I am deeply honored to be asked to address the Conference on Latin American History, especially on the topic of gay/lesbian studies. As a way of discussing gay studies in Latin America, let me reflect on my ethnographic research on gender and sexuality in Nicaragua. Because I am an anthropologist, I will focus on problems of ethnographic representation. But ultimately and, I think, logically, these problems open to historical questions as well. First, then, a brief reprise of my arguments about male same-sex relations, as developed in Life is Hard and elsewhere.

In 1814, Alexander von Humboldt, the great traveller and explorer of the Americas, drew attention to an unusual feature of the movement for independence in the Viceroyalty of New Granada: the establishment of printing presses and newspapers followed rather than preceded the outbreak of war. Humboldt was struck by the contrast New Granada's war of independence offered with the two more famous political revolutions of the age. A great proliferation of printed pamphlets and periodicals had preceded the outbreak of revolution in both the Thirteen Colonies and France. How curious, Humboldt commented, to find the process reversed in Spanish America. Humboldt is not alone in viewing the newspaper as the expected harbinger of change in the age of Atlantic revolution. While the precise role played by the printed word in the French and American revolutions remains a subject of debate, many historians acknowledge the importance of print in creating a climate conducive to revolutionary challenge. Were newspapers and the press really latecomers to the revolution in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, as Humboldt suggests? What does this tell us about late colonial New Granada? How, in the absence of a developed press, did information, revolutionary or otherwise, circulate within the viceroyalty? Moreover, what means were available to either the Spanish crown or the American insurgents to create and manipulate news and opinion? What, indeed, does it mean to speak of the spread of news in a society such as late colonial New Granada? This article seeks to address these questions.

The genesis for this special issue on "Words and Deeds" was a panel discussion held in conjunction with the January 1997 joint meeting of the Conference on Latin American History and the American Historical Association in New York City. Participants Richard Boyer, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Kimberly Hanger, and Jane Landers presented the papers included in this volume. The essays all flowed together so nicely and initiated such a lively exchange among panelists and the audience that the editors of The Americas asked us to prepare them for publication, incorporating some of the commentary offered at the session. What you read in the following pages is a result of that process, although we still think it rather ironic that a journal produced by the Academy of American Franciscan History should want to include articles with so many off-color words and references to sexual conduct and violence!

The fact that these essays generated such interest as conference papers and appear in this special issue of The Americas confirms the value cultural historians are placing on the study of insults, conflicts, and other confrontational behavior to reconstruct societal norms and worldviews and assess challenges to them. What constituted an insult or defined anti-social behavior reveals much about what the community considered each person's position in it; resistance to one's assigned role and identity or objection to someone else misconstruing this identity unmasked a sense of injustice that community members, especially its leaders, had to rectify in order to maintain social order.

Four years before the suppression of male religious orders in Mexico (1859) the Minister of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs, Ezequiel Montes, asked the provincials to inform him on the number of friars, their activities and their monasteries' properties (December 22, 1855). The data, which began arriving to the Minister in January 1856, provides some of the most complete information on the nineteenth century Franciscans in Mexico. Comparing this data with what is available for the end of eighteenth century we can draw the following comparative table.

A quick glance at these figures reveals the great deterioration through which the order had gone in a period of seventy years. From 1786 and 1856 the Franciscans had lost three fifths of their members, two fifths of their monasteries and four fifths of their missions. It can be pointed out as a counterweight that, during the same period, two colleges of Propaganda Fide were founded: Orizaba in 1799, and Zapopan in 1812.l But it also should be noted that during the same time a province disappeared, Yucatan.2 The general conclusion, then, is that in no other period of their presence in Mexico, had the Franciscan

No clearer testimony evidenced the social upheaval and shifting political landscape in Guatemala in February 1838 than the graphic narrative by the traveling United States' diplomat, John Lloyd Stephens. Recently arrived in the capital for the first time, Stephens witnessed the insurrectionary triumph of the military caudillo, Rafael Carrera, and his “tumultuous mass of half-naked savages, men, women, and children, estimated at ten or twelve thousand.” Stephens described how Carrera's indigenous followers, upon entering the abandoned plaza and within earshot of the terrified white elite shouted “Long live religion and death to foreigners!” Carrera's political uprising incited by religious concerns had laid siege to the power structure inherited from colonial times.

In spring 1939 Sonoran ranchers shared with one another the latest mockery of Mexico's president, whom they ridiculed as trompa chula—a reference to his fat lips. It came in the form of a poem:

Siervo de los rusos, patrón de extranjeros,
que a los mexicanos has dejado en cueros
como una consecuencia de tu obstinación
que es madre y señora de tu entendimiento.
Por que es muy difícil que pueda un jumento
aceptar alguna rectificatión.

Confórmate, hermano, con volver a Uruapán,
piensa que a los brutos de cierto los matan,
y si has de hacer algo en nuestro favor,
una cosa puedes de qué estar ufano
córtale las uñas a tu ilustre hermano,
Lombardo Toledano.

