The New Kingdom of Granada, now Colombia, was discovered and settled by three unrelated expeditions organized for different purposes. Two of them were led by Spaniards and one by a German. The first was placed under the leadership of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada by the governor of Santa Marta, and ordered to go south in search of a passage to Peru. Another was led from the south and out of Peru by Sebastián de Benalcázar in search of one Dorado or golden man, who was supposed to reign in the Indian area of Cundirumarca, while the third was organized by Nikolaus Federmann in the province of Venezuela, with the aim of reaching the Xerira land of riches, the existence of which was known from the Indians encountered in early explorations. He was to proceed under the auspices of the German House of Welser, concessionary at the time of the exploration and exploitation of the province of Venezuela.

Despite a growing interest in the history of women in colonial Spanish America, the Castilian legislation which defined female juridical status has received scant attention. Some scholars have treated legal questions as a corollary to the themes of feminine endeavor and wealth. The law itself, relegated to a secondary position, has remained a maze of confusing mandates to all but a few historians who have wrestled with its directives. An analysis of the legal foundation which was central to the roles that Hispanic American women assumed in the colonies is therefore in order. The purpose of this article is accordingly to clarify pertinent legal terms, concepts, and procedures that were operative throughout the Indies. Particular emphasis is given to the subject of females as donors and beneficiaries of marital endowments and parental estates. Since the abstract legal principles are difficult to understand, concrete examples are drawn from Hispanic families in Chile to illustrate the workings of the law. These eighteenth-century cases comprise a dowry receipt, an estate settlement, and a set of testamentary dispositions. The family papers underscore the fact that norms established in peninsular legislation and applied in Spanish America constituted an important link in the chain of continuity with the past that characterized colonial life even as that life underwent change in the Bourbon era.

In the last ten years there has been a great deal of interest in the scholarship devoted to the related issues of slavery and race relations in Latin America. This writer has himself published works which shed some light on the Black “experience” in isolated, interior Paraguay in the nineteenth century. The ongoing task to more fully understand the different patterns of racial (in all of its aspects) relations in Latin America has been fruitful and has elucidated much of a story, an experience, long hidden. There is, however, much to be done, for the vast bulk of the studies published to date deal with a few, selected countries (or colonies); most notably Brazil and Cuba. Nations such as Chile, Uurguay, Colombia and even Argentina, have received as yet very little attention from the scholars of slavery and race relations.

The recently unfolding process of transition from twenty years of military government to a new republic with democratic ideals in Brazil brings, as one of its correlates, an upsurge of citizen interest about a previous period of transition which took place almost one hundred years ago. That transition, marked by the end of modern slavery, led to the implantation of a dependent capitalist bourgeois order. The focus of many controversies and the object of considerable debate, “transition” in the late nineteenth century, has been most widely researched in São Paulo. There, the influx of European immigration accompanied the expansion of coffee production in the western frontier and excess capital generated from the sale of coffee was injected into the incipient industrial sector of the economy.

The presence of American bases and troops in the British Caribbean during the Second World War was the catalyst to an anti-Americanism which has continued to dominate political thinking in the area. This has been a rather ironic turn of events. Prior to the arrival of the Americans, there had been a growing sentiment among sections of the population for some sort of American take-over of the islands. After the Americans arrived, however, relations with the people of the islands soured. The idea of an American take-over died aborning, and by the end of the war, such ideas were no longer being entertained by the people of the British Caribbean. They were replaced instead, by an aggressive nationalism which called for self-government for the islands as an entity. Whereas in 1938, a British journalist could have written that “Trinidad (and Barbados and Jamaica) wants to be American,” it had long ceased to be true by the end of the war. A Trinidadian labor leader, at a regional conference in 1945, succinctly summed up the ideas of all of his confreres. “Whenever we pass into other hands,” he declared, “both hands must be our own.”

In the second half of this century, we have been told, the Latin American novel came of age. Authors no longer felt constrained to subject indigenous contents to alien forms. Instead contents suggested forms truly representative of societies, polities, and cultures in search of identity and struggling with numerous historic problems, some not even of their own region's making.

Although Latin American novels have long been recognized as important to the area's cultural development, as indicators of literary achievement, and as valuable sources for scholars, few works published between Machado de Assis's Dom Casmuro (1900) and Miguel Angel Asturias's Men of Corn (Hombres de maiz, 1949) could be described as aesthetic magna opera. In the long hiatus essayists took up the task of portraying reality, producing such classics as Euclides da Cunha's Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões, 1902), José Vasconcelos's The Cosmic Race (La raza cósmica, 1925), José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 1927), Alberto Edwards Vives's The Aristocratic Fronde (La fronda aristocrática, 1927), and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada's X-Ray of the Pampa (Radiografía de la pampa, 1933).