Even if the narrative is ornate, elegant, and copious of words
Even if persons, places, and times are conveniently displayed
Even if the shape of towns and the site and order of battles are fully described
Even if the mind of the reader is artfully attracted to the material
If the truth is missing it can never be called history.

The historical writings of Garcilaso Inca de la Vega (1539-1616) have evoked varying responses since they appeared. Consideration of his work has concerned its historical value rather less than it has examined Garcilaso's literary style, indigenist perspective, ambicultural dilemma, and irrepressible imagination. In turn most of this commentary has concentrated on Garcilaso's account of Inca history and customs as embodied in the Comentarios reales. Garcilaso's integrated, coherent, and circumstantial account was long regarded as the orthodox version of Inca matters, if only because it so congenially mirrored European ideas of what historical writing should be all about. Of late, however, it has come under fire as it becomes increasingly apparent that the weight of archeological, ethno-historical, and cultural evidence fails to sustain Garcilaso's projection of imperial status, utopian social norms, and quasi-Christian habits to the very beginnings of the Inca polity.

The prosperous state of Peruvian historiography partly reflects the parlous condition of Peruvian historians. With full professors' takehome pay just over 200 dollars a month at Lima's Pontificia Universidad Católica rather less at the University of San Marcos, and with prices not that much lower than in industrialized countries, scholars scrounge for additional support. Moonlighting as a cabby is risky though definitely known among academicians; high schools offer extra hours to about a fifth of San Marcos' lecturers; and the Católica historians staff the university's general studies program for freshmen and sophomores. But the most attractive solution lies in promoting projects for foundations. That is one way for history to be written.

The Peruvian educational reform law of 1972, promulgated by the military regime of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, was considered at the time one of the best to date in the history of Latin America. With the dismantling of many of the reform laws of the “First Phase” (1968-75) of the revolution during the “Second Phase” (1975-80), and the nearly total repudiation of the entire military period by the democratically elected government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980-85), there was no change more regretted than the undoing of the educational reform. One of the main reasons for the reform's setback was the intense opposition it aroused among private upper-class schools which resented the social aspects of the law. Half of these schools were church-run. But contrary to what has happened in other Latin American countries, the battle in Peru was not between an authoritarian laicist state and the Roman Catholic Church. The real forces that lined up against each other in Peru were, on the one hand, the government, the official church and progressive groups within the church, which in the wake of Vatican II and the bishop's conference of Medellín not only came out in support of the law but even participated directly in composing it, and on the other hand, the powerful cluster of upper-class religious and lay schools which represented the traditional and rightest groups in the church. The educational reform, therefore, was the occasion for a clash among Catholics themselves. At the same time it forced the church to make a fundamental choice: between continuing its uncritical support for upper-class religious education or openly siding with the many state-supported church schools for the middle and lower classes, especially in cases of conflict between the two systems.

The New Kingdom of Granada, now Colombia, was discovered and settled by three unrelated expeditions organized for different purposes. Two of them were led by Spaniards and one by a German. The first was placed under the leadership of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada by the governor of Santa Marta, and ordered to go south in search of a passage to Peru. Another was led from the south and out of Peru by Sebastián de Benalcázar in search of one Dorado or golden man, who was supposed to reign in the Indian area of Cundirumarca, while the third was organized by Nikolaus Federmann in the province of Venezuela, with the aim of reaching the Xerira land of riches, the existence of which was known from the Indians encountered in early explorations. He was to proceed under the auspices of the German House of Welser, concessionary at the time of the exploration and exploitation of the province of Venezuela.

During the Mexican Revolution, nationalism and class conflict became two of the most pervasive aspects of the social upheaval that swept Mexico. Class conflict became so intense that workers did not respond to the bourgeois leader Francisco Madero after he assumed power in 1911. Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa also failed to attract urban workers or unite the nation. Venustiano Carranza eventually articulated a version of nationalism that responded to class conflict by promising to alleviate the grim features of Mexican society that required reform. In Mexico as well as many other countries after the nineteenth century, nationalism prevailed over class conflict during periods of crisis.

