In an anonymous circa 1754 portrait (Figure 1), fray Francisco de Santa Ana stands in a flowered crown and the brown and white habit of the Carmelite first order. The image commemorates the occasion of his final vows as a mendicant friar, and he is a rare if not unique example of a monk within the genre of the so-called crowned nuns. With eyes cast down, fray Francisco appears next to a table bearing an hourglass, skull, and book, symbols of his devotion and of his meditation on his own mortality. Painted as if tacked to the wall beside him is a print of the Virgin Mary, representing the Carmelite order's fervent Marian devotion. While she seems to gaze down at her follower, fray Francisco humbly looks away.

“As ill-luck would have it”
“As good luck would have it”

First let me welcome y'all to Atlanta.

Let me begin by telling you what I'm not going to do. There is no subaltern theory, gender theory, queer theory nor any discussion of race, class and gender (RCG) in my talk. Nothing will be constructed, deconstructed, structured, conceptualized or historicized. I will not speak of hegemony or hegemonic processes, “weapons of the weak” or contested terrains, discursive mechanisms or hidden discourses and I will not unpack concepts, tease out or discover embedded meanings or interrogate silences. Lastly, in this talk there are no subalterns and no one is contesting, negotiating, empowering or empowered.

In December 1841, voters in Sonsonate (El Salvador) elected Frenchman and long-time resident, Luis Bertrand Save, as their alcalde, or municipal judge, for 1842. The governor insisted that Save accept the office. However, Save convinced El Salvador's president that he should not serve since he was not a citizen of the country, citing French and Salvadoran laws to back up his argument. French law mattered because Save could lose his qualité de français, or “Frenchness,” by holding office in a foreign government, and Salvadoran laws limited office-holding to its own citizens. In 1843, Save was again elected alcalde and again protested because “the law requires for these positions that it is indispensable that the elected be a citizen of the country. While I am a vecino (for I live in Sonsonate), I am not a ciudadano (citizen), and as a foreigner, have neither a letter of naturalization, nor am I naturalized de facto.” That is, Save acknowledged the importance of local citizenship and accepted the status of a Sonsonate vecino, or community member, but pointed out that he lacked national membership because his domicile did not make a “foreigner” a citizen, and he lacked the institutional change of status, naturalization, to overcome that foreignness.

Before anyone heard of Colombian narcotraficantes, a new class of international cocaine traffickers was born between 1947 and 1964, led by little-known Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Cubans, Mexicans, Brazilians, and Argentines. These men—and often daring young women—anxiously pursued by U.S. drug agents, pioneered the business of illicit cocaine, a drug whose small-scale production in the Andes remained legal and above board until the late 1940s. Before 1945, cocaine barely existed as an illicit drug; by 1950, a handful of couriers were smuggling it by the ounce from Peru; by the mid-1960s this hemispheric flow topped hundreds of kilos yearly, linking thousands of coca farmers across the eastern Andes to crude labs, organized trafficking rings, and a bustling retailer diaspora in consuming hot-spots like New York and Miami. The Colombians of the 1970s, the Pablo Escobars who leveraged this network into one of hundreds of tons, worth untold billions, are today notorious. Yet historians have yet to uncover their modest predecessors or the actual start of Colombia's role: cocaine's “pre-Colombian” origins.

The historiography of the book in the age of Spanish imperial expansionism has traditionally viewed printed works as repressive instruments of colonial domination that forcefully supplanted the native Americans' non-alphabetic vehicles of memory and communication. Accounts of the Europeans' wholesale destruction of native holy objects and material forms of expression bespeak the undisputable role of books in the Spanish colonization of indigenous memory and symbolizing practices. But the existence of colonial-era writings that testify to the resiliency of native technologies poses still-unanswered questions about the mechanisms by which this colonization took place and the ultimate reach of print culture in local native communities removed from the urban centers where, as Ángel Rama has suggested, written documents held sway. To what extent did native methods of communication endure under Spanish rule? What might the documentary traces of their use reveal about how they were transformed as a result of European contact? Can we tie their survival to concrete means by which native peoples withstood or adjusted to the Europeans' written culture and colonizing institutions? I would like to attempt to answer these questions by focusing on missionary uses of Andean khipus: the knotted cords used by the Inca for the purposes of accounting and historical record keeping, which native parishioners employed in colonial times for learning Christian doctrine and recalling sins prior to confession.

