Before anyone heard of Colombian narcotraficantes, a new class of international cocaine traffickers was born between 1947 and 1964, led by little-known Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Cubans, Mexicans, Brazilians, and Argentines. These men—and often daring young women—anxiously pursued by U.S. drug agents, pioneered the business of illicit cocaine, a drug whose small-scale production in the Andes remained legal and above board until the late 1940s. Before 1945, cocaine barely existed as an illicit drug; by 1950, a handful of couriers were smuggling it by the ounce from Peru; by the mid-1960s this hemispheric flow topped hundreds of kilos yearly, linking thousands of coca farmers across the eastern Andes to crude labs, organized trafficking rings, and a bustling retailer diaspora in consuming hot-spots like New York and Miami. The Colombians of the 1970s, the Pablo Escobars who leveraged this network into one of hundreds of tons, worth untold billions, are today notorious. Yet historians have yet to uncover their modest predecessors or the actual start of Colombia's role: cocaine's “pre-Colombian” origins.

As dawn broke in Mexico City's streets, steamy pots opened to offer the delicious smell of hot tamales and atole. Lupita woke up early that morning to sell tamales in the usual corner of Niño Perdido street in Mexico City's downtown. In that year, 1947, the construction of the Latin American Tower had just started. Lupita observed the builders digging deeply in the foundations while she sipped her atole and served red and green sauce tamales to her customers. In 1940s and 1950s Mexico City, workers and low-ranking bureaucrats started their day with this popular meal, as they had done since colonial times. Reformers, however, questioned the nutritional value of the working-class diet and considered it as a threat to the construction of modern Mexico.

The Roman Catholic Church in Chile first acknowledged its inability to pastor its flock in the 1920s because of an acute shortage of priests. Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, SJ addressed the clerical crisis in a 1936 article, La Crisis Sacerdotal en Chile. When critics found his analysis “exaggerated,” he conducted a survey of Chilean religious practices and published the findings in a controversial essay entitled Es Chile un país católico? which is said to have earned him the wrath of the hierarchy because it called attention to the woeful neglect of pastoral duties especially among the rural and working class populations. This empirical data demonstrated that the Catholic Church in Chile had 1615 priests, of whom 780 were secular and 835 regular clergy; of the same 1615 priests 915 were Chilean and 700 were foreigners. There were 451 parishes, some of which contained several towns and villages scattered over a thousand square kilometers with 10,000 parishioners to be ministered to by a single priest. Hurtado's solution—a larger and better-educated clergy—was a long-term solution to an urgent problem that would never be achieved. Something had to be done immediately to keep the faith alive. In the gendered world of Chilean Catholicism, the task of preserving the faith fell to young laywomen.

The strategic location of the Isthmus of Panama within the commercial network of the Spanish Empire and the need to defend it has greatly influenced historical writing on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Panama. Most studies have emphasized military and economic history and with few exceptions, have shown little interest in other aspects of Panamanian life. An excellent review of the historical literature on colonial Panama can be found in Christopher Ward, Imperial Panama: Commerce and Conflict in Isthmian America, 1550-1800 (Albuquerque, 1993). Despite a continuing emphasis on the usual themes of trade and defense, there is a growing trend to focus on other topics such as population movements and social classes. One of the areas still awaiting further investigation and study is the history of the cimarrons of Panama. The two principal primary sources for the role of the cimarrons are the collections of documents from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville published by Irene Wright and Carol F. Jopling, respectively. Wright's Documents Concerning the English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569-1580 (London, 1932) contains the correspondence of Spanish officials on the Isthmus to the king relating to the activities of the English pirates and their alliance with the cimarrons.