Turn-of-the century Argentine political leaders were deeply influenced by new ideas about the origin and treatment of criminality developed by the Italian positivist school of criminology. According to this school, crime was not the fruit of the criminal's wickedness, as classic penology had claimed, but was rather the result of a complex web of social and psycho-biological determinations of which the criminal had been a victim. This pathology called “crime” could be corrected if its origin was scientifically determined and if the new methods of rehabilitation prescribed for criminals and potential criminals were enforced. Although not all of the premises of the criminological school led by Lombroso, Ferri, and Garofalo were accepted uncritically in Argentina, the basic principles of the new science were widely adopted by jurists, doctors, hygienists and psychiatrists. These ideas were received in the context of massive European immigration, accelerated urbanization, and the emergence of a large working class.

This essay presumes the baroque texture of colonial Mexico in its multiple styles, voices, and peoples differentiated by race, ethnicity, locale, culture, place of origin, position, wealth, and clientele. It also presumes, using Marina S. Brownlee's words, a “selfreflective and distorting” tendency of baroque societies to spin off countercurrents and transpositions of dominant culture. “Profusion of detail, hierarchy, and contrast,” Irving Leonard's well traveled characterization of the Mexican baroque, could not be confined easily to fixed orderings and orthodoxies. From the first, in fact, the project to order the colony created more rather than less diversity by “introduc[ing] new, upsetting influences.” These influences—new cultural valuations, “a new, exclusive religion, and new laws and procedures”— may have “unified a congeries of independent states and empires.” But they also combined in different ways, rates, and degrees with pre-existing and newly emerging political and cultural forms. Not as a uniform flood plain but as diverse sedimentations, the colony was formed by back-eddies and cross currents more than a single stream.

Countless judicial complaints ranging from malos tratos (domestic mistreatment) to assault to insults contain the phrase de obra y palabra (by deed and word). Mexicans of the period 1750 to 1856 understood that the two aspects of injury—verbal and physical—were equally important. While violent acts harmed the body, words attacked an individual's honor and reputation. Therefore harm was conceived of as both physical and verbal, and the connection between the two was inherent in judicial formulations and the expression itself.

The most important public ritual to arise from the experience of Mexico's Revolution of 1910 came to be held on November 20—“Revolution Day.” The date commemorates Francisco I. Madero's famous call to arms: on November 20 all towns in Mexico were to rise up against the 34-year rule of Porfirio Díaz. Although Madero was forced to take action before the appointed date and the Revolution got off to a premature start, November 20 has generally been accepted as the inception of the violent phase of the revolutionary struggle.

With the Spanish conquest came racial miscegenation, depopulation, forced relocation, and migration, which resulted in the implosion of many ethnic (as well as linguistic) distinctions among the Indian peoples. Facilitating this implosion was a European-invented label “indio,” which eliminated—philosophically, juridically, and legally—virtually all ethnic differences. Yet it bestowed upon the Indian peoples a separate existence. In the Peruvian Andes, Indians themselves during rebellious episodes contributed to this ethnic leveling when they called for pan-Andean unity or the return of the pax incaica. To be sure, numerous Indian groups did not entirely loose their distinct identities, and the ethnic implosion itself varied in time and space. Ethnic differences could be maintained through the upkeep of cultural and racial traits, such as in dress, language, marital patterns, or territorial and social boundaries. In large measure, the leveling or disappearance of precontact ethnicities occurred at a faster rate in the urban environments where Indians from rural areas took up residence, or in any region where Spanish culture or non-Indian peoples predominated. There, the invented “indio” or new ethnicity was the viable alternative and thus stronger, while the autochthonous base and ethnic distinctions remained weaker. This weakness differentiated urbanized Indians from their rural counterparts who sustained their links to the past far longer.

The events of Alberto Masferrer's life and the parallel evolution of his social thought reveal much about the broader forces which shaped El Salvador and Central America during his generation. His lifetime brackets the consolidation of the Salvadoran state and the formation of modern social groups. Alberto Masferrer was born in 1868, the age of the Liberal presidents' ascendence throughout Central America; he died in 1932 as Depression-era dictators assumed power throughout that same region. In fact, 1932 is a watershed year in Central American history. With Agustín Farabundo Martí's failed Communist uprising in El Salvador and the murder of Augusto Cesar Sandino in Nicaragua, the early 1930s brought a decisive end to the possibility for Masferrer's idealized type of elite-led reform and instead turned opponents toward ideologically-motivated popular revolt. Alberto Masferrer, like most intellectuals, struggled with ideas and power. He realized that the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century Presidents not only had failed to improve the material and moral condition of the majority of his countrymen, but actually had degraded them. Though Masferrer's admiring biographer Matilde Elena López observed that “[t]he reality of man exploited by an unjust society is the central idea of his life,” it remains no easy task to categorize the cranky journalist's thought for, indeed, he does not fit neatly into any single ideology. Masferrer the humanist gave primary importance to the betterment of social and economic conditions for those living on the material plane, while Masferrer as a Christian stressed the otherworldly values of humility, hard work, patience and charity. Masferrer the communist called for a return to the ejidal landholding system of the traditional Indian communities and a guaranteed standard of living for all Salvadorans, but Masferrer the corporatist recognized the existence of a natural state of hierarchy and felt that harmony would prevail if each remained true to his pre-ordained vocation. Masferrer the aesthetic arielista venerated language and culture, but Masferrer the criollista could not be restrained to the world of pure art and consistently returned to earth to criticize uneven social conditions. Masferrer the hispano-falangist idealized a strong and vigorous nation, yet Masferrer the pacifist abhorred violence and aggressiveness.

