“A machine which does not serve the purpose of labor is useless. So a slave who becomes equated with a machine is useless when some component part no longer works.” (Karl Marx, Manuscripts, 459)

“Verás de abanzada edad
A muchos bozales negros
Que al público pensionando
Están después que sirvieron.”

For years after the 1687 earthquake had devastated much of Lima, various published sermons pondered the significance of the inauspicious event. One specific panegyric written in 1694 detailed the structural damage to the Hospital of San Bartolomé, founded in 1661 for “freed, disabled, ill or elderly blacks.” In the baroque literary style characteristic of the period, the author, Francisco de Vargas Machuca, described how the heroic viceroy Laso de Portocarrero, the Count of Monclova, “born like the sun for the remedy of all,” exercised his “divine charity” toward the poor of the Royal hospital, and “bore the weight of its ruins upon his own majestic shoulders to attend to the poor slaves and their hospital at his own expense.” According to the author, only Christ himself could have predicted that in 1694 the viceroy would refurbish the vestibule with exquisitely adorned doors, place “costly stones of the court” in the portal and replace the damaged cornices with more ornate ones in order to replicate a “hospital of heaven where the poor would enter.” After four months of intensive labor, the wards, in the shape of a Greek cross, were restored and the roofing and masonry work completed. Ample food, bedding and medicine once again provided adequate sustenance for the poor, infirm and elderly slaves and free castas in the hospital.

A historian, soldier, diplomat, journalist, poet, translator, and politician, Bartolomé Mitre (1821-1906) stood out among the most renowned figures of late nineteenth century Latin America. “He is a full handsome man,” declared one of his many European admirers in 1861, “of very eloquent appearance with a fine forehead and thoughtful face. He is a poet and a scholar, and looks altogether too refined and gentlemanly to be mixed up with the dirty doings of second-rate politicians.” Forty years later, Carlos Pellegrini, a former president of Argentina and one of Mitre's leading political opponents, described him as “the most powerful caudillo of our time” who possessed “an aura of personal valor that he imposed on the multitude.” To an American hagiographer writing in the 1940s, Mitre was a “poet in action,” and a “heart in unison with his time and his country.… In the unification of his country, Mitre displayed the astuteness of a Cavour and the ardency of a Garibaldi.”

Novelist and statesman Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969) played a key role in the emergence of Venezuelan populism, first by inscribing the populist rationale for change in a series of novels—most famously in Doña Bárbara (1929)—and later by lending his prestige to Acción Democrática (AD), the nation’s most successful populist party. A founding member of AD, Gallegos supported the coup that brought the party to power in 1945 and became the party’s standard bearer in 1947, winning Venezuela’s first presidential election based on universal suffrage and direct voting. As president, he advanced AD’s reform agenda for almost a year before the military removed him from office and imposed a reactionary dictatorship. Forced into exile, Gallegos returned to his homeland when the dictatorship fell in 1958 and spent his remaining years as a revered elder statesman and acclaimed cultural figure.

The first Afro-Brazilian to be awarded a knighthood in the Portuguese Order of Santiago seems to have been the light-skinned mulatto, Manuel Gonçalves Doria. In 1628 he was rewarded by King Philip IV with the habit and knighthood, as well as an annual pension of 20$ or 20 milreis, for his eight years of service as a soldier and captain (through 1627) and, especially for his bravery in Bahia in 1624 and 1625, fighting against the Dutch when they captured and occupied Salvador, the capital of Brazil. A letter from the crown praised him as “the prime mover behind the attacks and ambushes” which the Portuguese made as the Dutch occupiers tried to expand their military presence beyond the city limits. So great were his exploits during the Dutch invasion that the Portuguese-born Jesuit priest Bartolomeu Guerreiro, in his Jornada dos Vassalos da Coroa de Portugal, published in Lisbon in 1625, highlighted several examples of his derringdo. Not to be outdone, the Bahian-born Franciscan Frei Vicente do Salvador gave Gonçalves Doria's actions against the Dutch at least eleven mentions in his História do Brasil. But as Manuel and many of his contemporaries would discover, it was one thing to be awarded a knighthood and another to receive the authorization for the ceremonies to be performed.