In 1807 the Commissary General of the Indies for the Franciscan Order, Pablo de Moya, appealed to the Spanish crown to lift a long-standing ban on the admission of novices at the Observant Franciscan community of Our Lady of Santa Clara (Nuestra Señora de Santa Clara) of Havana. Moya reported that the great majority of the clarisas had grown aged and infirm in recent years. The sad situation on which the commissary general reported was the result of four decades of convent reform at Santa Clara that successfully reestablished the common life (vida común), something seldom achieved in the large, opulent convents of the Spanish empire.

“So, just how did you get interested in Latin America anyway?” Latin Americanists who don't have a recognizably Spanish or Portuguese surname are routinely asked this question by acquaintances, distant relatives, recently hired colleagues, and even by that most dreaded of airline passengers, the garrulous fool in the next seat. I don't have a convenient response—I can't claim to be the daughter of missionaries (my last name is a dead giveaway on that account), nor of diplomats or corporative executives posted to São Paulo when I was a young girl. I did have two great aunts from Minsk who took a boat to “America” and ended up in Buenos Aires, but that's a rather slim biographical reed on which to rest my decision to become a Latin Americanist.

Of the five great African diasporas of historical record, as recently described by Colin Palmer, the fourth includes the story of Blacks in Spanish America. It remains the best studied of the “five major African diasporic streams,” thanks to pioneering work by scholars such as Palmer, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Frederick Bowser, Herbert Klein, Rolando Mellafe, and others, as well as a flurry of recent and forthcoming publications by a new generation studying this diaspora—among them the contributors to this special issue of The Americas, and the late Kimberly Hanger, to whom the issue is hereby dedicated.

In their zeal to transform rural society during the 1920s, Mexican educators undertook a number of projects that in retrospect seem unusual. Fancying themselves as the intellectual heirs of the earliest Catholic friars, they sent “missionaries” into the countryside to preach the gospel of progress, developed rigid definitions of the appropriate forms of rural living, and even taught school children in Mexico City to paint according to pre-Colombian styles in order to build a harmonious nation. These were indeed creative ideas, but none was more imaginative than the decision to establish a Rural Normal School in the midst of the largest urban center in the country. Established in the Anáhuac neighborhood of Mexico City in 1926, the Casa del Estudiante Indígena was hailed as the centerpiece of the government's commitment to Indian education. Inside the Casa a culturally diverse student population, speaking mutually unintelligible languages, would be transformed into models of the national culture. They would adopt modern dress and practices, learn perfect Spanish, and in turn bring the benefits of modernity to their home communities.

Mining had far-reaching ecological consequences throughout much of colonial Spanish America. It deformed the landscape, introduced pollutants such as sulfur, mercury and salt into the biosphere, and caused human settlement of sparsely populated or uninhabited regions. Forests succumbed to the charcoal makers' axes. Workers' lungs filled with silicosis-causing dust. Cave-ins snuffed out lives or crippled those they spared.

As unhealthy as mining was elsewhere in Spanish America, it was reported to have been especially harmful in the central Andes at Huancavelica. Workers there suffered the common diseases and injuries associated with the industry such as respiratory disease and broken limbs. They also had to overcome the challenges of arduous labor at high altitude. Most pernicious of all was the toxic nature of the mercury they were mining. Colonial critics asserted that Huancavelica was an environmental tragedy that placed workers in exceptionally dangerous conditions in order to produce the mercury needed by silver refiners to amalgamate and refine their ores. The critics claimed that the mercury mines' human cost was immoral, yet their cries of despair and outrage could not overcome quicksilver's crucial importance to the imperial economy. Killing and maiming, Huancavelica earned for itself an infamous reputation as the mina de la muerte (the mine of death).

“I, Juan Garrido, black resident [de color negro vecino] of this city [Mexico], appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of making a probanza to the perpetuity of the king [a perpetuad rey], a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [Cortés] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out, always with the said Marqués, all of which I did at my own expense without being given either salary or allotment of natives [repartimiento de indios] or anything else. As I am married and a resident of this city, where I have always lived; and also as I went with the Marqués del Valle to discover the islands which are in that part of the southern sea [the Pacific] where there was much hunger and privation; and also as I went to discover and pacify the islands of San Juan de Buriquén de Puerto Rico; and also as I went on the pacification and conquest of the island of Cuba with the adelantado Diego Velázquez; in all these ways for thirty years have I served and continue to serve Your Majesty—for these reasons stated above do I petition Your Mercy. And also because I was the first to have the inspiration to sow maize here in New Spain and to see if it took; I did this and experimented at my own expense.”

In the eyes of many North Americans, Mexico is above all a country of immigration from which hundreds of thousands hope to pass across the border to find the promised land in the United States. What these North Americans do not realize is that for thousands of Latin Americans and for many U.S. intellectuals, Mexico after the revolution of 1910-1920 constituted the promised land. People persecuted for their political or religious beliefs—radicals, revolutionaries but liberals as well—could find refuge in Mexico when repressive regimes took over their country.