A monarchy based on the slave plantation labor of Africans until the late nineteenth century, vast Brazil offered little appeal to European immigrants except in the far south of the country, where smaller plots of arable land became available as the coffee frontier expanded. Facing shortages in slave supply after mid-century, when the British forced the Brazilians to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade, provincial governments attempted to lure European immigrants by granting subsidies to pay for transport and for initial costs of settlements. In 1881, the Imperial government joined in the effort to recruit immigrants who, in addition to providing a replenished work force, could also be counted on to “whiten” the population. Germans predominated among immigrants until 1886, followed by Italians, Poles, and some Japanese until the 1930's, when rising xenophobia led Brazilian officials to curtail immigration and to install a restrictive quota system.

Scholarly studies of the Mexican revolutionary period seldom have approached the subject from the standpoint of how this momentous struggle was actually waged by its combatants. While considerable investigation has rendered valuable insights into leading personalities and movements of the time, no comparable effort has been made to unravel the myriad military complexities and paradoxes of one of the major wars waged on the North American continent.

A case in point concerns the foreign soldiers who fought side by side with Mexican troops in the rebel armies. Such military personnel are commonly referred to in modern-day parlance as mercenaries, a term indicating “paid soldiers in the service of a foreign country.” However, not all foreigners who served in the Revolution were professional soldiers for hire, nor did all have previous military experience. Such words and phrases as soldiers of fortune or adventurers, in vogue during the period, more clearly define the status of these combatants as “men fighting for pay or love of adventure under the flag of any country.” Be that as it may, all of the terms given above are basically synonymous and can be used interchangeably to refer to the foreign volunteers who joined the various armed factions contending for supremacy in Mexico.

Despite a growing interest in the history of women in colonial Spanish America, the Castilian legislation which defined female juridical status has received scant attention. Some scholars have treated legal questions as a corollary to the themes of feminine endeavor and wealth. The law itself, relegated to a secondary position, has remained a maze of confusing mandates to all but a few historians who have wrestled with its directives. An analysis of the legal foundation which was central to the roles that Hispanic American women assumed in the colonies is therefore in order. The purpose of this article is accordingly to clarify pertinent legal terms, concepts, and procedures that were operative throughout the Indies. Particular emphasis is given to the subject of females as donors and beneficiaries of marital endowments and parental estates. Since the abstract legal principles are difficult to understand, concrete examples are drawn from Hispanic families in Chile to illustrate the workings of the law. These eighteenth-century cases comprise a dowry receipt, an estate settlement, and a set of testamentary dispositions. The family papers underscore the fact that norms established in peninsular legislation and applied in Spanish America constituted an important link in the chain of continuity with the past that characterized colonial life even as that life underwent change in the Bourbon era.

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Symposium “Bolivia: Formation and Development of a Labor Force, 1600 to the Present,” organized by Ann Zulawski and Lesley Gill for the 45th International Congress of Americanists, Bogotá, Colombia, 1985. The author wishes to thank Robert H. Jackson, Brooke Larson, and Nils Jacobsen for their comments on the paper. Research funds were provided by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Program, and the Inter-American Foundation.

The Spanish Crown established montepíos throughout the Empire after 1763, first in Spain and then in the overseas possessions. These agencies provided an excellent vehicle for shaping and implementing royal marriage policy in America. The institutions functioned as monitoring units and also provided penalties and incentives motivating bureaucrats to conform to the king's will when contemplating marriage. The montes became a central part of the process through which the king attempted to regulate his servants' marriages.

The king intended these agencies, funded by a combination of royal and membership contributions, to provide modest pensions for survivors of deceased officials. In Madrid, Mexico City, and Lima, the Crown founded autonomous institutions known as Montepíos de Ministros for senior officials and Montepíos de Oficinas for subordinates. Lesser capitals received only one office for all ranks. All the montepíos, however, were important not only as sources of pensions but also as a means of enhancing royal control over marriage in the bureaucracy.

