In September, 1584, during an episcopal visita to Chiapa de Indios, a group of townspeople came to the bishop, Fray Pedro de Feria, to accuse the patriarch of one of the principal lineages in the town of leading a clandestine cult. They said that, in nearby Suchiapa, a “gran junta” composed of twelve Indians who called themselves the Twelve Apostles gathered at night to walk among the hills and caves, and to perform “demonic rites against our Christian religion.” With them, Feria was told, went two women. One they called Santa María; the other, Magdalena. Together the cultists carried out ceremonies in which they transformed themselves into gods and goddesses. In their divine form, the women were said to have the power to conjure storms, and to give many riches to whomever they pleased. Feria would report that they had “many other superstitutions and vanities” which he compared to the Alumbrados or Illuminist sect that had been widely popular in Spain during the 1520s and been condemned by the Inquisition.

A seventeenth-century inhabitant of São Paulo once remarked that Indians were “the most profitable property in this land.” Legally, however, Indians were not property at all, for the crown explicitly prohibited their enslavement. During most of the seventeenth century, the settlers of São Paulo complied with the letter of the law and did not officially give their Indian servants any monetary value, and though they often sold them, the sales were known to be illegal and were not usually recorded in public documents, such as the documents used for this study, inventários, settlements of estates. By the end of the century, however, local judges were openly allowing the monetary appraisal of Indians and their subsequent sale was duly recorded in inventários and other court processes.

“The womb of the Province” is how one eighteenth-century resident described Querétaro, for within that city the Franciscans of the Province of San Pedro y San Pablo de Michoacán supported not only the friary of Santiago el Grande with its Spanish and Indian parishes, but also the pioneering College of Santa Cruz, the convents of Santa Clara and Santa Rosa de Viterbo for women, the seminary of the Province, the mission church of San Sebastián, and the friary and shrine of Nuestra Señora de Pueblito. The city additionally served as the seat of the Provincial chapter. Friars and nuns at these various foundations directed over twenty associations of laity organized into confraternities, or cofradíos. Poised delicately between those who were professed Franciscans (male and female, of the First and Second Orders, respectively), and the lay confraternities affiliated with the monasteries, was the Third Order, an institute which has defied classification.

Throughout the centuries of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, Africans and their descendants struggled against a social system that sought to reduce them to chattel. They found that their struggle was to continue, albeit in different forms, long after abolition. In Brazil, emancipation in 1888 was followed the next year by the demise of imperial government and the installation of the First Republic. This created a new political and legal framework for Afro-Brazilians to negotiate positions in society. Racial relations in former slave societies are not the simple result of imposed identities and social spaces by a dominant group upon an oppressed group. They evolve from a dialectical power struggle in which blacks as well as whites affect the outcome.

A patente, in the ecclesiastical sense of the term, was an official letter expedited by a prelate and addressed to his religious subjects. Both the Father Guardian of the College of San Fernando in Mexico City and the Father President of the Franciscan missions in Alta California were regarded as prelates in the canonical sense of the term. Consequently, the friars who worked in these missions were held by religious vows to obey the admonitions and instructions in such documents. Patentes sent by the guardian of the college to his missionaries in Alta California dealt with the administration of the missions and the observance of the religious life and were supposed to be transcribed or at least summarized in a book intended for that purpose and called a Libro de Patentes.