The first general strike in Uruguayan history, which completely paralyzed Montevideo for three days in May 1911, provides a useful vantage point from which to view the transformation of the third largest capital in South America from a sleepy “Belle Epoque” horse town into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Coming many years after general strikes in Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the 1911 Montevideo conflict appeared to erupt virtually overnight, at a moment when the labor movement itself was in some disarray, and caught the city by surprise. Merchants closed their doors, transport ground to a halt, and theaters and cinemas remained dark as the city became strangely quiet. An estimated 50,000-60,000 workers in 37 unions left their jobs in factories, breweries, frigoríficos, stores, and newspapers. In the words of a journalist for a conservative daily paper, “every sign of activity vanished from the city as completely as if it had been stricken by a pestilence—as in truth it was.” The anarchist labor confederation, which organized the mass strike, took over control of the streets and the food supply, and vehicles were only allowed to run with its authorization, thus inverting the city's power structure, at least temporarily.

As an integrating theme in the biological or ecological expansion of Europe, merino sheep were so important that one authority on their dispersal sees the nineteenth century standing as “the century of the Merino.” Merinos produce a wool of distinctive quality, one long appreciated for providing warmth without excessive weight. Guarded for centuries by Spanish monopoly, the breed's status as something of a prize outside Spain began to change in 1808 with the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula. By around 1820, a major new phase in merino dispersal was underway with its adaptation to some of the vast grassland ecosystems in the Europeanizing peripheries. The breed was of critical importance to the settlement and development of Australia. It was also highly important in other parts of the southern hemisphere, including in the transformation of existing cattle cultures on the great grassland regions of the Río de la Plata. Here the merino formed the leading edge of rural modernization, offering real potential for ground-up development.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Eric Van Young for inviting me to give this speech today. It is a great honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts concerning the development of gender studies in Latin American history as well as the issues that need to be addressed in future years. When I first became interested in gender history in the 1970s, it seemed unlikely that journals such as Luso-Brazilian Studies would ever dedicate an entire issue to women's studies. Yet this year there is such an issue. It helps us appreciate how accepted gender studies have become for Latin American historians.

Scholars who have studied the Franciscan effort in New Mexico during the Spanish colonial epoch have generally posited that the watershed event in the missionary program was the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Thus, the periodization for the Order's evangelical effort has been structured in two parts: pre-1680 and post-reconquest (1692-1821). One need only compare Fray Alonso de Benavides's glowing description of his brethren's work in the region in 1630 with that of Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante's harsh rebuke to the friars in 1777 to realize fundamental changes had occurred in the missionization process. Benavides's Franciscans are ardent, ascetic, and capable missionary priests. Consequently, prior to 1680, the Franciscan Order, in what the Spanish called the Kingdom of New Mexico, was able to maintain a high degree of authority, power, and prestige especially in regard to its relations with the local population and civil government. On the other hand, the missionaries condemned by Escalante are complacent, contentious idlers. While there are a dearth of studies on the post-1692 Franciscans, historians who have ventured into the era suggest a significant erosion in the quality and dedication of the later missionaries. The conclusion, then, is that these less committed friars were at least partially responsible for the decline of the Order's position within the Kingdom.

By now it has perhaps become a commonplace that the “rural democratic model” of Costa Rican history–the idea that Costa Rican democracy is based on a heritage of racially homogenous, egalitarian small holders–is an ideology and should be studied as such, rather than accepted as an accurate portrayal of Costa Rica's history. Recent studies have focused on the Liberal (1880-1900) and Liberacionista (post-1948) periods in which the ideology was formulated and then reformulated, and emphasized its conservative nature. During the period between 1900 and 1948, however, this ideology was far from hegemonic. This period saw much of the militant labor activism and social struggle that Costa Rica's new social historians are trying to uncover.

Patterns of land ownership and availability define pre-industrial society. Land defines wealth and translates into political power and social status. Thus historians of Latin America have been interested in land usage and distribution before economic and social history came into vogue. However, the major focus has been on the hacienda, not the small holders, and the assumed model was Mexico, not Paraguay or Colombia. A series of colonial regional studies on Mexico and Peru published in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated the variation in economic power and regional differences of the hacienda but only incidentally probed the status of small holders. The recognition of the persistence of a variety of early land patterns, including indigenous communal landholdings, however, has challenged earlier interpretations of the socioeconomic power of the hacienda. The awareness of differences of market factors and population density within regions laid the basis for new questions about ownership, land usage, labor, and the forms of internal and external community relations.

Let us set aside the permanent and silent struggle against the Indians” writes Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos in his recent study of political change in early nineteenth-century Brazil that does, indeed, forgo any attempt to locate Indians within Brazilian history. Mattos apparently fails to see any relevance even in asking questions about how “permanent” armed conflict with Indians might have influenced the character and structure of the emerging national state that he studies. All in all, Mattos's remarks typify an historiography that at best romanticizes Indians, but even more often either simply ignores them or relegates them to the margins of Brazil's past. Indians of course appear in works focusing on the very first stages of colonial settlement. They were on hand to greet Pedro Álvares Cabral and other explorers and to provide labor for early colonists. But, then, from most accounts, it would seem that, within the span of a few generations, disease, warfare, and enslavement had completely destroyed the native populations near and along the Brazilian coast. In this way, ongoing processes of contact, accommodation, and conquest have become, in Mattos's words, a “silent struggle,” and Indians have been transformed into a topic of interest only for scholars concerned with the distant Amazon basin or with the early decades of Portuguese settlement in Brazil.

