by ship to California. In 1849 apparently only one group of gold seekers chose to cross Central America at Nicaragua rather than Panama. The next year, however, as reports came back of the various disadvantages of the all-water route and of the Panama crossing, more and more of the Argonauts turned to Nicaragua.

From the Early Days of the conquest of the River Plate up to our times, there have been numerous religious of the Order of St. Francis who have occupied episcopal sees in what is today the Argentine Republic, but not one of them has filled such glorious pages of the history of this country as Fray Fernando Trejo y Sanabria. Only one has come close to imitating his intense and extraordinary labors, and that was Fray Martín Ignacio de Loyola, Bishop of Asunción del Paraguay between 1602 and 1606, an epoch when all the Argentine coastland belonged to the Asunción Diocese.

When Harold Palmer Davis published his Black Democracy in 1928, after twelve years of study and of residence in Haiti, he wrote of Toussaint L’Ouverture that it would be impossible to form any true estimate of Toussaint’s character, because of the great mass of material that had been written about him from widely divergent and conflicting viewpoints.

1. Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. MS copy of part of Landa’s original manuscript discovered in Academia de la Historia, Madrid, by C. E. Brasseur de Bourbourg and first published by him: Relation des choses de Yucatan de Diego de Landa (Coll. Doc. Lang. Indig.… de l’Am. Anc., vol. 3). Paris, 1864. (Incomplete.)

Second edition: Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgado, Manuscrito de Diego de Landa tomada directamente del único ejemplar que se conoce y se conserva en la Academia de la Historia (Appendix to Spanish translation of Léon de Rosny’s Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’écriture hiératique Maya, Paris, 1876). Madrid, 1884. (First complete edition except for maps.)

The History of the Early contacts between the Russians and the Spanish-speaking people in this hemisphere remains to be written. A few of these meetings are common knowledge. Miranda’s visit to the Russia of Catherine the Great has been treated frequently; Concepción de Argüello’s tragic love for the Russian Rezanov became a traditional theme. Obviously, in California, where the two civilizations met, contacts were numerous. With very few exceptions they were reported as incidents of friction. Bancroft’s History of California (XIX, Chapters 4, 14 and 28) and Engelhardt’s The Missions and Missionaries of California convey the impression that the Russians were aware of the military weakness of the Spanish outposts and that the Spanish, later Mexican, leaders were generally apprehensive of the designs of their neighbors to the North. On the other hand, the friendly reception accorded by the Spanish Franciscans to Rezanov’s companion, Langsdorff, and the latter’s favorable comments on the friars’ achievements are known. Another instance of peaceful relations whose record somewhat belies the concept of an early nineteenth-century “cold war” on the Pacific coast is almost unknown.

IN 1630 FRAY ALONSO DE BENAVIDES, the former superior of the Franciscan missions in New Mexico, returned to Spain and wrote for Philip IV a report on the activities of the missionaries of his custodia. In this report is found one of the most interesting accounts in the whole history of the missionary Church in America. It is the strange story of the miraculous conversion of the Jumano Indians and of other tribes in the Southwest of the United States by a Spanish nun, Sor María de Jesús de Agreda. In 1622 Fray Alonso de Benavides had come to the missions of New Mexico with a large group of Franciscans. Being their superior, he assigned them to various missions. One of the group, Fray Juan de Salas, he sent to work among the Indians of Isleta near present-day Albuquerque.

The Regional Security provisions of the Rio Treaty of Mutual Assistance dealing with individual and collective defense, along with the structural and juridical reorganization of the inter-American system of Bogotá in 1948, constitute to a certain degree a return to Bolivarian political concepts of a Hispanic-American union or confederation. This was the dominant theme and leitmotiv of inter-American relations from 1830 to 1865. It is our purpose in this present study to present the attitude and position of Chile towards these expressions of hemisphere solidarity during this period of the mid-nineteenth century.

The Document entitled “Conversión de los San Luiseños de la Alta California,” by the Luiseño Indian, Pablo Tac, who was born at the California Mission of San Luis Rey de Francia in 1822, and who died in Italy in 1841, is of unusual interest both as an historical and ethnographic record, but perhaps most of all because it is the unique instance of an account of California Mission Indian life written by an Indian. It may also be claimed as the first writing of a literary nature produced by a native of California, even though there may be legal instruments, commercial notes and personal letters by native Californians bearing earlier dates. Although the culture of the Luiseño Indians is fairly well known from the work of modern anthropologists, Tac’s account is certainly the only written description of it by a Luiseño, brief and incomplete though it is.

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.

Water is a Prominent Theme in Mexican place names. Of at least 50,000 Indian toponyms, an untold number of references are made to water: its abundance, scarcity, shape, size and quality (i.e., color, taste and purity for drinking).

A study of Mexican place names makes it apparent that the proper distribution of water is historically one of the basic problems confronting the country; this is indirectly substantiated by many allusions to aqueducts and to the question of water ownerships in a given place. Rivers, too, play an important part in Mexican toponyms; the same applies perhaps more so to springs. Vegetation and fauna frequently are identified with hydronyms in Mexican place names. Diverse actions are associated with another group, while stones and soil figure in still another class. Canoes appear in another cluster of place names.