This article is about the relationship between the early labor movement of the Andean town of Cuzco and a local student movement that emerged during the first two decades of the twentieth century and which produced some of Peru's most distinguished indigenistas. At the turn of the century signs of “progress” and “modernity” made their appearance in the city of Cuzco and both indigenistas and labor leaders were fascinated by these vague liberal concepts. The article seeks to explore the role these two groups played in local urban society and to analyze forms of cooperation and conflicts that characterized relations between them. Indigenistas of the earlytwentieth century did not invent what frequently has been called Peru's “Indian Question,” but they pushed the issue to the forefront of regional and even national debates contending that solving this key problem could help unify the country and develop a more solid sense of national identity.

Beyond a century, however, tradition is of no value. The pre-Hispanic Tarascans and those of a few generations ago are merged into “antepasados” and unless an historically known event is referred to, it is difficult to know to what period a tradition refers.

—Ralph L. Beals, Pedro Carrasco, and Thomas McCorkle, 1944

This article examines the emergence and transformation of the legendary Vasco de Quiroga from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It argues that from the mid-eighteenth century onward Vasco de Quiroga has been transformed into a humanist icon due to the shifting needs of various “historical presents.” Today Vasco de Quiroga is remembered for the utopian communities he dreamed of establishing among the “Indians” of Michoacán, where he served as the first bishop from 1536-1565. However, the traditional image of Vasco de Quiroga as a saintly father figure who understood and was beloved by his Indian charges is best understood as an after-the-fact reconstruction rooted more in colonial discourse, creole perceptions and the formation of modern Mexican nationalism than the sixteenth-century past.

“A machine which does not serve the purpose of labor is useless. So a slave who becomes equated with a machine is useless when some component part no longer works.” (Karl Marx, Manuscripts, 459)

“Verás de abanzada edad
A muchos bozales negros
Que al público pensionando
Están después que sirvieron.”

For years after the 1687 earthquake had devastated much of Lima, various published sermons pondered the significance of the inauspicious event. One specific panegyric written in 1694 detailed the structural damage to the Hospital of San Bartolomé, founded in 1661 for “freed, disabled, ill or elderly blacks.” In the baroque literary style characteristic of the period, the author, Francisco de Vargas Machuca, described how the heroic viceroy Laso de Portocarrero, the Count of Monclova, “born like the sun for the remedy of all,” exercised his “divine charity” toward the poor of the Royal hospital, and “bore the weight of its ruins upon his own majestic shoulders to attend to the poor slaves and their hospital at his own expense.” According to the author, only Christ himself could have predicted that in 1694 the viceroy would refurbish the vestibule with exquisitely adorned doors, place “costly stones of the court” in the portal and replace the damaged cornices with more ornate ones in order to replicate a “hospital of heaven where the poor would enter.” After four months of intensive labor, the wards, in the shape of a Greek cross, were restored and the roofing and masonry work completed. Ample food, bedding and medicine once again provided adequate sustenance for the poor, infirm and elderly slaves and free castas in the hospital.

The question of identity has been one of considerable importance to the study of race in Latin America. Particularly for the multitude of racially mixed offspring produced by miscegenation, it has been debated, what exactly was the degree of consciousness that race could produce? What degree of strength, if any, should be attributed to the caste boundaries created in the colonial period, and how did the reins of “caste” contribute to the 19th and 20th century heritage of the region? With the new and emerging research on the African Diaspora in Latin America, the question has often been asked: did the free mulatto, moreno, or pardo ever feel a specific identity, especially during colonial times, and especially when racial discourse was apparently created by, and served the interests of those who held the supreme positions of power?

Dijo anoche, su canto de muerte
la Canción de la tos en tu percho
y, al mojarse en las notas rojizas
mostró flores de sangre el pañuelo.

Pulmonary tuberculosis substantially influenced societal attitudes and Argentine life style in the nineteenth century. Because tuberculosis was socially defined, how Porteños viewed the tubercular depended on conceptions of the disease, as well as popular and medical views of contagion and cure. Illness did not isolate individuals from society or even from familiar faces and responsibilities. Class, gender, age, attitudes on contagion, and approaches to treatment influenced the choices available to men, women, and children.

On 15 August 1880, the Venezuelan military governor of the Venezuelan Territorio Federal de la Guajira complained to the president of the state of Zulia that a woman from the town of Sinamaica had recently taken a young Indian woman to Maracaibo for a visit. She then sold the girl to the owner of an hacienda south of Lake Maracaibo. The girl turned out to be the niece of a powerful leader of the Uriana lineage or clan of the Guayú, or Guajiro Indians, known to Creoles as “Jullachipar” or “Juya Chipara.” He threatened to attack nearby Venezuelan settlements unless she was returned. State authorities undertook an urgent search for the girl. She eventually reappeared on an hacienda near Encontrados, south of Lake Maracaibo. She was returned to her family. The man who purchased her was jailed in Maracaibo, as was her abductor, but the ultimate disposition of the case remains obscure.

