On May 19, 1537, in a region of the Pearl Coast, two armed factions of Spaniards challenged one another on the banks of the Unare River in what would become eastern Venezuela (see Figure 1). Licenciado Juan de Frías and his smaller force of about 80 men confronted a large party under the command of the conquistador Antonio Sedeño. Frías professed to represent the crown by charge of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, which had bestowed on him a vara del rey (staff of the king, symbolizing royal authority) and sent him off to arrest Sedeño. Sedeño likewise maintained that he had royal authority, citing his capitulación (contract of conquest) for the nearby island of Trinidad and letters from Empress Isabel, wife of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (King Charles I of Spain) and regent of Spain from 1529–32 and 1535–39. In their confrontation, both Frías and Sedeño claimed to represent the will of the king.

In the early morning of February 15, 1898, a farmer named Zacarias Navarro found the remains of a newborn infant in a shallow well on the outskirts of Alamos, Sonora, in northwestern Mexico. As caretaker of the well, it was predictable that Navarro would be the first resident to make the grisly discovery. He immediately informed the chief of police, Manuel Vargas, who sent officers to retrieve the infant's body.

In 1891, Luther H. Gulik, a prominent member of the international leadership of the YMCA of the United States, established the triangle as the YMCA symbol. He saw the triangle as a symbol imbued with Christian beliefs that would become the spearhead of a worldwide missionary movement. About the Triangle, Gulik wrote:

In September-October 1925, there occurred in Panama a tenants' strike that helped define the development of the left and workers' movement in that nation. This article presents an overview of the strike—important because no synthetic English-language account exists—and then analyzes the role of black West Indians in the event. West Indians were prominent among the ranks of workers in Panama, and among the slums of Panama City and Colón. Nonetheless, they were not central to the rent strike. This absence reflects the historic relationship between West Indian and Hispanic workers in the isthmus, the effect of the recent defeat of strikes led by West Indians in the Panama Canal Zone, and the lack of attention paid to attracting West Indian support by the Hispanic leadership of the tenants' strike. This division between the West Indian population and the broader labor movement in Panama had lasting effects in the history of the Panamanian left, reinforcing divisions between the struggle for Panamanian self-determination and the struggle against racist oppression of West Indians and their descendants in Panama.