Until quite recently, most attention to Brazil’s agrarian history has focused on the chief export crops of sugar and coffee. This makes sense both because until the post-World War II period these were largely responsible for integrating Brazil into the world economy and because they have traditionally been the chief financial props for the elites and the central state. Exports have the advantage too of being relatively easy to study, given the availability of reports and statistics from domestic and foreign sources. But it is important to remember that exports have not been what have occupied most rural Brazilians most of the time, and this was particularly the case in the nineteenth century. Rather, their day to day activities have involved primarily the so-called “internal economy,” the production, consumption, and exchange on local, regional and, but only indirectly, national markets of food, animals, raw materials, and artisan handicrafts.

Mexican writers of the twentieth century have often imagined cuisine to be a symbol of their national identity, a mestizo blend of Native American and Spanish influences. Salvador Novo, for example, a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua and official chronicler of Mexico City, traced the beginnings of mestizaje to the “happy encounter” between corn tortillas and pork sausage that produced the first taco. The most common culinary metaphor for the Mexican nation was mole poblano (turkey in deep-brown sauce). Authors in the 1920s began attributing the origins of this dish to the convents of colonial Puebla, and in particular to Sor Andrea de la Asunción of the Dominican Santa Rosa cloister. About 1680 she supposedly combined seasonings from the Old World with chile peppers from the New in honor of Viceroy Tomás Antonio de la Cerda y Aragón. Mole thus represented Mexico’s “cosmic race,” created by divine inspiration and served up for the approval of the Spanish crown.

On August 31 1832, when news arrived of the death of the English utilitarian philosopher and jurisconsult, Jeremy Bentham, the Guatemalan Statesman José del Valle introduced a resolution to the congress of the Central American Republic requesting all its members to wear mourning as a mark of respect. He also took the opportunity to bestow fulsome praise on Bentham, not only as the sage who had taught the art of legislation and government, but also as the defender of Spanish-American independence.

Few would dispute the first claim. Bentham’s work on the science of legislation, Traités de législation, had been translated into Spanish and was widely read throughout Spanish America. Francisco Santander was said to have always had a copy open on his desk and it was adopted as a basic text for study at University level in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Many of Bentham’s other works enjoyed similar esteem and his opinions on what constituted good government were constantly cited and debated in the assemblies of the new republics.

The administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico is famous for the enormous distribution of lands that it undertook, the prize of the bloody and protracted revolution that had promised tierra to the nation’s peasants two decades earlier. Less well remembered are the actions the administration took against the peasantry, when federal troops stationed in southwestern Chihuahua killed several Mexicans while protecting a colony of Canadian-born Mennonite fanners. This quiet display of the central government’s authority was not the first of its kind in the area around the growing town of Cuauhtémoc. President Alvaro Obregón’s administration had also sent troops to Cuauhtémoc, and their mission then as under Cárdenas was the protection of the lives and properties of the small Mennonite enclave that resided in the area south of Chihuahua City. It was Obregón who invited the religious minority to settle in Mexico shortly after his election, and it was he who pledged federal government protection of the Mennonites’ interests. The incongruities evident in the case begin therefore not with the stationing of the troops in Cuauhtémoc, but much earlier, with the very concessions that Obregón gave the Mennonites in the years after the Mexican Revolution.

Just as the Nazi destruction of European Jewry during World War II led to the dramatic dissemination of the realities of genocide in the 1940s, so a painful corollary to the more recent breakdown of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has been the all too familiar newsworthiness of the concept of ethnic cleansing, i.e., the forcible and unheroic eviction of undesired groups. The practice of applying varying degrees of coercion and/or violence to purge national, religious and other minorities, though, is far older than the inception of either of the aforementioned multiethnic states, let alone their disintegration, and it is not limited to these particular countries. Such a dilemma—the presence of implacable competitors for political supremacy over the same territory—is a position with certain similarities to that of Palestine and early Israel in the first half of this century, especially after binational and other minimalist solutions were deemed irrelevant by the respective mainstreams of the Jewish and Palestinian national movements.

