In an anonymous circa 1754 portrait (Figure 1), fray Francisco de Santa Ana stands in a flowered crown and the brown and white habit of the Carmelite first order. The image commemorates the occasion of his final vows as a mendicant friar, and he is a rare if not unique example of a monk within the genre of the so-called crowned nuns. With eyes cast down, fray Francisco appears next to a table bearing an hourglass, skull, and book, symbols of his devotion and of his meditation on his own mortality. Painted as if tacked to the wall beside him is a print of the Virgin Mary, representing the Carmelite order's fervent Marian devotion. While she seems to gaze down at her follower, fray Francisco humbly looks away.

In 1808, confronted with the latest in a lengthy series of legal challenges to its corporate landholdings, the municipal council of the Indian town of San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala, in the northeastern province of Coahuila in New Spain, dispatched a blistering note to its counterpart in the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo. The question of the moment concerned the right of Saltillo residents José Miguel and Juan González to route water they claimed in one place to property San Esteban had earlier allowed them to farm in another. But to do so meant that the water would be directed across lands belonging to San Esteban. When the Indian town denied them this right, the brothers protested vigorously. They contended that agriculture was, after all, the mainstay of the local economy. It benefited the public, the king, the church, and particularly the families of the pueblo itself. To deny these two farmers access to their water was to jeopardize agricultural production in the area. Further, they argued, San Esteban possessed much uncultivated arid land; perhaps the pueblo should consider renting some of the Gonzálezes' water as it flowed across the town's properties. Implicit in this suggestion was the assumption that San Esteban residents could not deal with what they had, that they were wasteful in utilizing their resources, and that Spaniards, in this particular case the brothers González, were better equipped to exploit the resources of the community.

“Bishops, because they are bishops, cannot stop being vassals of their kings, and functionaries of their states. Nor are they exempt from practicing with all those around them, especially with their diocesans, works of mercy, physically as well as spiritually.

I gave [the miners] as proof of this truth one of the soliloquies of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in which he said: “You are a man, you are a citizen of the world.” —Bishop Martínez Compañón recounting his experiences with the Hualgayoc miner's guild in a letter to Viceroy Teodoro de Croix of Peru, May 1786.

In the 40 years since he published Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964: An Experiment in Democracy, Thomas Skidmore has simultaneously been a leading U.S. scholar of Latin American history and a prominent public figure in Brazil. Balancing these roles, Skidmore has written and commented extensively on recent Brazilian political and economic history. But he is also the author of an influential intellectual history of racial thought in Brazil, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (1974). Black into White examines what Skidmore calls the “whitening thesis” by which Brazilian intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries managed their racial and nationalist anxieties by interpreting miscegenation as a dynamic process that would dilute Brazil’s black population.