A historian, soldier, diplomat, journalist, poet, translator, and politician, Bartolomé Mitre (1821-1906) stood out among the most renowned figures of late nineteenth century Latin America. “He is a full handsome man,” declared one of his many European admirers in 1861, “of very eloquent appearance with a fine forehead and thoughtful face. He is a poet and a scholar, and looks altogether too refined and gentlemanly to be mixed up with the dirty doings of second-rate politicians.” Forty years later, Carlos Pellegrini, a former president of Argentina and one of Mitre's leading political opponents, described him as “the most powerful caudillo of our time” who possessed “an aura of personal valor that he imposed on the multitude.” To an American hagiographer writing in the 1940s, Mitre was a “poet in action,” and a “heart in unison with his time and his country.… In the unification of his country, Mitre displayed the astuteness of a Cavour and the ardency of a Garibaldi.”

The creation of the new banana enclave on Costa Rica's Pacific coast in the 1920s marks a significant watershed in the social and political history of race relations in the country. The culminating event in what was a lengthy battle over the composition of the workforce on the new plantations was the signing of the 1934 banana contract between the government of Costa Rica and the United Fruit Company. In addition to allowing for the continued growth of the industry in Costa Rica, the agreement took aim at the West Indian immigrant by prohibiting “people of colour” from working for United Fruit on the Pacific coast. Subsequent to the agreement, the state made a conscious effort to force the integration of the West Indian community. The government closed English schools, pushed farmers off their land, and deported West Indians in order to purge the province of Limón of people who were not citizens, but who belonged to a well-established immigrant community. As a result, resident West Indians were forced to re-examine their relationship with the country and they engaged in a protracted struggle to overcome heightened levels of discrimination.

The exploitation of Andean villagers under the forced labor regime for the mines of Potosi is almost as infamous as the silver they extracted from the cerro rico is famous. Established by Viceroy Toledo in the 1570s, the mita, as the system of forced labor was known, remained in place until the smoke and shot of Latin American independence struggles were in the air. For over two centuries, Spain forced thousands upon thousands of naturales (a common colonial term for indigenous people) from communities throughout the southern Andean highlands to lend their muscle and sweat, and all too often their blood and their lives, to keep Potosi's veins open and flowing. Through this work the mitayos and their communities not only drove the colonial economy, but also were a major force in sustaining the Spanish empire and in helping forge the modern world's dominant economic system. Conversely, mita exploitation threatened the very survival of the communities subject to it. The mita was so onerous that virtually all indigenous peoples subject to the labor draft, regardless of ethnicity or class, raised an almost continuous voice of protest from their communities against the mita and its abuses. Tensions created by the mita also severely strained the bonds that linked community, curaca, and the state, which were primary ingredients in the social glue that kept colonial Andean society from coming apart. To avoid descending into the mines, and to escape such horrors as laboring over mercury vapors, many people permanently fled their communities, giving up the status of originarios (community members with rights such as access to land and subject to state obligations) to become forasteros (indigenous person not living in community of origin, or descendant of the same, without communal rights but exempt from many state obligations). In this way the mita, one of the few forces that had potential for uniting Andean peoples in opposition to the state also fractured them. Communal solidarity was severely strained and neither the shared experience of the mita nor the commonality of experience in Potosi created sufficient cohesion to overcome the ethnic and regional differences that divided them.

Before the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, Protestantism and Cuban nationalism coexisted relatively comfortably and even naturally, the function of a Protestant movement under Spanish colonialism that, unlike the rest of Latin America, was run not by North American or English missionaries, but by Cuban ministers. After United States intervention in 1898, U.S. interests were imposed on virtually every sector of Cuban society, including organized Protestantism, influencing Cuba's development for at least the next half-century. Preempted by U.S. intervention, Cuban nationalism, in both its ecclesiastical and secular dimensions, endured and intensified with the deepening of Cubans' dependency on the U.S. Politically, Cuban nationalism was expressed in growing protests and demands for a more genuine independence by abrogating the Platt Amendment and otherwise ending U.S. interventionism. Ecclesiastically, Cubans pushed for a greater role in Protestant church affairs, and toward Cubanization of the Church. Protestant missions thus confronted a rising nationalism within and outside the Church. By 1920, eastern Cuba, the cradle of Cuban independence, became the epicenter of this struggle.

Novelist and statesman Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969) played a key role in the emergence of Venezuelan populism, first by inscribing the populist rationale for change in a series of novels—most famously in Doña Bárbara (1929)—and later by lending his prestige to Acción Democrática (AD), the nation’s most successful populist party. A founding member of AD, Gallegos supported the coup that brought the party to power in 1945 and became the party’s standard bearer in 1947, winning Venezuela’s first presidential election based on universal suffrage and direct voting. As president, he advanced AD’s reform agenda for almost a year before the military removed him from office and imposed a reactionary dictatorship. Forced into exile, Gallegos returned to his homeland when the dictatorship fell in 1958 and spent his remaining years as a revered elder statesman and acclaimed cultural figure.