The performance of the Chilean economy during the period between 1830 and 1879 can best be described as a case of “export-led growth.” For those fifty years, exports of raw materials and foodstuffs to North Atlantic markets, especially Britain, rose dramatically. Between 1844 and 1878 the value of exports increased five-fold from $6,087,023 (about £1.2 million) to $31,695,859. This represents an average annual rate of growth of five percent. During the same period annual fiscal income, largely generated by exports, grew from $3.3 million to $15.4 million. Mining products dominated the export sector and constituted between one-half and two-thirds of the total value of Chilean production during this period. The export of copper bars and ingots was particularly dynamic. It increased ten-fold from $1.2 million in 1844 to $13.0 million in 1878 growing, on average, at an annual rate of 7.2 percent. Expansion in the export of copper bars and ingots was especially significant between 1844 and 50. This was due to a series of technological innovations, market conditions, and fiscal measures including the introduction of new smelting methods using coal instead of firewood, state incentives to Chilean copper smelting, extremely low prices for copper ores in the British and Chilean markets, and the formation of large copper smelting companies in Chile.

Between 1840 and 1847 the Mexican province of Yucatán witnessed a remarkable explosion of rural political violence. Contemporaries were well aware of the trend, for they referred to it through vivid phrases such as “uprisings,” “murder and other excesses,” “restless and turbulent spirits,” and “the storm which threatens us close at hand.” And by all accounts these episodes were something new to the society. Indeed, Yucatán had suffered a good deal less violence than had other regions of Mexico. Until 1847 nothing here had remotely approached the chaos of the Hidalgo revolt or the Morelos insurgency. It is impossible for historians, just as it was for contemporary observers, to avoid connecting the violence to the Caste War, the massive rural rebellion which would erupt in 1847. But what was the connection? And what does the political violence tell us about the nature of rural Mexican society?

In Brazil hyphenated identities are very real in spite of the fact that elite culture aggressively rejects such social constructions. Thus, while there are no linguistic categories that acknowledge hyphenated ethnicity (a third generation Brazilian of Japanese descent remains “Japanese” while a fourth generation Brazilian of Lebanese descent may become a “turco,” an “árabe,” a “sírio” or a “sírio-libanese”), in fact immigrant communities aggressively tried to negotiate a status that allowed for both Brazilian nationality and ethnic difference. Immigrant groups in Brazil often did this by claiming a more “original” or “authentic” Brazilianess than members of the European descended elite, often via active constructions of social myths specific to the Brazilian milieu (see “The Legend of the Town of Marataize” above). This is possible since immigrant ethnicity is not some “immutable primordial indentit(ies)” but rather, as Anthony Cohen and others have suggested, a self-conscious and symbolic means by which boundaries were built.

Victory over Spain in 1898 provided the United States with the opportunity to pursue the various options that imperial status now offered. Indeed, under the influence of the strategic precepts of an Alfred Thayer Mahan, the messianic expansionism of a Josiah Strong, the extended frontier concept of a Frederick Jackson Turner, and the now seemingly obtainable economic aspirations of a James G. Blaine, North Americans looked to their newly established imperial arena with anticipation and confidence. It would be the adjacent circum-Caribbean region, for the most part, where the United States government would attempt to create the appropriate climate for the attainment of its strategic, economic, and altruistic goals. Acquisition of the Canal Zone in 1903 served in particular to focus U.S. attention on the isthmus. Accordingly, whenever revolutionary violence erupted in Central America, the United States government more often than not took vigorous action to ensure the survival or emergence of governments and factions which were supportive of North American interests.

In March 1995, a tragic incident understandably evoked public displays of Muslim religiosity in Buenos Aires. The incident—the death of the head of state's son—provoked the irruption of ritual and religious aspects of Islam, unknown to most Argentines, on the country's radio and television. The demise of president Carlos Menem's first-born brought into the public arena with a vengeance the issue of ethnoreligious identity that had been kept under wraps since the end of the nineteenth century as a matter for the intimacy of family and community.

The governmental era of the Bolivian conservative parties—Constitutional, Democrat, and Conservative—encompasses the historical period from Bolivia’s withdrawal from the Pacific War (1880), which saw a Peruvian-Bolivian alliance against Chile, to the outbreak of the Federal War of 1899 between conservatives and liberals. Within this period of infighting lies the genesis of the Bolivian political party system. With the establishment of a truce in 1880 between Chile and Bolivia, without which Bolivia would have had to definitively withdraw from the conflict and break its Peruvian alliance, two positions arose concerning a resolution of the conflict: the continuation of the war or peace. These polar solutions adhered to the first ideological substratum of the Bolivian political parties, making it possible to define the various factions of the elite in light of the new political restructuring and the role of the State.