In the 1920s such radical leaders as Víctor Raúl Haya De La Torre, César Augusto Sandino and Julio Antonio Mella found refuge in Mexico. This policy continued for many years even after the Mexican government turned to the right. Thousands of refugees from Latin American military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay fled to Mexico. The history of that policy of the Mexican government has not yet been written.

Much has been written about race and race stereotyping in Brazil in relation to African-Brazilians and their mixed African-European descendants. The situation of Indians and their mixed-blood descendants has been studied much less. In fact, the word mestizo as it is used in Spanish America does not translate well into Portuguese, for in Portuguese a mestiço can be any mixture. In the case of Brazil, it can mean either a descendant of Indian-European parents or of African-European parents.

This paper studies racial classifications in seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth-century São Paulo. São Paulo was a unique region in colonial Brazil and, because of its unique history, these findings cannot be automatically extrapolated to all other parts of Brazil. São Paul was very poor, especially if compared to the northeast, and later to Minas Gerais, the center of the gold and diamond mining region. Though the town was founded in 1554, it lacked exportable natural resources until the late eighteenth century, so that the economy was partly based on the raising of a few cattle and crops for subsistence or for sale locally or to other regions of Brazil. The labor needs of Paulistas (inhabitants of São Paulo) were met through exploratory and slaving expeditions called bandeiras that replenished their Indian labor force or else provided captives to be sold to other parts of Brazil. Though there were a few African slaves in São Paulo in the seventeenth century, the settlers could not afford them in substantial numbers until the second half of the eighteenth century.

By 1820, much of Spanish South America had achieved independence, and Spain was on the defensive in those areas where her flag still flew. Amongst the countries that gained their independence in this period was Chile, which after the battle of Maipú in April 1818, faced no further threats to its existence from Spain. For many of the new nations, the period immediately after independence was one of political instability, shading into civil war, and Chile was no exception. However, in comparison with many of its neighbors, the period of instability was short, and the physical destruction not great.

A theme common to all regions of the Portuguese seaborne empire was dependency on non-Europeans for the creation, consolidation and survival of empire: for defense, labor, construction of towns and forts, transportation, production of raw materials, sexual gratification and, in the case of the Estado da India (Portuguese forts, towns, cities and factories from the Swahili coast to Japan and Timor), on merchants, brokers and interpreters to provide access to suppliers, distributors, commercial networks, and even vessels and capital. Through conversion, peoples from Japan to Africa and America, contributed to the flock of the church militant and, in some more limited cases, as missionaries, catechists, and secular priests. One exception was Brazil where Amerindians were not admitted into the regular or secular clergy. The one area in which the Portuguese crown was not willing to countenance indigenous participation was appointment to public office, be this in the imperial bureaucracy, or election to city or town councils other than in Cape Verde and São Tomé. In Asia and Angola persons other than of exclusively European parentage on both sides and even New Christians may have served on town councils, and some non-Europeans held clerical positions, but the policy forbidding persons of African descent to hold office in church or state was adhered to in practice. Brazil was unique in at least two regards. First, perhaps in no other European colony was dispossession (from an indigenous perspective) so complete. The Portuguese assumed sovereignty over indigenous peoples and their territories and saw Brazil as a tabula rasa where the Portuguese were free to establish cities, institutions, governance, commercial practices, and to implant their religious beliefs, writing and numeracy systems, values, and mores. Secondly, among European overseas colonies in the early modern period, Brazil was unique in that by the end of the colonial period (1822), a transplanted population of African-born and their American-born descendants comprised a demographic majority which exceeded the indigenous population and persons of European origin or descent.

In 1545, miners struck silver in what would become one of the richest veins in the entire New World, the near legendary Cerro Rico of Potosí, in the Andean highlands of Peru. This strike prompted swift action on the part of royal authorities. They sought to rearrange existing land and labor systems and to establish new ones to meet the spiraling economic demands. Simultaneously they had to cope with a dramatic, unprecedented drop in the indigenous population which hitherto had supplied needed labor. The crown turned elsewhere, and authorized the exploitation of another, far more distant group of people. Slaves from Africa became an additional, ongoing source of much needed labor in the Andes.

During the period between the Brazilian declaration of independence from Portugal in 1822 and Brazil's abolition of the slave trade in 1850, Rio de Janeiro constituted the most important destination of Portuguese emigrants in the world. In 1841, the preponderance of these immigrants in that city was described by a representative of the Portuguese government in Rio, Ildefonso Leopoldo Bayard:

A number of factors made this city attractive to these migrants. The arrival of the Portuguese court and the opening of the city's port to foreign trade and foreign merchants, created an economic boom in Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century. This growth was also perpetuated by the increasing coffee economy after the 1830s.