In 1808, confronted with the latest in a lengthy series of legal challenges to its corporate landholdings, the municipal council of the Indian town of San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala, in the northeastern province of Coahuila in New Spain, dispatched a blistering note to its counterpart in the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo. The question of the moment concerned the right of Saltillo residents José Miguel and Juan González to route water they claimed in one place to property San Esteban had earlier allowed them to farm in another. But to do so meant that the water would be directed across lands belonging to San Esteban. When the Indian town denied them this right, the brothers protested vigorously. They contended that agriculture was, after all, the mainstay of the local economy. It benefited the public, the king, the church, and particularly the families of the pueblo itself. To deny these two farmers access to their water was to jeopardize agricultural production in the area. Further, they argued, San Esteban possessed much uncultivated arid land; perhaps the pueblo should consider renting some of the Gonzálezes' water as it flowed across the town's properties. Implicit in this suggestion was the assumption that San Esteban residents could not deal with what they had, that they were wasteful in utilizing their resources, and that Spaniards, in this particular case the brothers González, were better equipped to exploit the resources of the community.

As dawn broke in Mexico City's streets, steamy pots opened to offer the delicious smell of hot tamales and atole. Lupita woke up early that morning to sell tamales in the usual corner of Niño Perdido street in Mexico City's downtown. In that year, 1947, the construction of the Latin American Tower had just started. Lupita observed the builders digging deeply in the foundations while she sipped her atole and served red and green sauce tamales to her customers. In 1940s and 1950s Mexico City, workers and low-ranking bureaucrats started their day with this popular meal, as they had done since colonial times. Reformers, however, questioned the nutritional value of the working-class diet and considered it as a threat to the construction of modern Mexico.

Early in 1817, in the tiny port of Rosario, a deeply troubled Comandante Tomás Bernal sat down at his desk to pen a confidential private letter to Supreme Director Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, head of the national government based in Buenos Aires. Nearly seven years after the May Revolution against Spain, the territory that would later become Argentina found itself buffeted by civil war. Bernal's region, the jurisdiction of the city of Santa Fe, just up the Paraná River from Buenos Aires, found itself enmeshed in the bitter conflict between the government in Buenos Aires, the former viceregal capital, and its principal rival, José Gervasio Artigas, leader of a federalist alliance based in the nearby Banda Oriental, modern Uruguay. Desperate to contain disputes between the national government and the recently created government of Santa Fe, Bernal counseled restraint. However, he knew that Buenos Aires and Santa Fe were on the brink of war. “For my part,” he wrote Pueyrredón:

On the night of June 24, 1874, the illiterate farmer Francisco Angelino de Souza attended a St. John's party in the house of João Pereira, located in the estate Barra do Felipe in the largely rural municipality of Jucás, province (now state) of Ceará in Northeast Brazil. The celebrations unfolded uneventfully, with the guests singing to the rhythms of a viola (small guitar, typical of the Northeastern backlands) and drinking the sugarcane brandy called cachaça until late in the night. However, unexpectedly, a fight erupted between Francisco Angelino and António Rodrigues de Souza. According to eyewitnesses, Francisco Angelino stabbed António's leg with his knife after he had “offended” Francisco Angelino's reputation. In the midst of this commotion, one of the party guests performed an in flagrante arrest, taking an indignant Francisco Angelino to jail, while he clamored at the top of his lungs that he “was not afraid of any man, or even of being jailed, because he had a bull, a horse, lands and money” to defend himself.

The Roman Catholic Church in Chile first acknowledged its inability to pastor its flock in the 1920s because of an acute shortage of priests. Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, SJ addressed the clerical crisis in a 1936 article, La Crisis Sacerdotal en Chile. When critics found his analysis “exaggerated,” he conducted a survey of Chilean religious practices and published the findings in a controversial essay entitled Es Chile un país católico? which is said to have earned him the wrath of the hierarchy because it called attention to the woeful neglect of pastoral duties especially among the rural and working class populations. This empirical data demonstrated that the Catholic Church in Chile had 1615 priests, of whom 780 were secular and 835 regular clergy; of the same 1615 priests 915 were Chilean and 700 were foreigners. There were 451 parishes, some of which contained several towns and villages scattered over a thousand square kilometers with 10,000 parishioners to be ministered to by a single priest. Hurtado's solution—a larger and better-educated clergy—was a long-term solution to an urgent problem that would never be achieved. Something had to be done immediately to keep the faith alive. In the gendered world of Chilean Catholicism, the task of preserving the faith fell to young laywomen.

