Third Sergeant Wenceslau Martins Leal may have misunderstood his orders for 18 July 1888 but his greater mistake was, in fact, carrying them out too well. With his patrol from the Sixteenth Infantry Battalion, he reported to the police subdelegate of Salvador’s São Pedro parish at 7:00 p.m. and received orders to arrest and take to the fort “all the vagrants that he could find, for the time had come for impressment [recrutamento forçado].” Because the subdelegate did not limit the number of men to be impressed and pointed out the best places to find such “vagabonds”—Dois de Julho Square and the nearby alleys—Leal concluded that he had unlimited authority to put his ten men to work on this “arduous task.” It only took an hour. In a first sweep, they picked up thirty-five men; in a second, seventeen more. Two resisted “tenaciously” and had to be forcibly subdued. By 8:00, the duty officer had developed serious misgivings about the large number of prisoners arriving at the fort. He checked with the subdelegate who denied having given such orders in the first place and released the detainees. An indignant Leal justified his actions on the grounds that he had merely followed orders to the best of his ability.

The 1930s was a period of slow and painful capitalist formation in the Ecuadorian highlands. Marginalized Indigenous peoples who lived in rural areas particularly felt this economic transition as modernizing elites utilized their control of state structures to extend their power to the remote corners of the republic. It was also a time of gains in social legislation, including new laws which dealt with the “Indian problem.” One of the primary examples of this type of legislation was the 1937 Ley de Comunas which extended legal recognition to Indian communities. In certain parts of the country such as in the central highland province of Chimborazo, Indigenous peoples quickly embraced this comuna structure and formed more comunas than any other area of the country (see Map 1). In similar situations in the neighboring countries of Colombia and Peru, Indian villages also used legal frameworks which the government imposed on their communities to petition for ethnic and economic demands.

In 1575 Juan de Ovando, the president of the Council of the Indies, wrote to Mateo Vázquez de Lecca, Philip II's secretary, about the maestrescuelas (headmaster of the cathedral school) of Mexico City who was under consideration for a position as chaplain to the king. The Council of the Indies believed that he lacked the proper limpieza de sangre, that is, that he may have had a tainted lineage that disqualified him for the post. Ovando declared that this was not true. However, despite the fact that the candidate was indeed an “Old Christian” of unblemished stock, he was not to be given the position. Because it was a royal position, wrote Ovando, it should be given only to one whose purity of blood was “notorious.” In 1590 Vázquez de Lecca expressed a similar sentiment when he wrote of a candidate for the royal council that “It is a pity that Agustín Alvarez is not considered to be pure of blood because … I consider him the best of all possible candidates.”

Recent ethnohistorical trends point to a renewed interest in the complex interplay of beliefs and ritual practices that gave rise to multiple expressions of religiosity in different temporal and spatial settings of colonial America. Religion provides a rich thematic matrix for exploring the boundaries of alterité between Amerindian and European actors and figures centrally, as well, in the internal development of different cultural and ethnic identities. Cosmology, understood as those systems of belief that bind individuals to their communities and to the wider universe, informs different peoples' concepts of time and their sense of history. The Maya of Yucatán, for example, integrated both linear and cyclical notions of time into their cosmic order in ways that rendered sensible their rhythms of accommodation and resistance to foreign domination. Moreover, cultural constructions of the past rely heavily on myths that fuse spiritual beliefs with ethnic claims to the land, as observed in the intricate connections between syncretic religion and the survival of ethnic polities in colonial Oaxaca. Ethnic rationalizations of space, it has been argued, underwrote particular aesthetic and cognitive approaches to spatial and temporal “mapping” which, in turn, brought a religious dimension to the notion of territoriality.

For nearly three centuries, the vecinos of colonial Paraguay defended Spanish interests in the Upper Plata. Turbulent as they were, protesting with violent regularity against unpopular governors and official policies, these “hijos del país” have traditionally been portrayed as the bedrock from which the Paraguayan people and identity sprang. Offspring of the Spanish conquerors of the 1500s and their guaraní consorts, the “mancebos de la tierra,” possessed the full rights of Europeans. They guarded their noble status jealously, while dominating the rural society of the province. With the passage of time their numbers increased, providing the manpower for Paraguay's eighteenth century frontier expansion. In the course of Paraguay's colonial development, vecinos bore the brunt of the militia defense of the province, “a su costa y minsión,” in an unrelenting struggle against nomadic Indians and the putative designs of neighboring Lusitanians.