The end of World War I marked the beginning of a new era in European migration to Brazil. The immigrants that had poured into the “país do futuro” (country of the future) now came at only a trickle and the number of entries fell by over fifty percent between 1913 and 1914 and by another sixty percent the year after. In 1918 fewer than 20,000 immigrants entered Brazil, a low that would not again be approached until 1936. Even so, between 1918 and 1919 the number of arrivals to Brazil's ports almost doubled, and in 1920 almost doubled again, reaching 69,000.

Post-war immigrants to Brazil differed in many ways from the pre-war group, both in national origin and in their views of success and opportunity. Although Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, and German immigrants continued to predominate, between 1924 and 1934 East European immigration to Brazil increased almost ten times to more than 93,000, representing about 8.5 percent of the total. Most of the East Europeans who migrated to Brazil in the quarter century after World War I were those fleeing the upheavals created by the establishment of the state of Poland. At the same time quotas and other forms of restriction in the U.S., Argentina, and Canada increasingly led potential migrants to look towards Brazil. The frequently destitute East Europeans rarely enjoyed the support of their often powerless governments, a factor that made such immigrants attractive to Brazil's large landowners. In 1927, a contract between the Polish Government and Brazil's Secretary of Agriculture for the transportation of 2,000 Polish families was partially based on the belief that the mixing of “docile” East Europeans with more “volatile” Southern Europeans would “go a long way to obviate any labor trouble that might otherwise occur.” Whatever positive attributes the East Europeans might have presented to Brazilian elites in terms of “dividing and conquering,” the Lithuanian government complained that the condition of its 20,000 immigrants was “so pitiable … that (we) might be forced to repatriate them.”

A recent edited study of U.S. ambassadors assigned to Latin American countries beset by economic and political crises assesses the importance of individuals as determinants of U.S. foreign policy. Although the authors differed in their conclusions, two in particular suggested that even ambassadors who enjoyed great operational independence rarely disagreed with the ideological premises of their superiors in Washington. Historian Louis A. Pérez, for example, portrayed U.S. ambassador to Cuba Sumner Welles as “an active powerbroker” who “operated out of a defined ideological framework, a world view that allowed him to recognize social forces as potential friend or likely foe to U.S. interests.” Welles's attempt in 1933 to remove Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martin, who had abrogated the Platt Amendment, coincided with the State Department's policy of keeping Cuba favorable to U.S. economic and strategic interests. Scholar Jan Knippers Black came to a similar conclusion about the role of Ambassador Lincoln Gordon in the 1964 overthrow of leftist Brazilian President João Goulart. Black found it “extremely difficult to isolate his [Gordon's] imprint on more fundamental aspects of policy … it seems unlikely that U.S. policies and actions would have differed in any significant way, had some other individual been serving at that time and place as ambassador.”

One evening in April 1926 a party of Italian emigrants outward bound from Genoa aboard the steamer Conte Verde celebrated their impending new life in Argentina by singing the fascist anthem “Giovinezza.” They thereby angered a larger number of passengers and crew, who responded with a lusty rendition of the Socialist “Bandiera Rossa.” Tension grew, but Conte Verde’s captain averted further unpleasantness by escorting the fascists to safety at the ship's bow; at the same time Second Captain Rivarola restored order among the antifascists. The Genoa police prefecture reported the incident to Benito Mussolini's cabinet, but as the quarrel had been transferred to Argentine soil there was little to be done–for the moment. The secret police would maintain surveillance of the troublemakers in Argentina and of their families in Italy.

Revolution and women did not mix well, at least in the eyes of most leaders of the insurrection that swept Mexico in 1910-17. Moreover, common wisdom suggested that armies were no place for the “gentler sex” and hence the two kinds of women that did accompany men to the battleground–female soldiers and soldaderas–were generally regarded as marginal to the fighting and extraordinary, or strange, in character.

Female soldiers received much notice in the press and arts during the revolution and in its aftermath. They were portrayed as fearless women dressed in men's garb flaunting cartridge belts across the chest and a Mauser rifle on one shoulder. But they were invariably shown in the guise of curiosities, aberrations brought about by the revolution. Soldaderas received their share of attention too. They were depicted as loyal, self-sacrificing companions to the soldiers or, in less sympathetic renderings, as enslaved camp followers: “the loyalty of the soldier's wife is more akin to that of a dog to its master than to that of an intelligent woman to her mate.” But even laudatory journalistic accounts, corridos, and novels did not concede soldaderas a prominent role in the revolutionary process, much less in the success of the military campaigns.