In October, 1797, the indios principales of the Andean pueblo of Muñani appealed to the royal court in Cusco to depose their governor, or cacica, Doña María Teresa Choquehuanca. Not challenging hereditary Choquehuanca rule, they instead focused on María Teresa's incompetence and her sex, complaining of “the miseries that we have suffered with [her] inappropriate entry into the cacicazgo,” adding that “on account of her distinct sex she should by justice be deposed, because she is not worthy of so estimable an office.” That office was central to the indigenous politics of colonial Peru, the legal and administrative ordering of which placed most of the Indian population in relatively autonomous, land-owning “pueblos de indios” over which the cacique, responsible for collecting the crown's tribute and maintaining order, presided as something between a chief and a lord. As the village leaders in a parallel, popular tradition that reserved its authority for men, Muñani's principales asserted that this bastion of elite indigenous authority ought not be held by a woman. But they made clear that it sometimes was: María Teresa had governed Muñani for five years. Nor was she alone. Cacicas governed pueblos and ayllus throughout the Andes, and it was quite common for the husbands of cacical heiresses to rule in their names.

“Bishops, because they are bishops, cannot stop being vassals of their kings, and functionaries of their states. Nor are they exempt from practicing with all those around them, especially with their diocesans, works of mercy, physically as well as spiritually.

I gave [the miners] as proof of this truth one of the soliloquies of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in which he said: “You are a man, you are a citizen of the world.” —Bishop Martínez Compañón recounting his experiences with the Hualgayoc miner's guild in a letter to Viceroy Teodoro de Croix of Peru, May 1786.

In response to an anti-Federalist insurgency within the province of Córdoba in 1840, Manuel López, the governor (r. 1835-1852) and staunchally to Juan Manuel de Rosas, issued a directive to all provincial judges to round up all suspected Unitarians and their families, seize their property, and strip them of their citizenship. In following these orders, Pedro José García, the local juez de paz (Justice of the Peace), the principle law enforcement body of Pueblo de la Toma in the heart of Córdoba province, proceeded to the farmhouse of Faustino Avalo, who had recently been “classified” as a “savage Unitarian,” a political label describing any person opposing Federalist rule. García charged Avalos with secretly aiding and abetting Unitarian armies, which had passed through the province during the anti-Federalist uprisings in the previous year. As evidence of his guilt, according to the confiscation order, Avalos went missing for weeks and was nowhere to be found. Indeed, when García arrived, only Avalos's wife, María Juana Villafáñez, and their ten children remained. Nevertheless, García, along with two other “trusted” witnesses, read the order and confiscated the entire family's property. Villafáñez and her children could only watch helplessly as their clothes, toys, furniture, and livestock were taken away in wagons and their house boarded up. Yet, García did not arrest nor imprison Villafáñez and her children; instead, they were allowed to stay with her brother, Gervasio, a well-known Federalist and one of the “trusted” witnesses to his sister's material loss and public humiliation.

In the 40 years since he published Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964: An Experiment in Democracy, Thomas Skidmore has simultaneously been a leading U.S. scholar of Latin American history and a prominent public figure in Brazil. Balancing these roles, Skidmore has written and commented extensively on recent Brazilian political and economic history. But he is also the author of an influential intellectual history of racial thought in Brazil, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (1974). Black into White examines what Skidmore calls the “whitening thesis” by which Brazilian intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries managed their racial and nationalist anxieties by interpreting miscegenation as a dynamic process that would dilute Brazil’s black population.

In May 2006, foreign-born workers, largely from Latin America, mobilized across the United States in response to calls from anti-immigrant groups for tougher federal policies against illegal immigrants. About 400,000 protested in Chicago, 300,000 in Los Angeles, and 75,000 in Denver. In fifty cities between Los Angeles and New York, workers organized walkouts, demonstrations, and rallies in an effort to show just how important they were to the smooth operation of the U.S. economy.

The strategic location of the Isthmus of Panama within the commercial network of the Spanish Empire and the need to defend it has greatly influenced historical writing on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Panama. Most studies have emphasized military and economic history and with few exceptions, have shown little interest in other aspects of Panamanian life. An excellent review of the historical literature on colonial Panama can be found in Christopher Ward, Imperial Panama: Commerce and Conflict in Isthmian America, 1550-1800 (Albuquerque, 1993). Despite a continuing emphasis on the usual themes of trade and defense, there is a growing trend to focus on other topics such as population movements and social classes. One of the areas still awaiting further investigation and study is the history of the cimarrons of Panama. The two principal primary sources for the role of the cimarrons are the collections of documents from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville published by Irene Wright and Carol F. Jopling, respectively. Wright's Documents Concerning the English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569-1580 (London, 1932) contains the correspondence of Spanish officials on the Isthmus to the king relating to the activities of the English pirates and their alliance with the cimarrons.