Among other treasures, the tidy, compact municipal archive of Pátzcuaro houses a document of genuine antiquarian interest: the will of Juan José Codallos, recorded on July 9, 1831, just two days before he was executed for his role as the instigator and chief caudillo in Michoacán of the War of the South. Codallos began by stating that he was 41 years old, the son of Felipe Codallos and Andrea de Ponce; that he was in good health (considering that he was condemned to die); that he was married to a woman named Dolores Domínguez, with whom he had four children (the oldest was seven; the youngest, one); and that his worldly goods consisted of his clothes, two horses, a fancy saddle, and a silver-trimmed bridle. [“peno” is bridle? I have been unable to confirm this translation]

It was the perfect murder, really. Illicit passions: two beautiful women-of-the-night feuding over a dashing young rake, a masked ball, casual taunts, thwarted assaults, escalating threats. Heinous crime: the lover's borrowed gun, midnight bordello visit, fighting words, a gun shot, a maid's scream, a young woman's tragic death. Cruel punishment: suicidal remorse (by some accounts), humiliating public trial, twenty lost years (the maximum sentence for a woman) in Mexico City's squalid Belem jail. The Tarasquillo Street murder had it all!

And so it happened that, in an era enamored of all things French, Mexico City had its very own cause célèbre. A scant twelve years earlier, professional francophile and amateur criminologist Rafael Zayas de Enríquez had devoted an entire volume of his Fisiología del crimen to notorious foreign criminals like Alfonse Dupont, the hunchbacked wife-killer, and Charles Guiteau, the deranged assassin of President Garfield. Now, Mexico too could claim a prominent place in the international annals of infamous crime.

The rebellion of 1932 in El Salvador is commonly described in the context of communism and the leadship role of the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS). Relying on previously unavailable archive materials from Russia and El Salvador, the present article demonstrates that the PCS played a limited role in the rebellion. Factional infighting and a strategy that collided with social realities in western El Salvador combined to inhibit PCS influence among western peasants. The evidence suggests that Indian communities were at the forefront of the rebellion, as an extention of their long history of political mobilization.

How religion became a tool for integrating women into the modernization process in mid-nineteenth century Chile is the subject of this essay. The intense liberal assault on tradition in nineteenth century Latin America resulted in cultural warfare that benefited women as the abandonment of the Church in record numbers by men created opportunities for both religious and lay women to assume leadership roles. Perhaps for the only time in its history, the Roman Catholic Church identified religious women as a specie of clergy and actively encouraged their female apostolates to preserve the faith of women and children. In Chile this tension between traditional Hispanic and competing bourgeois values had a female dimension because included among the indicators of modernity was the social role of woman. Traditional Hispanic culture cloistered woman in the convent or home; she was a private person who left the public sphere to her male relatives. Independence, however, introduced the idea of republican motherhood and the notion became more pronounced when travelers to the United States and Europe noted the freedom and social contributions of women thereby giving credence to the new concept. Female apostolates provided women with the bridge to the modern age and provided a “feminine ideal of self-sacrificing women [to balance] Adam Smith's masculine gospel of enlightened self-interest.”

In the study of colonial history the ability to discover the voice of the people is often hindered by the fact that most extant sources are archival, written by those who held power. In some instances mediated sources have survived which can be read as colonialist text, or can be read subversively, from the perspective of the colonized. Such is the case surrounding the events which began in May 1865 when a traditional Yucatecan religious festival was held in the Maya village of Xaibe, near Corozal in the Northern District of Belize (known at that time as British Honduras). The newly appointed British magistrate laid criminal charges against those celebrants who had engaged in the alleged cruelties of the vaquería or bullfights held in conjunction with the fiesta. In June, nearly four hundred residents of the District, “Persons of mixed Spanish and Indian descent and Indians,” petitioned the House of Assembly demanding redress from a magistrate who had, “systematically harassed and oppressed the people … prevented them from disposing of their commodities before the hours of service on Sunday mornings … and has endeavoured and partly succeeded in putting a stop to the festivities of one of their most sacred and cherished festivals.” The petition was rejected and colonial authorities challenged its authenticity, the integrity and character of the signatories, and the “alien” culture it represented.

On 14 July 1786, representatives of the Kings of Spain and England signed the Convention of London by which His Britannick Majesty undertook to evacuate all British subjects from the northern coast of Central America, thereby putting an end to over a half-century of conflict in that remote corner of the Caribbean.

Although Article I of the Convention referred to the territory to be evacuated simply as “the Country of the MOSQUITOS …,” the intention was to secure the removal of a string of small British settlements extending from sixty miles east of Trujillo in what is now Honduras along some 550 miles of coast to Cape Gracias a Dios, and then south and east to Nicaragua’s San Juan River. The area was called then, as now, the Mosquito Shore, and had been a British sphere of influence since the 1730s.

The changing status of the Indian population in postindependence Spanish America has been a major theme of historical research and writing, with primary emphasis for obvious reasons on the cases of Mexico and Peru. Bolivia and Guatemala have received a secondary share of attention, but other countries have been relatively ignored. Certainly the case of Argentina is seldom cited save in connection with the ebb and flow of the frontier between Creole settlements and semiautonomous native peoples of the Pampa and Patagonia. The latter story, of course, has more in common with that of westward expansion in the United States than with the situation of settled Indian communities in Mexico or the central Andes. But there are some exceptions even in Argentina, involving native communities more akin to those of Cuzco or Chiapas than to the original inhabitants of Kansas and Wyoming or of the Argentine Pampa.