La naturaleza de la sociedad colonial fué en nuestra historiografía, desde fines del siglo XVIII, motivo de denodados conflictos. Concolorcorvo (1773), uno de los primeros viajeros en relatar sus impresiones del Río de la Plata, manifestó no saber que en esa región existiese mayorazgo alguno. Casi cuarenta años más tarde, Azara fue el primer intelectual, conocedor del Río de la Plata, que repitiendo la afirmación de Concolorcorvo, dió fundamento a la posteriormente denominada excepcionalidad argentina. Sostenía Azara, quien sin duda debía hallarse muy influído por la lectura de Jovellanos, que entre los españoles (incluye los criollos blancos) radicados en esta región de la América Española reinaba “…la más perfecta igualdad, sin distinción de nobles ni de plebeyos. No se conocen entre ellos ni feudos, ni sustituciones ni mayorazgos.” También E. M. Brackenridge, un diplomático Norteamericano que escribió unas memorias de viaje por América del Sur, repite a Azara al afirmar que no había en Buenos Aires “…familias de viejo arraigo” y que “la igualdad general dominante parecía atraer a los hombres a una unión más estrecha.”

Historians often date the “professionalization” of the Latin American military establishments to the late nineteenth century. At that time, widely accepted “positivist ” beliefs equating technological modernization with “progress” resulted in the military's perceived need for superior defense forces, to be commanded by officer graduates of newly inaugurated military academies. In Brazil, the military was already emboldened by its successes in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1864-1870); it now sought to consolidate its gains in the competitive institutional climate of the late 1800s by presenting a more recognizably professional appearance.

The European practice of conceptualizing their enemies so that they could dispose of them in ways that were not in accord with their own Christian principles is well documented. In the Americas, this began with Columbus's designation of certain Indians as man-eaters and was continued by those Spanish who also wished to enslave the natives or eliminate them altogether. The word “cannibal” was invented to describe such people, and the Spanish were legally free to treat cannibals in ways that were forbidden to them in their relations with other people. By the late fifteenth century the word cannibal had assumed a place in the languages of Europe as the latest concept by which Europeans sought to categorize the “other.” As David Gordon White has shown, by the time the Spanish discovered America, barbarians were an established component of European mythology, history and theology as well as popular thought, and the categories Europeans employed to describe outsiders date as far back as the Greeks and the Egyptians before them. Therefore, it is not surprising that when they reached Mexico the Spanish easily adopted a word from Nahuatl to describe the Indian peoples of the north whom they believed to be barbarians. This word, chichimeca, which both designated and defined in a very particular way the native peoples of the north Mexican frontier, assumed in Spanish the credibility of longstanding native use, although as we shall see, this was not entirely justified.

About twenty years ago, the Mexican SepSetentas series published La historia económica en América Latina, the proceedings of a symposium held at the thirty-ninth International Congress of Americanists. For many novice historians of Mexico, the SepSetentas collectionavailable for ten (very old) pesos each at fine shops in the Metro, or at Sanborns-were Penguins or Pelicans of a lesser sort. Graduate students eagerly awaited new volumes, and scoured the streets for older ones. SepSetentas published some first-rate items, and, alas, some not-so-first-rate ones. La historia económica en América Latina was a keeper. Its second volume contained useful bibliographies and historiographical essays by Enrique Florescano, David Brading, Woodrow Borah and Sherburne Cook, and Jan Bazant. To take just one example, Brading noticed that no one had reconciled Chevalier's Land and Society with Borah's New Spain's Century of Depression. “Where should one look to study domestic industry or commerce?” Brading wondered. The accounts of the Royal Treasury had not been systematically exploited. The tobacco industry had yet to find its historian. The costs of Spanish colonialism were essentially unknown. The proper scope of rural history was the regional study. And so on. Obviously, Brading's essay proved remarkably prescient. Historians in Mexico, Great Britain, Western Europe, the United States and Canada have all had a hand in carrying out the agenda that Brading proposed. We have, as the song says, come a long way. The latest and most comprehensive measure of our progress is the long-awaited appearance of Richard Garner's (with Spiro E. Stefanou) Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).

Because of the power of film, movies with historical themes affect public perceptions of the past more deeply than do scholarly reconstructions. Film makers and historians search for meaning in separate ways, but their quests can converge. Examples of different approaches to similar destinations are found in a newer film and older historical views of Catholic missions in South America. Released in 1986, The Mission, directed by Roland Joffé with a screenplay by Robert Bolt, displays paternalistic attitudes like those of an earlier generation of North American academic historians. The film's voice is a white European distortion of Native American reality. This essay will examine that voice, offer alternative explanations of historical events, and suggest a research agenda for future study of the Guarani missions of Paraguay, often mentioned in surveys but seldom studied by North American historians.

Latin American social historians often decry the lack of statistical material available in the region. In some countries national censuses were not taken in the nineteenth century, and municipal information for the period is hard to locate. The lack of data makes it difficult to investigate such questions as family size, mortality, employment, and residency among those groups which were least likely to provide written records of their lives. As a result, many studies are limited by the availability of data. Recently, however, Latin American social historians have begun to propose additional questions, plumbing the potential of those sources which are available.