“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.”

In the 1970s two important trends in Latin American history came into conjunction. The older of these was the study of the evangelization of the natives of the New World. The evangelization largely occurred at the hands of the regular clergy: Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians. Nevertheless, there were significant numbers of secular priests who also engaged in the mission, but they did not leave the editorial legacy of the religious. The second trend which emerged was the study of the native peoples, but with a very important new consideration. While earlier historians had been contented to write basing their histories on the Spanish language documentation, in the 1970s a new generation of scholars versed in Nahuati, Maya, and other native languages, began to look at themes utilizing native language documentation. The confluence of these two trends was the use of native language documentation to study the evangelization.

There is a special relationship between historians and remembering as an act of the will. Forgetting is not what we are supposed to do or want to do. As people, historians love to remember and act deliberately to achieve the reconstruction of the past, which is itself the product of as many forms of remembrance and memory-keeping as there are people who want to remember—about themselves, their actions, their sentiments, and their understanding of the world in which they lived. Pursuing that objective I would like to share with my audience at this luncheon and later with my readers some memories of my life as a historian. Through sharing them I know we will come closer together as friends and colleagues.

Every year during the second half of the eighteenth century, as river levels dropped, an average of 1,500 Indian crewmen departed nearly 50 villages for the remote interior forests and waterways of the Amazonian sertão. During the next six to eight months, as they searched for cacao, sarsaparilla, nuts, or turde eggs, the crewmen might experience all manner of hardships—epidemics, tribal attacks, famine, mutinies, or the loss of the village canoe and its cargo, to name just a few. Then, upon arriving home, they might find their families reduced to utter poverty or sickness, their wives taken in by other men, or their crops abandoned and devoured by pests. Yet despite the arduousness of the state-sponsored collecting expeditions and the hardships imposed upon those left behind, the trips offered a range of opportunities that other kinds of compulsory labor did not. Some of those who were not required to participate, such as the native officials, even did so voluntarily.

In 1519 Spanish conquistadors arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica under the leadership of Hernando Cortés. Following the defeat of Mexico-Tenochtidan, the Aztec capital, Cortés requested that members of the Franciscan order be sent from Spain to lead the conversion effort. In 1523 the first three Franciscans arrived, among them fray Pedro de Gante. One year later another 12 Franciscans made the journey. They established themselves in the southeastern portion of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and under their direction Nahua laborers built the principal Franciscan religious compound, San Francisco, and the first indigenous chapel in New Spain, San Josef de los Naturales. Together this friary and chapel served as the main point of interaction for Franciscan conversion efforts within the altepetl, ethnic state, of Mexico-Tenochtidan. In the courtyard of San Francisco, next to the indigenous chapel, fray Pedro established an indigenous school aimed at the indoctrination of the Nahua peoples of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and other outlying altepetl. Although its students were primarily members of indigenous nobility, other promising Nahuas received an education there as well.

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.

In the spring of 1925, Santa Anita's Festival of Flowers seemed to follow its tranquil trend of previous years. The large displays of flowers, the selection of indias bonitas (as the contestants of beauty pageants organized in an attempt to stimulate indigenism were known) and the boat-rides on the Viga Canal, all communicated what residents of neighboring Mexico City had come to expect of the small pueblo in the Federal District since the Porfiriato: the respite of a peaceful pastoral, the link to a colorful past, and the promise that mexicanidad was alive and well in the campo. Unfortunately, wrote Manuel Rámirez Cárdenas of El Globo, “the modern newspaper,” the next day, this idyllic tradition was rudely interrupted by a group of audacious, scantily clad women. The culprits were actresses of Mexico City's Lirico theater, who walked around Santa Anita's streets in “picaresque clothing”—stage outfits that left little to the imagination, particularly in broad daylight—and upset visitors and campesinos alike. According to Cardenas, abuelitas and mamas were shocked by the display, averting their eyes from the female spectacle in fear of “elpecado mortal.” Thankfully, for the mothers and grandmothers in the audience, the festival continued in predictable fashion after the initial uproar. Organizers continued with the traditional dances, and judges selected an india bonita from a pool of young, decente mestizo girls to represent the pueblo and the festival.