There is perhaps no area of historical literature where women—other than monarchs and Mata Haris—have been less visible than in the literature of international relations. Yet women of the western world were active at the international level by the last half of the nineteenth century, and in numbers commensurate to those of their male counterparts. The record of their organization, deliberations, tactics, correspondence, public statements and delegations to designated representatives of their governments adds a new dimension to the history of international relations.

In the last ten years there has been a great deal of interest in the scholarship devoted to the related issues of slavery and race relations in Latin America. This writer has himself published works which shed some light on the Black “experience” in isolated, interior Paraguay in the nineteenth century. The ongoing task to more fully understand the different patterns of racial (in all of its aspects) relations in Latin America has been fruitful and has elucidated much of a story, an experience, long hidden. There is, however, much to be done, for the vast bulk of the studies published to date deal with a few, selected countries (or colonies); most notably Brazil and Cuba. Nations such as Chile, Uurguay, Colombia and even Argentina, have received as yet very little attention from the scholars of slavery and race relations.

No more Cubas!” For a quarter of a century, that slogan has propelled American intervention into Latin America. President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was designed to head off more Castro-type revolutions in the region. In 1965, President Johnson crushed a revolution in the Dominican Republic, declaring that “another Cuba in this hemisphere would be unacceptable.” And the Nixon plan for subverting the Chilean government in the early 1970s was motivated, in Henry Kissinger's words, by fear of Allende's “patent intention to create another Cuba.”

If banditry and mysticism represents one classic formula summarizing the historical reality of the Brazilian Northeast, its companion image is one of devastating droughts and concomitant migrations out from the parched backlands to regional capitals like Recife and Salvador and on to the great national metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Reports of drought in the Northeast appear from the times of early settlement; succeeding centuries witnessed repeated dry periods. While some of these proved relatively moderate in intensity, others, sparing only the lush coastal strip, assailed the entire region and reigned for several seasons. Of this latter type, none provoked greater suffering than the so-called Grande Séca which embraced the winters from 1877-1879, devastating the cotton and cattle complexes, the mainstays of the backlands' economy, and setting in motion an enormous migratory stream which ranged from the Amazon rubber lands to those of the booming coffee culture in the Southeast. Moreover, with the outbreak of epidemic diseases, it generated a mortality estimated as exceeding two hundred thousand persons. By this measure, then, the Grande Séca stands as “the most costly natural disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere.”

The recently unfolding process of transition from twenty years of military government to a new republic with democratic ideals in Brazil brings, as one of its correlates, an upsurge of citizen interest about a previous period of transition which took place almost one hundred years ago. That transition, marked by the end of modern slavery, led to the implantation of a dependent capitalist bourgeois order. The focus of many controversies and the object of considerable debate, “transition” in the late nineteenth century, has been most widely researched in São Paulo. There, the influx of European immigration accompanied the expansion of coffee production in the western frontier and excess capital generated from the sale of coffee was injected into the incipient industrial sector of the economy.

The image of the lone and footloose venturer, all but penniless, striking out for the Indies seeking immediate enrichment, has long since given way to a more balanced picture of the Spanish settlers of the New World in the sixteenth century. This revised picture suggests that the Spanish emigrants had their origins principally in a wide middle sector of social and occupational groups, ranging from hidalgos below the level of the high nobility, professionals and officials, to artisans and tradespeople of all sorts, farmers, and an impressive number of “servants.” One component of the earlier image of Spanish emigrants—the down-on-his lick hidalgo whose pride and sense of honor propelled him to the Indies in hope of improving his fortunes—survived the transition to the revised idea now accepted, his reputation somewhat rehabilitated but his presence undeniable. Stereotypes notwithstanding, the image of the cadet sons of hidalgo families and of relatively poor hidalgos going off to the Indies has considerable basis in fact; it is a reflection of the realities of Spanish family and social structure that sent the same type of individual into religious orders, universities, or the army. But while a basic truth gave rise to the longstanding cliche, we still know relatively little of what lies behind it—nor, for that matter, do we know very much about the hidalgos and provincial nobility of Spain, the sector (as opposed to the high titled nobility) that entered into the Indies venture in the sixteenth century in some numbers.

