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.

On August 23, 1931, the galleries of Lima's bull ring, the Plaza de Acho, rang with deafening applause. The object of this public tribute was Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a young provincial politician who had just finished exhorting his fellow countrymen to join him in a movement for the regeneration of Peru. This day truly belonged to Haya, for it symbolized his return to the lists of Peruvian politics and the resumption of an active national political career that would be stilled only by death almost half a century later. This moment of triumph in the Plaza de Acho must have been especially sweet, for a little over eight years before, on May 23, 1923, Haya, as a young student leader, had organized a protest against the government of President Augusto B. Leguía. Military forces, however, dispersed the demonstrators killing several and wounding many in the process. Haya's reward for this manifestation of anti-establishment behavior was arrest, imprisonment, and ultimately, in October of 1923, deportation. Thus Haya's triumph of 1931 served, at least in part, as a vindication for the events of 1923 and the subsequent years of exile.

In José Lins do Rego's 1936 novel, A Usina (the sugar refinery), the penal colony of Fernando de Noronha Island emerges as an incongruous Utopia. The novel's young black protoganist Ricardo serves a three year sentence there as a result of his involvement in a Recife labor strike. Upon his return, he is disillusioned by what he finds on the mainland. He recalls his penalcolony stint with a mixture of nostalgia and shame, especially the tender relationship he had had with the former black bandit Zé Moleque, the respected convict in the citation above. The island, some 220 miles off Brazil's northeast coast, initially appears to be an exotic criminal community of dishonored men, the antithesis of life on the mainland. But, as the plot progresses, it becomes a bucolic foil with which the author highlights hypocrisy, injustice, indifference, and corruption on the modernizing Brazilian mainland of the 1920s.

Spanish preoccupation with what seemed to be the inexhaustible mineral resources of the Andes contributed to the collapse of the highly developed agrarian economy of the Incas. The disruption of stable food production and the end of Inca political authority, which had prohibited the indiscriminate chewing of coca, led to the extensive use of the leaf among the Indians as a stimulant, a nutritive substitute, and a fetish. Within a generation after the conquest, several missionaries began to oppose the use of coca by the indigenous population. The leaf soon became the center of a controversy in the Viceroyalty of Peru, which endured in varying degrees of intensity for nearly a century.

The well organized Inca nation of Peru yielded to the Spanish quest for precious metals and mission fields. The new Indian subjects, having developed stable economic and political nationhood before the conquest, were accustomed to work and amenable to organization. Out of this substance, a colonial state could be moulded to make a substantial contribution to the Spanish purposes.

Spaniards readily rationalized that precious metals were material rewards for the missions' spiritual ambitions; conquest itself had precedents both among the Romans and the Incas, but Spain's Christianity gave her even greater justification.

The history of the Church in Mexico has seen an ongoing confrontation between the secular and the regular clergy. During various periods one or the other side would achieve ascendency, only to decline at a later date. The religious orders have chronicled the exploits of their brothers and friars, yet to this day the activities of the secular clergy have remained largely unknown. One critical period in the development and expansion of the secular clergy occurred between the promulgation of the Ordenanza del Patronazgo in 1574 and the end of the sixteenth century. In this quarter century many of the basic institutions of the diocesan establishment came into being, and in general the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy felt the changes. This essay specifically will focus on the implementation of the Ordenanza del Patronazgo and its effect on the secular clergy.

On April 19, 1914—two days before the seizure of Vera Cruz by United States marines—North American radicals gathered at Carnegie Hall in New York City to protest the expected use of force against Mexico by the administration of Woodrow Wilson. One of the speakers, William (“Big Bill”) Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, threatened a nationwide general strike should the United States go to war against Mexico, and the crowd approved a resolution condemning any act of armed intervention.

But the Mexican crisis was not the only issue that aroused the crowd at Carnegie hall. A second resolution was approved which denounced the imprisonment of a young immigrant called Frank Tannenbaum, who had recently been sentenced to a year in the penitentiary for participating in an illegal assembly. On March 4 — his twenty-first birthday — Tannenbaum had led an “army of the unemployed” into the Roman Catholic Church of St. Alphonsus on West Broadway and had demanded shelter. His arrest that night and subsequent trial had become a cause célèbre among liberals and radicals who believed that he had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Mexican industrialization, which began during the second half of the nineteenth century, was paralleled by the appearance of an urban labor movement. Industrialization resulted in a sudden concentration of new workers from the countryside in a few urban areas—especially Mexico City. Living conditions for the new city dwellers were generally intolerable and were compounded by chronic economic and political instability. Crowning the laborer's difficulty were the almost impossible working conditions in the new factories. The working class, virtually in self-defense, began to organize. Because the urban labor movement during the last third of the nineteenth century was a prelude to similar and more famous developments during the violent years of the early twentieth century, analysis of its causes, nature, and significance is essential for understanding an important aspect of the Mexican Revolution.

