Why Should Anyone be Interested in the Spanish Borderlands of the southeastern United States during the last years of the Spanish occupation, and what has occurred that makes the area of more than passing interest at the present time ? First, this area of Spain's New World colonial empire was unique. And second, the availability of a significant amount of new source material has given rise to a healthy increase in scholarly interest and productivity during the past decade.

When One Examines the Research and Writing on Spanish Colonial Alabama, 1780-1813, it is possible to conclude that this area has received the least emphasis of all Spanish Borderlands. This is unfortunate because there are tens of thousands of original sources extant. As the director of a University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa research project, which began in 1966, Holmes collected some 20,000 pages of documents from Sevilla and Simancas on microfilm. The so-called “Holmes Collection” has been copied for several libraries in the Southeast, including Alabama, Auburn, Florida, West Florida and Tulane universities. A brief description of the twenty-nine reels appears in Coker and Holmes (1971).

In the Great Struggle for the Mastery of the North American Continent during the second half of the eighteenth century, the major European powers—Britain, France, and Spain—confronted each other on the lower Mississippi and along the Florida frontier. The fate of both East and West Florida was determined by this titanic struggle. Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War as the mightiest nation on earth. Her fleet had captured Havana, and to redeem this valuable port Spain agreed to cede the Floridas.

Establishing Boundaries for Spanish West Florida is No Simple Matter. Under consideration is not the entire province of Spanish West Florida stretching to the Mississippi but the smaller region bounded on the west by the Perdido River, the Suwannee River on the east, the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and the uncertain boundary with the United States on the north. Pensacola and San Marcos are two principal settlements, and this area approximates the western panhandle of the present-day state of Florida. When Spain acquired West Florida in 1783 the British boundary was the Apalachicola River, but Spain in 1785 moved it eastward to the the Suwanee River. (Few maps indicate this eastward shift.) The purpose of making the Suwannee River the eastern boundary was to transfer San Marcos and the province of Apalachee from East Florida to West Florida. After the 1795 Pinckney Treaty Spain and the United States agreed that the northern boundary was the thirty-first parallel west from the Chattahoochee River and the parallel intersecting the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers running eastward. Until after the Pinckney Treaty went into effect in the late 1790s, Spanish West Florida's northern boundary was indefinite. Spain regarded the Yazoo parallel, the Tennessee, Cumberland, or even Ohio rivers as the northern limit. This meant that for well over a decade Spain considered the western part of Georgia, the eastern part of Alabama, along with bits of Tennessee and North Carolina, as part of West Florida.

The Renaissance of Interest in Spanish Louisiana Over the Past Ten Years owes much to the acquisition of important document collections by such universities as Loyola in New Orleans, Northwestern of Louisiana, Tulane and Memphis State. Graduate students and scholars who lacked sufficient funds for research in Europe now find adequate materials in the United States.

One of the Reasons Given for the Neglect of the Spanish Era in Mississippi history has been the concentration of historians and writers on the Civil War which has overshadowed everything else. To that conclusion should be added a second consideration. The attention of a large number of graduate students has been centered on those four horsemen (one horsewoman) of Mississippi literature, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, James Street and Eudora Welty. A brief examination suggests that there have been more graduate studies written on these authors in the last thirty years than on any single topic of Mississippi history, the Civil War notwithstanding. The number of theses and dissertations on Faulkner alone would make an impressive bibliography. Without any visible decrease in the devotion shown Faulkner and his literary companions, the decade of the 1960s may be considered the renaissance for the study of Spanish Mississippi. Not that there have been any large number of people working in that period; but, because a few dedicated scholars of the younger generation, notably Jack D. L. Holmes, have worked energetically and productively on the years of the Spanish domination. The renewed interest in that fascinating age stimulated by Holmes and others is responsible for this survey which attempts to assess the state of historical and other scholarly studies for Spanish Mississippi. But what specific geographic area does this term embrace?

This Paper Analyzes Family and Kinship Patterns in Latin America Among distinct socio-economic groups in urban and rural settings. The literature on which the analysis rests is also critically examined. Much of the focus is on those aspects of the material which deal with extended family (parentesco) relations and with fictive kinship (compadrazgo) ties; less attention is given to studies and components of the nuclear family. The central theme developed in the essay is that familial ties and the institution of fictive kinship are not breaking down under the impact of modernization, despite theories and interpretations of urbanization and industrialization which maintain that the opposite is true. Our position and findings on his matter are summarized in the conclusion.

“Woman has always been for man the ‘other,‘ his opposite and complement.”

Scholars of Latin America Have Recently Concerned Themselves With socially-oriented studies—not merely of structures, institutions, or groups, but about the individuals who comprise those entities. Despite analyses of political and military elites, students, peasants, blacks, and immigrants, little scholarly work has been undertaken on man's “other,” the female. Only now are studies on the largest single sub-grouping in society beginning to appear, and these are primarily the work of women scholars. The undertaking is rife with problems, not the least of which is the lack of any comprehensive guide to sources or research directions. Few major subjects suffer such a lack of core bibliography, methodological apparati, or thematic models as does the subject of the female. In an attempt to redress the balance and to encourage the study of man's “opposite and complement,” I present here an essay dealing with research directions and a core of works on the female in Ibero-America.

I Congreso Venezolano De Historia Caracas, Venezuela June 27-July 3, 1971

The first Venuezuelan history congress was held under the auspices of the Academia Nacional de Historia of Venezuela. The following works were presented:

J. Ignacio Rubio Mañé, México, Orangibación de las Instituciones del Virreinato de la Nueva España;

Mario Germán Romero, Colombia, El Cpildo de Caracas y la Iglesia;

The Organization of American States has published a series of eight volumes (paperback) which survey Latin American for 1970. Topics covered are: Situación Demográfica, Situación Económica, Situación Social, Situación Cultural, and Suplemento. Guillermo N. Fuentes was responsible for the preparation of these extensive collections of statistics. For information about these editions write to: General Secretary, Organization of American States, Washington, D.C. 20006.