I am touched and surprised by this recognition, from colleagues who don’tknow me personally, as well as from friends in the profession who must havewritten on my behalf. I like Bill Russell’s idea that a good way of leadingis to serve. I have looked for ways to serve, but they have mostly been outof public view. In that spirit I want to acknowledge especially John TePaskewho died a few weeks ago—a colleague I’ve looked up to from the beginning asa wonderful example of integrity, generosity, and wisdom.

Popular legend suggests that a mysterious curse fated Nina Rodrigues’ deathin 1906. Though a pioneer of Afro-Brazilian studies, he posited thatAfro-descendants possessed a genetic atavism predisposing them to crime andargued that widespread racial miscegenation had contributed to thefin-de-siècle “negro problem” in Brazil. Almost four decades following hisdeath, the curse was reborn, striking Arthur Ramos shortly after he hadrevived the stagnant field of Afro-Brazilian studies using a modifiedversion of Rodrigues’ methodology. Both Brazilian men died in Paris in theirmidforties, just as they were reaching the summit of their respectivecareers.

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century,or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all ofPortuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe,casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governmentsinstead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, asthe new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well asoffer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete Europeanalliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together aroundrepublican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicianswere no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to JohnQuincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from thehemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures andagricultural surplus.

In 1660 Cristóbal de la Cruz presented himself before the commissioner ofthe Holy Office of the Inquisition in Veracruz, Mexico, claiming to beafflicted by doubts about the Catholic faith. Born in Algiers and capturedat the age of nine or ten by a Spanish galley force, he was taken to Spain,where he was quickly sold into slavery and baptized. Thirty years later, Dela Cruz denounced himself to the Mexican inquisitorial tribunal andproceeded to recount to the inquisitors a detailed and fascinating story ofhis life as he crossed Iberian and Mediterranean landscapes: escaping fromhis masters and being re-enslaved, encountering Muslims and renouncingChristianity, denouncing his guilt remorsefully before the Inquisitions ofBarcelona and Seville, and moving between belief in Catholicism and Islam.His case provides important insights into the relationship between religiousidentity and the regulatory efforts of powerful institutions in the earlymodern Spanish world.

Dr. Richard Greenleaf has been one of the most influential historians ofcolonial Latin America in general, and of the Inquisition in particular. Hereceived his university and graduate education in his home state at theUniversity of New Mexico. His professional career took him to Mexico Cityduring the exciting period of the 1950s and 1960s. From there he went on tobe one of the guiding forces in the consolidation of the Latin AmericanStudies program at Tulane University. This interview was conducted in thesummer of 2007 at Dr. Greenleaf's residence in Albuquerque.