The participants in the festivals of the rosary in Minas Gerais tell a story about the beginning of the devotion of the blacks to Our Lady of the Rosary. In the story, a black slave sees Our Lady of the Rosary out in the sea rocking on top of the waves. When he tells his master, the master and the priests rush down to the water, but are unable to coax her to come to shore. In frustration, they leave the task to the blacks. Blacks from different African nations, or different groups of congados in the vernacular, go one by one to the edge of the sea (or a river) and play their instruments, dance and sing to try to convince Our Lady of the Rosary to come ashore. Their efforts only become successful when the most traditional group goes to the shore and begins to play their music. Even this most traditional group has no success, however, until all the other groups return and join them to sing together. Only then does Our Lady of the Rosary come to the shore and sit on the largest drum, showing her acceptance of the devotion of the blacks. Even when the whites take her to their own chapel and lock the door, she escapes and returns to the sea, waiting for the blacks to call her out again and put her in their own chapel.

“En la NUEVA ARGENTINA, el pueblo gozará ampliamente del CREDITO para su beneficio. Los hombres de campo podrán adquirir con él su parcela, su casa y las maquinarias que requiera su labor.”(2do. Plan Quinquenal al alcance de los niños, para 5to. y 6to. grados, 1953, p. 44)

La Argentina de los años 1940:

“Es necesario que el país conozca francamente los serios extremos a que se aproxima su situatinón económica. […] Grandes excedentes de productos invendibles significan intenso malestar en la campaña, crisis industrial, desocupación y zozobra en las ciudades, postración general en todas las actividades del país, con repercusiones sociales de imprevisible alcance.” Así presenta, en 1940, ante el Senado Nacional su plan de reactivación económica el Ministro de Hacienda Federico Pinedo, en un intento por formular una propuesta que se anticipe a los efectos del fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El proyecto se esfuerza por conciliar industrialización y economía abierta, fomentando el comercio con los Estados Unidos mientras procura crear un mercado de capitales e implementa el subsidio a la producción agraria, a la que sigue considerando como “la gran rueda de la economía” argentina.

Perhaps the most enduring image of the Zapatista uprising, which began in Chiapas on 1 January 1994, is the masked figure of Subcomandante Marcos. Running a close second, however, would be the sight of this makeshift army filing past delegates at the opening of the Conventión Nacional Democrática in the Lancandona later the same year. Men, women and youths with their wooden rifles for weapons, dignity and silent determination as ammunition. They were not the first, and I dare say will not be the last, indigenous movement in Mexico to be driven to violence in defense of their rights. The state's firm response to the uprising was predictable and illustrates the most common reaction to the specter of an Indian with a gun in his hand. Ironically, the Mexican army has carried out such repression with a rank and file comprised largely of youths from indigenous backgrounds. These young men see enlistment as one of the few escapes from the rural poverty that did much to foster the Zapatista rebellion in the first place. Thus, an armed Indian per se is not a problem; it is merely when this person acts autonomously that the trouble begins.

The first Afro-Brazilian to be awarded a knighthood in the Portuguese Order of Santiago seems to have been the light-skinned mulatto, Manuel Gonçalves Doria. In 1628 he was rewarded by King Philip IV with the habit and knighthood, as well as an annual pension of 20$ or 20 milreis, for his eight years of service as a soldier and captain (through 1627) and, especially for his bravery in Bahia in 1624 and 1625, fighting against the Dutch when they captured and occupied Salvador, the capital of Brazil. A letter from the crown praised him as “the prime mover behind the attacks and ambushes” which the Portuguese made as the Dutch occupiers tried to expand their military presence beyond the city limits. So great were his exploits during the Dutch invasion that the Portuguese-born Jesuit priest Bartolomeu Guerreiro, in his Jornada dos Vassalos da Coroa de Portugal, published in Lisbon in 1625, highlighted several examples of his derringdo. Not to be outdone, the Bahian-born Franciscan Frei Vicente do Salvador gave Gonçalves Doria's actions against the Dutch at least eleven mentions in his História do Brasil. But as Manuel and many of his contemporaries would discover, it was one thing to be awarded a knighthood and another to receive the authorization for the ceremonies to be performed.

On 11 September 1941, U..S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took to the airwaves to warn his country that “Hitler's advance guards” were readying “footholds, bridgeheads in the New World, to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans.” The most recent sign that the Nazis were coming, the president told his rapt national audience, was the discovery of “secret airlanding fields in Colombia, within easy range of the Panama Canal.”

In Bogotá, the response was pandemonium. U.S. ambassador Spruille Braden, astonished that “the President has gone out on a limb with this statement,” sent his staff scrambling across German-owned farms and rice fields to try to produce evidence for the assertion ex post facto. Colombian President Eduardo Santos scoffed at Roosevelt's claim, telling Braden, “in the final analysis all of Colombia is a great potential airport.” A resentful Colombian Senate voted unanimously that no such airfields existed (that Colombia had fulfilled its responsibility to defend against the Axis menace). In Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was forced to call in Colombia's Ambassador Gabriel Turbay to express “the very deep regret of the President, of myself and of our Government” for the “unintentional reference.”