Shortly after the Spanish conquests in Mesoamerica (or, as the colonizers termed it, New Spain), friars chiefly of the Franciscan and Dominican orders taught the art of alphabetic writing to the indigenous elite. As a result the colonial period saw the production of an extensive body of documentation—overwhelmingly notarial and largely legal in nature—by Mesoamerica's indigenous peoples, written in their own languages but using the Roman alphabet. The language best represented in the surviving material (and thus in the ethnohistorical literature) is Nahuatl, often misleadingly called Aztec but in fact widely spoken throughout central Mexico. Yucatec Maya places a distant second in terms of known records, probably followed in order of magnitude by Mixtec. While this article will focus primarily upon these three tongues, it should also be noted that scholars have investigated a small but significant body of Cakchiquel and Quiché materials from highland Guatemala, and that there are also known to exist unstudied sources in Chocho, Cuicatec, Mixe, Otomí, Tarascan, Totonac, and Zapotec; other Mesoamerican languages may also have been written alphabetically in the colonial period.

The “horseman of hope,” Brazil's “undefeated column”—much is known about the legendary Luis Carlos Prestes and his rebel column's march through thirteen Brazilian states in the 1920s. Indeed, legends are made of such stuff. Roughly one thousand rebellious federal soldiers and state policemen pushed their way through 25,000 kilometers of Brazil's isolated interior. Forced marches day and night helped them elude capture and defeat from late 1924 until they chose exile in Bolivia in early 1927. Soon the column's fame and impact reached worldwide. Even today, for example, the study of Prestes's tactics is still a part of Red Army officer training in China.

Colonial New Orleans was a community, like so many others in Latin America, in which the upper sectors desired to maintain order and “toda tranquilidad,” preferably by way of legislation and judicial compromise but through force and authoritarian measures if necessary. Challenges to this tranquility came from those groups considered marginal and thus often subordinated, oppressed, and made generally unhappy with the status quo, among them workers, women, soldiers, slaves, and free blacks (libres). Free black women— the focus of this paper—drew upon multiple experiences as members of several of these subjugated groups: as women, as nonwhites, sometimes as former slaves, and usually as workers, forced by poverty to support their families with earnings devalued because they were gained doing “women's work.” But they did not suffer silently. Condemning the patriarchal order, racist, sexist, authoritarian society in which they operated, libre women vigorously attacked it both verbally and physically, employing such elite-defined legal and illegal methods as petitions, judicial procedures, slander, insults, arson, and assault and battery.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Spanish Crown issued a Real Cédula (Royal Decree) authorizing the administration of public education in Cuba to an elite Creole group of twenty-seven large landholders known as the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País. The Real Cédula provided for the expansion and secularization of primary education in Cuba. The Sociedad embodied the elite planter Creole class whose influence had increased in Cuba steadily during the second half of the eighteenth century with the initial development of a slave-labor plantation economy. During the nineteenth century, their power and strength grew rapidly with the proliferation of sugar cultivation, culminating in the 1840s when Cuba became the world's primary producer. The Real Cédula entrusting the Sociedad with education recognized the emergence of the Creole planter class as a major influence in Cuban society. Just as the Creoles increasingly wielded more influence economically and politically in determining the future of the island, their control over the administration of public education allowed them to articulate their vision for the cultural and intellectual development of Cuba. The promotion of public education provided an essential medium to express the Sociedad's vision of Cubanidad (Cubanness), precisely at the time when the racial composition of the population was changing dramatically through the massive importation of African slave labor.

I am of two minds in regard to a response to the reviews of Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico. Although I am gratified by the attention that it has received, I have been disinclined to engage in a debate about its merits and defects. Ultimately a book must stand on its own. Some will find that Economic Growth and Change makes a plausible case, and others will say that it does not. That is how it should be. I have no interest in rewriting those sections of Economic Growth and Change that miss the mark. Still, the invitation to write a reply does allow me the opportunity to re-examine some of the most controversial issues with an eye toward how scholars might move ahead with the agenda on the reconstruction of Latin America's colonial economic history.

Historian Charles Cutter has analyzed the “non-adversarial nature” of the Spanish legal culture and the manner in which Spanish authorities deployed written law (ley), customary law (derecho), and personal discretion (arbitrio judicial) effectively to achieve justice (equidad), even in peripheral areas of the empire. The primary objective of judicial administration was the resolution of conflict and restoration of harmony within the Spanish community. This paper uses civil and criminal records from second Spanish period Florida (1784-1821) to explore the gendered nature of Spanish legal culture by examining conflict between women and its resolution, as well as the ways in which the community and the court attempted to monitor and correct the “disruptive” behavior of women.