José Vasconcelos, whose lawyer’s degree entitles him to the designation “Licenciado,” but who more commonly is referred to respectfully as “El Maestro Vasconcelos,” has suffered in recent years a political eclipse which has deprived him of the publicity enjoyed by less distinguished Latin Americans who have kept themselves more attuned to political changes. The writer of this article does not share Vasconcelos’ political or religious creeds, but he cannot help recognizing in him one of the noblest expressions of Latin-American thought. His vast culture and universal philosophy is free from the parochialism which is the curse of much Latin-American culture. This eulogy by one of a different persuasion is intended to counteract the oblivion into which a hostile partisan spirit would relegate him.

It is Probable that no country outside the borders of the United States has, during the past half century, been more widely and more inaccurately presented by our American writers, than the Republic of Mexico. An examination of this surfeit of material and the multiplicity of its authors’ approaches to their topic discovers our Catholic neighborland to have long proved both an irresistible lure and an enigma to the professional producers of run-of-the-mill travel volumes as well as to the more popular (i.e., lighter-weight) theorists on economics and sociology. Their enthusiastic, even florid rhetoric has been ceaselessly inspired by the color and drama of Mexico; but otherwise their persistent output rarely gives much evidence of a clear understanding of Mexican attitudes or ideals and so, of competence to fathom the true significance of this nation’s turbulent history. Since the past cannot be overlooked in any safe estimate of the future, this is a regrettable fact that could prove most detrimental to that much-desired inter-American accord which has already cost the American taxpayer some millions of dollars. There are two easily understood reasons for such lack of insight on the part of so many of our writers; this has already served to rouse the resentment and disrespect of the Mexican reader of the American press while also resulting in a sincere acceptance by Anglo-Americans of a decidedly strange mixture of misinformation and absurdly ill advised opinion for “the truth about Mexico.”

The Apostolic Colleges of Spanish America, as is well known, were spiritual powerhouses which provided learned, zealous and dynamic missionaries, who not only evangelized the pagan Indians on the periphery of Christianity but also renewed the faith and morals of the professed Christians in populous cities and far-flung haciendas. These missionaries were recruited principally from the provinces in Spain, though a number of American-born friars became members. It was but natural that in the course of time these colleges came to possess great archives and valuable libraries. The correspondence of the missionaries out in the conversiones, of bishops and government officials, the official books of the college, such as the Acta of the discretory, the reception and profession of novices, the account books, the affiliation and disaffiliation of members, the records of benefactors, all, after a century or two, comprised bulky archival material. Just as naturally, in the course of time, large libraries developed. Home missionaries needed access to general and particular knowledge without the constant necessity of leaving their colleges to obtain it. The missionaries in the Indian fields had to rely almost exclusively upon the college or mother house to supply them with the books they needed in fields where printing was unknown and reading was confined almost to the circle of missionaries.

In 1898 Bernard Moses, professor of history at the University of California, published the first of the series of volumes which contributed in a preeminent degree to the inception of a new era of Hispanic-American historical studies in the United States. Six years later appeared Edward Gaylord Bourne’s Spain in America, 1450–1580, which enjoyed a wider circulation and probably exerted a more immediate influence in English-speaking historical circles than Moses’ pioneer work. Bourne’s career was cut short by death in 1908, and one can only speculate on what might have been his influence on the development of Hispanic-American studies in the United States. Moses, however, lived on until 1930, active to the last in turning out the succession of volumes which have earned for him a distinguished place among the Anglo-American pioneers of the new era of Hispanic-American historiography. His scholarship, it is true, rested content with the utilization of the printed sources of his field, but these were abundant and Moses used them exhaustively and with discernment. The interest he stimulated sent his disciples on their highly rewarding researches in archives and manuscript depositories.

The Recent sweeping innovations in the Organization of American States and the provisions of the Treaty of Mutual Assistance constitute in certain respects a return to the political concepts of Bolívar’s Americanism. Through the present study of these early ideas as they existed in Chile we hope to show that the modern Pan-American movement had its origin in the early nineteenth-century ideals of Hispanic-American solidarity.