“These days, we want to know everything and forget nothing. Life needs to confess to itself and take a test of conscience. Let's grab life by the neck so that it makes that confession in the elegantly eloquent form of numbers, tables, formulas, and diagrams. This is statistics: the confession that we make life make. One must never forget what Goethe said: my works are merely part of a great confession. We make of statistics the schematic, numerical confession of life. Life should confess to itself.”

“Our struggle has its inspirational roots in [our] national history and reality: our flag . . . is the same raised by Hidalgo, Morelos and Guerrero, Juarez, Zapata and Villa.”

Genaro Vazquez Rojas, La Asociacion Civica Nacional Revolucionaria, 1968

As regards the slave societies of the Americas, it is hard to imagine a more palpable example of social mobility than manumissions. The fact that exslaves were able to carve out a space for themselves within the larger slave societies attests to their resilience—a resilience that must have played a role in obtaining freedom in the first place—and demonstrates that a considerable measure of social and racial flux existed in at least some of those societies. Manumission and miscegenation, independendy or in association with one another, decisively contributed to the sometimes explosive growth of colored and mestizo populations, which came to characterize large parts of Latin America. Few better examples exist than Brazil, where it was not at all uncommon for ex-slaves to become slaveholders in their own right.

Arguably the line “Broken Spears” is the most famous in Nahuatl. Any undergraduate student who has taken a course in Latin American history, literature, or anthropology has in all likelihood come across the line. It, of course, comes from the title of Miguel Leon-Portilla's book of the same name. The line appears in a description of Tlatelolco following the destruction of the city by the Spanish in the conquest of Mexico:

Broken spears lie in the roads
We have torn our hair in our grief
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
Are red with blood.

This evocative image has dominated much of the imagination of two generations of college students.