In 1575 Juan de Ovando, the president of the Council of the Indies, wrote to Mateo Vázquez de Lecca, Philip II's secretary, about the maestrescuelas (headmaster of the cathedral school) of Mexico City who was under consideration for a position as chaplain to the king. The Council of the Indies believed that he lacked the proper limpieza de sangre, that is, that he may have had a tainted lineage that disqualified him for the post. Ovando declared that this was not true. However, despite the fact that the candidate was indeed an “Old Christian” of unblemished stock, he was not to be given the position. Because it was a royal position, wrote Ovando, it should be given only to one whose purity of blood was “notorious.” In 1590 Vázquez de Lecca expressed a similar sentiment when he wrote of a candidate for the royal council that “It is a pity that Agustín Alvarez is not considered to be pure of blood because … I consider him the best of all possible candidates.”

It was the perfect murder, really. Illicit passions: two beautiful women-of-the-night feuding over a dashing young rake, a masked ball, casual taunts, thwarted assaults, escalating threats. Heinous crime: the lover's borrowed gun, midnight bordello visit, fighting words, a gun shot, a maid's scream, a young woman's tragic death. Cruel punishment: suicidal remorse (by some accounts), humiliating public trial, twenty lost years (the maximum sentence for a woman) in Mexico City's squalid Belem jail. The Tarasquillo Street murder had it all!

And so it happened that, in an era enamored of all things French, Mexico City had its very own cause célèbre. A scant twelve years earlier, professional francophile and amateur criminologist Rafael Zayas de Enríquez had devoted an entire volume of his Fisiología del crimen to notorious foreign criminals like Alfonse Dupont, the hunchbacked wife-killer, and Charles Guiteau, the deranged assassin of President Garfield. Now, Mexico too could claim a prominent place in the international annals of infamous crime.

How religion became a tool for integrating women into the modernization process in mid-nineteenth century Chile is the subject of this essay. The intense liberal assault on tradition in nineteenth century Latin America resulted in cultural warfare that benefited women as the abandonment of the Church in record numbers by men created opportunities for both religious and lay women to assume leadership roles. Perhaps for the only time in its history, the Roman Catholic Church identified religious women as a specie of clergy and actively encouraged their female apostolates to preserve the faith of women and children. In Chile this tension between traditional Hispanic and competing bourgeois values had a female dimension because included among the indicators of modernity was the social role of woman. Traditional Hispanic culture cloistered woman in the convent or home; she was a private person who left the public sphere to her male relatives. Independence, however, introduced the idea of republican motherhood and the notion became more pronounced when travelers to the United States and Europe noted the freedom and social contributions of women thereby giving credence to the new concept. Female apostolates provided women with the bridge to the modern age and provided a “feminine ideal of self-sacrificing women [to balance] Adam Smith's masculine gospel of enlightened self-interest.”

Political theory, consensus and participation have often had deeply religious motivations and inspirations driving them. And however peculiar to theology the concept of corpus mysticum may seem to us today, it has often been used in association with politics. In the late Middle Ages, the notions of political office as against personalism, continuity of sovereignty in spite of the unexpected and politically perilous deaths of monarchs, unity over factionalism, the relationship between authority and the law, and that between authority and the people, were persuasively addressed through this religious metaphor.

It is generally agreed that a couple of years after Cabral's discovery of Brazil in 1500, the Portuguese Crown leased out the land to a trading consortium for economic exploitation and further exploration. But whether the Crown granted one or two leases, and when the second lease [if there was one] began and for how long it ran, have long been matters of confusion and disagreement.

Evidence of the first lease is clear. A letter of Rondonelli written from Seville and dated the third of October, 1502, speaks of a three-year lease on the following terms: the consortium would have to send six ships to Brazil and “discover” 300 leagues of coast each year and would be obligated to build a fort/factory there. During the first year the lease-holders would pay the Crown nothing, in the second year they would pay a sixth [of the profits?], and in the third year a fourth.