An opinion often expressed by historians of Mexico and Latin America is that the age of Don Porfirio's Mexico was one in which the philosophy of positivism, wherther Comtean or Spencerian, was the dominant and official ideology of the day. In contrast to this viewpoint, an important supposition of this essay is that the intellectual history of the Porfiriato can only become intelligible if and when other ideas, concepts, and philosophies are distinguished from positivism. In addition, an accurate description of the role of ideas necessitates that some attention be focused upon the function of ideas in society. Thus a concern of this essay, apart from differentiating ideas, is that of suggesting the interrelationship of ideas to certain political and socio-economic groups during the Porfiriato. To do this properly will first require a statement about the social structure of Mexico between 1876 and 1911.

Alfredo Méndez Medina, writing from Belgium in January 1911, was possessed by the idea that Mexico's social and economic organization required radical change. Méndez Medina, a Mexican Jesuit priest and developing labor activist, had spent just a few years in Europe, sent by his superiors to learn the techniques, strategies, and ideology of Catholic social action. What he saw and experienced there helped shape his vision for Mexico and guided his work upon his return in late 1912. In Europe, the young Méndez Medina observed firsthand the Catholic unions, ministries, and propagandists of L'Action Populaire, an influential French social Catholic institution founded by Gustave Desbuquois, S.J. (1869-1959) in Reims. In a few brief notes, Méndez Medina wrote that Desbuquois's earthy, no-nonsense way of speaking to ordinary workers, and his profound spirituality, had impressed him deeply. To Méndez Medina, Desbuquois appeared to link seamlessly his religious faith, his social commitments, his sense of duty, and his politics.

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.

The tasaciones de tributos compiled between 1548 and 1554 under the supervision of Alonso López de Cerrato have long been recognized as the most important tribute documentation extant for mid sixteenth-century Central America, being of particular interest to all those whose inquiries have focussed on various aspects of the economy and demography of regions stretching from Chiapas and Yucatán in the north to Honduras and Nicaragua in the south. For the purpose of this paper, we wish to concentrate simply on one spatial component of the Libro de tasaciones forming part of the celebrated legajo 128, a rich set of documents housed in the Archivo General de Indias in the section of the archive classified as the Audiencia de Guatemala: that spatial component referred to by contemporary Spanish officials as “los términos y jurisdictión de la ciudad de Santiago de Guatemala,” that is, the territory which in early colonial times fell under the administrative authority of the city of Santiago.

Though a nation of discordant regionalism and historically weak central institutions, Colombia can paradoxically claim strong currents of popular national identity. It is well known that long centuries of relative economic isolation, coupled with Colombia's largely subsistence internal economy and torturous topography, provided few opportunities to integrate the nation's different regions. Such conditions resulted in fractured regional identities and racial compositions. What few links to the world market Colombia enjoyed before the late nineteenth century came from the mining of gold, with short episodes of tobacco and quinine exportation. Only in the 1880s and later did coffee production finally reorient the nation's economy and introduce new questions of land tenure and social relations. Colombia's fiercely partisan political system evolved during the nineteenth century, therefore, when the country was still overwhelmingly rural, inward-looking, and little more than a collection of semi-autonomous regions. Keith Christie noted that before the 1950s, regionalism was so strong that “Bogotá was essentially just another provincial capital.” As a consequence, the national army in the nineteenth century seldom proved more powerful than the many rebel armies it faced. Indeed, according to the basic Weberian definition of the “state” as the entity that controls a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and evidenced by the fact that the national government still does not control large portions of the country's territory, Colombia's central state structures continue to be glaringly weak at the end of the twentieth century.

On February 18, 1724, field marshal Antonio Manso Maldonado arrived in New Granada as the president, governor, and captain-general of the New Kingdom. He had been appointed to this position on December 4, 1723, because both the crown and the Chamber of the Indies thought it would be best executed by a military officer. Manso Maldonado could boast more than 30 years of military service, proven loyalty, and administrative experience, much of it during the first reign of Felipe V. After joining the royal armies as a private, Manso Maldonado rose steadily through the ranks, fighting the Moors in Ceuta and the French in the wars of the late seventeenth century. During the War of the Spanish Succession, he served at the orders of the militant bishop of Murcia and last viceroy of Valencia, Luis Belluga, who praised Manso's valor directly to the king. Most important perhaps, at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and upon the occupation of Catalonia by Bourbon forces, Manso Maldonado had served as teniente de rey in Gerona (1716-1719) and Barcelona (1719-1723), witnessing first-hand the implementation of the Nueva Planta and the enforcement of royal authority over the rebellious principality.

