Although there have been numerous important contributions to the social history of colonial Spanish America published in recent years, these studies have generally ignored the artisan and semi-skilled working classes that were, numerically, the largest urban components of these societies. This article will examine one colonial artisan group, the bakers of Buenos Aires, during a period when the city and its hinterland experienced significant economic and political change, 1770-1820. At the beginning of the period, Buenos Aires was little more than a large village with a population of approximately 20,000 and an economy dominated by contraband trade. As part of a major reform of Spanish strategic and economic policy, Buenos Aires was selected in 1776 as the political capital of a new viceroyalty that included the vast region bordered by the Andes, the Atlantic and Brazil. The city's new political importance with a viceregal court, enlarged military garrisons and augmented bureaucracy stimulated both urban and regional economies and attracted large numbers of immigrants from the interior and from Europe. It is increasingly clear that these alterations in the city's economic life and social structure contributed to the political crisis that culminated in the independence period. Although this study will concentrate on a single occupational group, it is hoped that this effort to measure the responses of the bakers to the altered opportunities and challenges of the late colonial and early independence periods will also provide some new insights into the economic and political history of the region during this crucial period.

Our view of the Spanish missionary Church results from the convergence of two streams of historical writing. The first uses the activities of a particular religious order or its most illustrious members to frame the foundation and growth of a missionary enterprise. The second pursues a thematic approach, emphasizing the importance of the missions as foci of Spanish culture in a native world. Within this second stream falls the particularly North American interest in the frontier with its stress on the mission stations as the vanguard of Iberian religious, political, and social institutions.

Though widely divergent in organization and emphasis, both streams present a picture of isolation. Solitary missions existed as self-contained theocracies on the very edge of the viceroyalty. The missionaries themselves constantly stressed this view. Their correspondence cites the difficulties of operating stations at great remove from the seats of Spanish power in America. Professional historians, following the diaries and letters of the missionary fathers, have placed priests, neophytes, and — in North America — presidial soldiers beyond the aid or control of metropolitan authority touched only by an occasional visita or supply train.

José Celestino Mutis, physician, naturalist and educator, and a native of the port of Cádiz in Spain, arrived at the Spanish viceroyalty of New Granada in the year 1760 as personal physician to Viceroy Messía de la Zerda. His arrival coincided with the beginning of a period of change in the cultural history of that reino or “kingdom”. Progressive reform in the colonial universities, stimulus to scientific study, new directions in philosophic and political thought and the formation of an enlightened society were the contributions don José made to the cultural partrimony of New Granada. The results of his activity in this viceroyalty were manifestations of that period in history which is termed the Enlightenment.

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.