The 1824 Chumash uprising against three Franciscan missions in the central section of the California chain—Santa Inés, La Purísima Concepción, and Santa Bárbara—was the largest organized revolt in the history of the Alta California missions. The Chumash burned most of the Santa Inés mission complex. At La Purísima, they drove out the mission guard and one of the two priests in residence. The mission was not forcibly retaken by the Mexican army for almost a month. At Santa Bárbara, the Chumash disarmed the soldiers stationed at the mission and sent them back to the presidio. After an inconclusive battle against troops who were sent out against them from the presidio, most of the rebels retired to the interior, where they set up their own community. The revolt was finally brought to an end when a military expedition led by Pablo de la Portilla negotiated the return of this group to the Santa Bárbara Mission. The role of the Prefect of the Missions, Father Vicente í, in bringing the revolt to an end by persuading this group to return to the Santa Bárbara Mission has long been recognized. Antonio María Osio, most likely relying on what he had been told by his brother-in-law, Governor Luis Argüello, stated in 1851, “They [the Chumash] had decided not to return to the missions and expressed the low regard in which they generally held the inhabitants of California. Yet, at the same time, they revered Reverend Father Vicente í for his many virtues. Only he had the necessary power of persuasion to calm the Indians’ fears.” In 1885, as he described the negotiations between the Mexican military and the Chumash, Theodore S. Hittell wrote, “Communications were opened and a conference held; the two missionaries, Father President Vicente í and Father Antonio Ripoll of Santa Bárbara, acted as negotiators; and the result was that the Indians submitted unconditionally; were pardoned, and the fugitive neophytes marched back to their respective missions.” We offer here a translation of a letter which í wrote to the Bishop of Sonora, Bernardo Martínez Ocejo, a few months after these events. The document provides an excellent first-hand account of the conclusion of the revolt. It also offers a close view of the growing fear and anxiety the missionaries were experiencing in the early years of Mexican independence. As a context for the letter, let us briefly summarize the Chumash revolt.

The Caste War of Yucatán, beginning in 1847, was the most successful revolt by a native people in the new world. The Maya almost drove the whites from the peninsula, and although they were in turn forced back into the uninhabited forest of eastern Yucatán, they defended themselves there for many years, maintaining a certain independence to this day. Their successful resistance was based on the refuge zone of dense forest, on the availability of weapons and munitions from adjoining British Honduras, on the appearance of a prophet who created a new religion and on the subsequent appearance of a leader who used that religion to form an independent society. New information has become available in recent years on this important nativistic movement; this article reviews the origins of the Cross, the nature of its prophet, Juan de la Cruz, and the achievements of his successor, Venancio Puc, without whom the new religion would not have survived.

“In Ecuador, the streets are paved with money. All you have to do is go there and pick it up.”

It was this rumor that lured Gabriel Manzur and Juan Adum into trying their luck in such a far-away, unknown land. Little did it matter that this meant a month-and-half journey by sea from Beirut with a stopover in Marseilles, then a train ride across Panama to get from the Caribbean to the Pacific because the Panama Canal did not yet exist. A sailor took pity on them and bought them a pineapple in one of the ports of call, and to Manzur and Adum, this strange fruit tasted like an orange.

In May 1866, almost twenty years after the outbreak of the Maya rebellion of 1847, the juez de paz of Tekax in the Puuc or Sierra region of southern Yucatán recorded the testimony of a Maya peasant by the name of Herculano Balam. Herculano, along with his father and his cousin, had been picked up by local authorities for questioning following a lengthy absence from their home village of Cantamayec in the district of Sotuta. The three prisoners had been detained because they were suspected of being spies sent by the Maya rebels of Chan Santa Cruz to persuade local Maya to join them in their continuing struggle against the creole government of Yucatán. Herculano’s statement does not shed much light on whether or not he and his companions were, in fact, “spies.” Nonetheless, his testimony is extremely important for it contains rare evidence of contact between the Maya rebels of Chan Santa Cruz, the pacíficos del sur, and the peasants of central Yucatán. At the same time, Herculano’s travels provoke interesting questions about the interaction between peasants and guerrillas, and the relationship of individuals to communities, which lead us, in turn, to the nature of peasant politics in the aftermath of the rebellion.