In mid-July 1594 a notary recorded the last wishes of an elite woman on her deathbed in Quito. Ysabel de Baeza was a native of the old Kingdom of Granada, a four-time widow, owner of some houses in Seville and a modest estancia in Ambato, a few days' ride south of Quito. She also claimed five slaves: Magdalena and her four children, Luisa, Felipe, Juan, and Antón. Doña Ysabel's real estate was to go mostly to her children and grandchildren in Quito, but the fate of the slaves was more carefully circumscribed. Magdalena would serve her dying master's daughter for four years, after which she would be freed. Luisa was to serve Baeza's granddaughter, Leonor de Ayala, and Felipe a great-grandson, Alonso Bonifaz, both “until the time when they ransom themselves (se rescaten) and give each one on their own behalf four hundred pesos of current silver.” The younger Juan and Antón were to stay in the household of Baeza's executors until they also freed themselves, each for 300 pesos. The slaves were not to be sold by these temporary masters, and the 1,400 pesos thus collected was to be placed in a chaplaincy fund (capellanía) administered by Quito's Augustinians. The masses thus financed by the self-redemption of Ysabel Baeza's slaves would in turn help release her soul from the temporary captivity and untold pain of Purgatory.

Every year a fair is held in the last days of September at which not only the inhabitants of Saltillo provision themselves for the entire year, but also those of the Kingdom of Nuevo León, Coahuila, Texas, and a great part of the colony of Santander as well. They come to sell wool, deer skins, salt, mules, and some other products that those places produce, and return with clothes, tanned hides, soap, saddles, and a variety of foodstuffs that come from Michoacán and Nueva Galicia, such as rice, sugar, chickpeas, and other commodities harvested in those lands. As a result, Saltillo has become a sort of warehouse, where the neighboring provinces provision themselves not only at fair time, but where they come between-times to stock themselves of those articles that they lack, which are considerable because of the impossibility of preserving them in such hot places.

Mexico's transition from a colonial society to an independent nation was extremely difficult and civil war seemed to threaten at every turn during the first half of the nineteenth century. Independence required the creation of a new republican order to replace the colonial system of corporate identities and racial domination. The creation of a new liberal order based on individual citizenship was a contested process where competing political actors sought to preserve colonial privileges even as they used the new constitutional system to their advantage. The indigenous communities, the majority of the population at independence, posed a challenge to the new society of citizens. The objective of this paper is to explore the fate of indigenous communities under the new system and how Indians manipulated it in order to survive. The following pages discuss how independence affected villagers by first describing what the change to a new liberal order meant for local town governments. Then using case studies from the gulf region of Mexico, the paper will draw connections between indigenous village politics and the pronunciamientos that frequently destabilized the national government. Pronunciamientos in the provinces had a profound effect that over time tended to create more opportunities for discontented villagers to enter politics. Finally, the paper will discuss how these political divisions played out in the series of rebellions of the late 1840s known as “caste war of the Huasteca.”

So many Indian men had moved, fled or died because of the labor draft to the silver mines of Potosí that only women were left to govern in some Andean communities. Or so the rumor went. In 1682, the cabildo of the imperial mining capital informed the king that such reports were greatly exaggerated. “This could not be true, even in the case where not one male Indian was left in the entire Kingdom,” its statement reads. “Although the pueblos have been depopulated, there are still more than enough [men] to fill offices in conformity with cabildo ordinances.”

Juan, a literate black slave born and raised in the Spanish town of Cáceres, labored for at least five years during the 1560s in the Honduran gold mines of Guayape. Finally, growing tired of the arduous work of placer mining and taking advantage of his isolation, he made a bid for freedom. Upon hearing of Juan's flight, his owner, a wealthy Santiago-based merchant named Santos de Figueroa, immediately began the process of securing Juan's recovery. Eventually Juan made his way to Santo Domingo where unfortunately he was captured and Figueroa notified of his whereabouts. It remains unknown if Juan was actually returned to Santiago or if Figueroa instead preferred to sell him, a rather common occurrence in cases of runaway slaves.

In 1978, the Brazilian military government launched a “community development project” for the Xavante Indians of Mato Grosso (“Projeto Xavante”) to promote mechanized rice production and livestock rearing, and to institute educational and health programs. As the project sought to foster indigenous self-sufficiency, the government Indian bureau, Fundaçaão Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) would deploy a team of technicians, agronomists, educators, and health care officials to train Xavante as agriculturists, machine operators, health care attendants, and bilingual teaching monitors. Under the administration of General Ismarth Araújo de Oliveira, FUNAI initially earmarked CR$8,635,207 for the Xavante Project and established a special coordinating unit in Barra do Garças, Mato Grosso, the Ajudância Autônoma de Barra do Garças (AJABAG).