“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

In 1982, native historian Joe Sando vividly described the Christmas season at Jémez Pueblo in northern New Mexico. Throughout the pueblo, figures of the Christ Child lay on display in homes in prominent, specially-decorated areas representing the stable in Bethlehem. During his childhood, Sando remembered that Hemish families roasted corn in their fireplaces, while elders drew pictures of wild game animals and birds, as well as important crops, on the wall next to the fireplace, in hopes that the birth of Christ would also result in the birth of the animals and plants drawn on the wall. In Jémez today, although the roasting of corn and drawings on the fireplace walls have been replaced by the exchange of gifts and watching television, some seasonal customs continue. Pine logs for communal bonfires rest neatly in square piles in front of each home. Christmas Eve bonfires attract the newborn Infant Jesus, and children gleefully play and dance around them. When the fires die out, the Hemish return to their homes to await midnight mass. After mass at the church, worshipers follow the newborn Infant in procession through the community. The next morning, as the first rays of daylight become visible in the east, animal dancers appear on the hilly skyline to the east and southwest. By the time the sun leaves the eastern horizon, the animals have arrived in the village, gathering in front of the drummers, who sing welcoming songs. The people arrive to welcome the animals, who process to the plaza, where they dance all day.

Between 1802 and 1849, cholera and influenza pandemics killed hundreds of thousands from Shanghai to Seville to New York, but these diseases did not dip below the South American portion of the equator. As a result, Brazil gained a reputation of good health, an opinion confirmed by European travelers and some provincial authorities. This rosy reputation wilted in 1849 when a yellow fever epidemic devastated several seaports, including the imperial capital of Rio de Janeiro. Following this outbreak, waves of epidemics swept the nation with unfamiliar and terrifying virulence. Brazilians were struck again and again by cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, and bubonic plague until the early 1900s.

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.

With his television blaring in the corner, Don Isidro Durán spoke of the men whom his neighbors had once chosen as leaders, men those neighbors labeled “colonels.” As Don Isidro described the indigenous political mobilization that rocked his rural Ayacucho community back in 1923, he explained that these colonels led their supporters in military exercises and proclaimed that President Augusto B. Leguía was “bad for the Pueblo.” Although the elderly Durán spoke with the authority of an eyewitness and the eloquence of a local intellectual, the indigenous leaders he described are essentially absent from the extensive literature on indigenous politics during Peru's 1920s. That absence is surprising, for reports of various popularly appointed colonels fill Ayacucho's archival records during Leguia's oncenio (his 1919-1930 presidency). These Ayacuchano civilian colonels were typically literate, indigenous men witxiout formal standing in the Peruvian armed forces. During the first years of the 1920s, Ayacucho peasants embraced rliese indigenous men as leaders because of their profound anger at official government authorities and their agents.

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.

The field of Latin American Studies owes much to Professor Howard J. Wiarda, whose pioneering work on “corporatism” and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped establish a new conceptual paradigm for interpreting the persistence of corporately defined, institutional identities throughout Latin America, despite the purported triumph of the “Liberal Tradition.” A child of Dutch parents, his early travels throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America sparked a keen interest in the question of “third world development.” Entering graduate school in the early 1960s, Professor Wiarda gravitated to the newly emergent field of modernization studies at the University of Florida, where he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Latin American politics. It was a time of tremendous social ferment in Latin America and his early fieldwork took him to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil, among other places. In each instance, he found recognizable patterns that transcended geographic locations, patterns that seemed to directly challenge the predominant arguments set forth in the modernization literature at the time.

In the hours before dawn on September 15, 1961, various groups of men armed with machetes, pistols and rifles attempted to take over military posts, police stations and municipal offices throughout Mexico, proclaiming “justice for the poor.” The uprising of the so-called Federacionistas Leales was part of a strategy coordinated by an old revolutionary general, Celestino Gasca Villaseñor, who planned to take power in order to carry out a new agrarian program to benefit the campesinos of Mexico.

When in the late eighteenth century the prelates of the Fourth Mexican Provincial Council ordered all clergy to stricdy employ their newly printed catechism, they provided a valuable description of the colonial Church and its relationship to unofficial ecclesiastical texts. The Fourth Provincial Council's call for the faithful to receive the doctrines of the Church in a sanctioned and uniform manner acknowledged the presence of a variety of Catholic discourses that stemmed from colonial religious works deemed to be “destitute of legitimate authority and revision.” Such unofficial ecclesiastical texts avoided the editing process that both the clergy and Crown established to ensure the orthodoxy of all printed religious material. In so doing, the texts could convey diverse, unorthodox interpretations of Catholicism. These unofficial ecclesiastical texts, and the role they played in producing multiple versions of Catholicism, constitute the focus of this study.

Stanley J. Stein, Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University, is a lifelong Latin Americanist. Together with his late wife Barbara, herself an accomplished bibliographer and historian of the region, Professor Stein wrote several books and articles that put their stamp on methods of writing the social history of modern Latin America, specifically on the impact of colonialism and industrialism in Mexico and Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is fair to say that no one who studied Latin American history over the last 35 years would have failed to engage the slim, elegantly written synthesis, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (1970). Recipients of grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, singly or together, the Steins were honored for their path-breaking studies with the CLAH Robertson and Bolton prizes, the Conference on Latin American History Distinguished Service Award (1991), and the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (1996).