The list of memorable European musicians working in New Granada begins with a chance arrival at Cartagena in 1537—Juan Pérez Materano. Dispatched from Spain with a royal appointment to head the music in a Mexican or Central American cathedral, he landed first at Cartagena. In a letter to Charles V dated October 7, 1537, the Cartagena civil officials laud his voice and bearing: these have proved so agreeable during his stopover that they have prevailed upon him to stay and to become chantre of the already functioning Cartagena cathedral, rather than continuing to Yucatán. Arriving between first and second bishops of Cartagena, Pérez Materano found a wooden cathedral but with a “very imposing and good” coro dominated by an elegant choirbook stand. By the time this primitive cathedral was burned in February of 1552, he was already teaching or was soon to teach Juan de Castellanos, the imitator of Ercilla. Castellanos in his long poem on the foundation of New Granada calls Pérez Materano a “Josquin dez Prez” in theoretical knowledge.

Mexico in the 1860's was torn by bloody civil war between liberals and conservatives, aggravated by the intervention of thousands of French troops who supported the conservative faction. This latter group set up a monarchy in Mexico headed by Emperor Maximilian von Hapsburg and soon controlled most of the country. However, the liberals and republicans under President Benito Juárez were never completely conquered; they eventually rallied and their triumph was symbolized by the execution of Maximilian in 1867. The European intervention forced President Juárez to seek aid from the United States, and he dispatched several secret agents north with orders to secure arms, men, and moral support for his government.

The title of this article seems to give the impression that its author is a financial expert. Unhappily, this is not the case. But—for quite unknown reasons—college professors are apt to acquire some empirical knowledge of credit facilities. Besides, I do not intend to give practical advice to anybody. I shall only try to show, how people in Puerto Rico, a century and a half ago, managed to survive—and at times prosper—in the midst of what some people used to call, not very affectionately, the “money complex.”

What makes the question interesting is the lack of banks or other credit institutions. Apparently, the first small savings banks did not appear until the 1870's. The paucity, if not the absolute absence, of liquid capital characterizes Puerto Rico until the period under study. Such a state of affairs had remote causes. Puerto Rico, as Spain's second colony in the New World, had had a prosperous start in the sixteenth century. Some gold was found, and the first ingenio was set up. But in the 1520's an exodus was set off by the attraction of the fabulous mineral wealth of the continent that was being conquered, an exodus that the threat of the death penalty was not able to stop effectively. The lack of sufficient settlers was then the initial cause of Puerto Rico's economic stagnation. Naturally, the following two hundred years should have been more than sufficient to allow recovery, for—popular beliefs to the contrary—mineral wealth was not the only source of economic prosperity in the Spanish monarchy. As a sample, the Philippines exported Chinese goods, Central America cocoa and dyestuff, Venezuela cocoa and tobacco, Guayaquil cocoa and timber, Quito textiles, Peru wine and flour, Chile flour and timber, Tucumán mules, Buenos Aires hides, and Cuba sugar and tobacco.

It is a well known fact that Brazil today is the greatest producer of iron and steel in all of Latin America. It is less well known that this industry is one of the oldest in the nation. Any effort to trace the development of this iron-working industry from its earliest sources should take into consideration the contributions of the Jesuits. As early as 1554, Father José Anchieta informed his Jesuit superiors and the king of Portugal of the existence of iron ore deposits in the interior of the captaincy of São Vicente (later São Paulo). Even more important in this respect was a forge established by the Jesuit Mateus Nogueira which in 1556 was instrumental in the manufacture of fishhooks, knives, wedges, shovels and other such implements used in the support of his community. These are claimed to be the first implements made from iron in Brazil.