Between 1880 and 1916, elite women engaged in social welfare and transformed the politics of subordination in Argentina as they brokered a new accommodation between the Catholic Church and the Argentine state. Without ever claiming equality, women made it clear that the progress of the new nation—as male intellectuals and statesmen conceived it—could not be accomplished without their assistance. By stressing what they considered to be their essential contributions to social peace and national integration, elite women completely ignored both traditional and liberal ideas of the divisions between public and private responsibility without appearing to challenge gender norms.

One of the most important issues that confronted the colonial powers in the New World was the problem of European-Indian relations. Upon this pivotal point hinged such fundamental questions as political sovereignty, the moral responsibilities of Christian states towards aboriginal inhabitants and, on a less elevated level, the economic rights of the Europeans to the wealth and labor of the Indians. All colonial nations in the western hemisphere grappled with the problem introducing, modifying, and ultimately substituting a variety of institutions to regulate European-Indian contacts.

Over the course of the colonial period the Spanish in Mexico, whether Creole or peninsular, not only created an economic and marketing structure based on their own practices and preferences but also penetrated and even came to dominate the marketing of certain Indian commodities, when these products were exchanged in a cash rather than a barter system and when involvement in the marketing appeared sufficiently lucrative. Cacao was probably the first item in the indegenous market economy whose distribution was taken over by Spaniards. Cacao had been a long-distance import item of high specific value even in the pre-Conquest world and the victorious Spanish quickly replaced the disappearing pochteca class of merchants which had controlled its distribution.

“Mercy,” preached Fray Casimiro Díaz, “is the legitimate daughter of compassion. And the indigent exclaims, the widows, orphans, and destitute women broadcast, even the religious communities acclaim, that mercy is the distinctive virtue of this Holy Board, for your pious gifts reach all of them.” The Augustinian friar was addressing the guardians and members of Manila's Hermandad de la Misericordia (Confraternity of Mercy) in a mass that commemorated the anniversary of its foundation in mid September of 1743. At first glance, the occasion would not deserve much attention, another sermon praising the alms-giving labor of a confraternity. Spanish America swelled with similar institutions devoted to administering alms and endowments to sponsor prayers and charity. Yet, the Manila Misericordia was different. Church corporations in the Americas invested donations in low-interest annuities in perpetuity attached to property. Charity donors in Manila had found a better way to maximize pious gifts: by creating legacies to be invested in maritime trade loans at high interests.

With the exception of the Franciscans pledged to poverty, the major religious orders of colonial Brazil, Carmelites, Benedictines, and Jesuits, all maintained their religious activities and establishments by means of bequests, stipends, loans, urban and rural properties. Any analysis of the economic role of the Church in Brazil normally and justifiably begins with the activities of the Society of Jesus whose extensive properties spread throughout Portuguese America. Unquestionably, their operations were the most extensive of any corporate group or institution in the colony. The other orders, however, were often regionally important and were always an integral part of the economic life of the colony, sharing in the good times and bad along with their secular counterparts. The following article is an attempt to examine the operations of the Benedictine sugar engenhos in Brazil by analyzing previously usused records. These materials not only reveal a great deal about the management of ecclesiastical estates, but also provide one of the few opportunities to analyze the expenses and income of a series of plantations over time, thus allowing us to examine some of the general economic trends in the colony's export history.

“Unlike some Latin American mainland societies which still contain large numbers of indigenous peoples,” Jorge Duany observed, “Caribbean societies are immigrant societies almost from the moment of their conception.” Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint- Méry likened the latter to “shapeless mixtures subject to diverse influences.” Their population, Dawn I. Marshall reminds us, “is to a large extent the result of immigration—from initial settlement, forced immigration during slavery, indentured immigration, to the present outward movement to metropolitan countries.” Throughout their history, David Lowenthal noted, limited resources and opportunities kept West Indian societies in a constant state of flux, impelling continuous transfers of people, technology, and institutions within the area. Despite the frequency and importance of these population movements, the bulk of scholarship on American migration history has traditionally concentrated on areas favored by European settlement. Moreover, the overwhelming quantity of research on immigration to the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil has tended to overshadow the study of similar processes in other American regions. Due to its historical association with the arrival of involuntary settlers, migratory currents in the Caribbean have been too narrowly identified with bondage, penal labor and indentured workers. Nowhere is the imbalance more conspicuous than in the study of trans-Caribbean migratory streams during slavery. Discussions on pre-1838 population shifts have centered largely on inter-island slave trading and the exodus prompted by Franco-Haitian revolutionary activity in the Caribbean. The parallel legacy of motion hinted by Neville N.A.T. Hall's “maritime” maroons and Julius S. Scott's “masterless” migrants has attracted noticeably less attention.