The presence of American bases and troops in the British Caribbean during the Second World War was the catalyst to an anti-Americanism which has continued to dominate political thinking in the area. This has been a rather ironic turn of events. Prior to the arrival of the Americans, there had been a growing sentiment among sections of the population for some sort of American take-over of the islands. After the Americans arrived, however, relations with the people of the islands soured. The idea of an American take-over died aborning, and by the end of the war, such ideas were no longer being entertained by the people of the British Caribbean. They were replaced instead, by an aggressive nationalism which called for self-government for the islands as an entity. Whereas in 1938, a British journalist could have written that “Trinidad (and Barbados and Jamaica) wants to be American,” it had long ceased to be true by the end of the war. A Trinidadian labor leader, at a regional conference in 1945, succinctly summed up the ideas of all of his confreres. “Whenever we pass into other hands,” he declared, “both hands must be our own.”

Amanuscript account by a Scots merchant, Robert Allen, of his life in New Spain from 1698 until 1707 has recently come to light. In 1708 Allen sent the three-page memorial to the British secretary of state for the south, Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, outlining his experiences over the preceding decade with the view towards securing employment under the crown in the Americas. Allen began with the year 1698 when he left the Scottish colony at Darien to work for Jamaican merchants on trading voyages in the Spanish West Indies. In 1701 he returned to the coast of Darien in search of Nicaragua wood and, by chance, began six years of residence on the continent. Surviving one Indian massacre, he lived among friendly natives, joined the Jamaican expedition of 1702 which raided the Isthmus of Panama, escaped a second Indian and Spanish massacre, and was taken as a prisoner to Quito where in 1704 he secured appointment as secretary to the fiscal of the audiencia and surveyor general of the province of Quito. When this official was promoted to the Council of the Indies in 1707, Allen accompanied him on the journey to Spain. However, their ship was one of those attacked and sunk by Admiral Wager, who in turn persuaded Allen to return to England and approach the government.

The long-traditional view of the Roman Catholic Church in Spanish America as a monolithic, wealthy, and all powerful institution has been gradually modified by successive studies over the last thirty years. From these examinations emerges the picture of a complex institution characterized by diversity, and internal conflict. New research continues to enlarge and clarify understanding of the Church's role as an institution of the Spanish empire.

What follows will, in highlighting the colonial Church's relationship to the Spanish crown, add to this view of it as a complex and diverse institution. An examination of crown policy with regard to Church finance in the sixteenth century shows that the episcopal hierarchy of the Mexican colonial Church had a subordinate relationship to the crown in the era of the Counter Reformation. Rather than a strong Church influencing the crown, what emerges is the portrait of a relatively weak, dependent institution, supported by the king. The secular church hierarchy had only enough power to carry out its function and serve as a counterpoint to the religious orders, not enough to achieve financial independence on its own. The basis for this relationship lies in the patrimonial nature of Castilian government and its dominant position over the Church hierarchy because of the Patronato Real.

The Spanish mission system was a tool of empire. If we consider it oppressive by modern standards, it was—at least in intent—a lesser of the many evils invariably accompanying the historical tactics of imperialism. With the Enlightenment and the new world republican movements of the early nineteenth century, the lot of the “mission Indian” grew worse rather than better. Although along with the other “citizens” of the new American republics he was declared “liberated,” he soon found out that some citizens were more liberated than others. With the rejection of the centralized authority of the Spanish monarchy, land-grabbing became the order of the day and Indian lands were the easiest target.