Political theory, consensus and participation have often had deeply religious motivations and inspirations driving them. And however peculiar to theology the concept of corpus mysticum may seem to us today, it has often been used in association with politics. In the late Middle Ages, the notions of political office as against personalism, continuity of sovereignty in spite of the unexpected and politically perilous deaths of monarchs, unity over factionalism, the relationship between authority and the law, and that between authority and the people, were persuasively addressed through this religious metaphor.

How does one write the history of psychoanalysis? Although the question seems too broad it is still pertinent. In countries like Argentina, where psychoanalysis has become a Weltanschauung, traditional approaches from the history of science, the history of ideas or institutional history are insufficient to give a full account of its cultural implantation. There is a level of cultural reception that is unaccounted for by those approximations but which is, nevertheless, a constitutive component of the history of the discipline. Although some authors have identified a common “latin pattern” in the reception of psychoanalysis, national differences sometimes overcome similarities. Whereas psychoanalysis, for instance, started to be discussed in Argentine medical circles as early as in the 1910s, it did not have the influence in avant-garde literature that it had in France or Brazil. However, since the early 1920s psychoanalysis had an impact in popular magazines and publications in Buenos Aires. Only a multilayered analysis can provide a good understanding of the different patterns of reception of psychoanalysis. Elsewhere I dealt with the impact of psychoanalysis in the medical profession and in the teaching of psychology in Buenos Aires. My goal here is to analyze another area of diffusion of psychoanalysis: popular periodical publications. Although the massive diffusion of psychoanalysis in Argentina began in the 1960s, since the late 1920s popular magazines and publications introduced discussions on psychoanalysis and its creator, thus defining a space through which the discipline inserted itself in the culture of the city of Buenos Aires. It seems clear that in Argentina publications aimed at an expanded lower-middle class public, outside and beyond the restricted circle of the “republic of letters,” constituted an earlier path of reception for psychoanalysis than what is usually considered high literature.

On 18 May 1911, the indigenous Mixtec peasants of Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca, rose up against the local cacique and ranchers who had dispossessed them of their ancient communal lands. Thus began not only the lone agrarian rebellion in the state of Oaxaca but also the only attempt to revive a pre-Columbian indigenous empire during the Mexican Revolution. The study of this remarkable episode situates Oaxaca, a state previously thought to be peripheral to this major social upheaval, within the main currents of revolutionary activity.

As in the case of other revolutionary movements, the arrival of Maderista revolutionaries from a neighboring state, in this case Guerrero, triggered the peasant mobilization in Pinotepa Nacional, unleashing social tensions in the area. Although an overwhelmingly rural state in 1910, the Revolution in Oaxaca has generally been characterized by the absence of agrarian protest. Recent studies have found the precursor and Maderista movements in Oaxaca to be predominantly middle class, either urban or rural, seeking social mobility, wider political participation, and greater local autonomy. Nevertheless, the study of the events of May 1911 on the Oaxacan coast reveals a struggle that pitted an agrarian, indigenous movement against a middle class, rancher-style revolution.

Few topics if any have perplexed Peruvian thinkers in the twentieth century as much as why the indigenous population has not been more fully incorporated into the nation. While the question has been posed in a number of ways from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, changing greatly over the decades, all agree that the indigenous population has not, as of the late twentieth century, been granted the rights and dignity implied by the term citizenship. Although the question has been addressed in literature, the social sciences and other academic disciplines, the answer is ultimately historical. Most analysts cast an eye on the colonial period and pay particular attention to the War of Independence. For the indigenous population, continuity more than change marked the Andean republics' rupture with Spain. Well into the republican era, “Indians” continued to pay tribute, euphemistically renamed the Contribution, and thus continued to constitute a unique fiscal and political category.

It is generally agreed that a couple of years after Cabral's discovery of Brazil in 1500, the Portuguese Crown leased out the land to a trading consortium for economic exploitation and further exploration. But whether the Crown granted one or two leases, and when the second lease [if there was one] began and for how long it ran, have long been matters of confusion and disagreement.

Evidence of the first lease is clear. A letter of Rondonelli written from Seville and dated the third of October, 1502, speaks of a three-year lease on the following terms: the consortium would have to send six ships to Brazil and “discover” 300 leagues of coast each year and would be obligated to build a fort/factory there. During the first year the lease-holders would pay the Crown nothing, in the second year they would pay a sixth [of the profits?], and in the third year a fourth.

The famous sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript Historia by Fray Diego Durán is an extensive account of Aztec/Mexica history and rites, and a description of the Aztec calendar. Although the exact date of completion is unknown, there are two internal dates in the text (1579 and 1581) which have been used to date the original document. Durán's account was recopied by Mexican scholar José F. Ramírez in 1854 and a two volume printed version with the title Historia de Nueva España y Yslas de Tierra Firme was published in Mexico between 1867 and 1880. Recently a manuscript copy of Durán's text, transcribed in the 1840s, was rediscovered at the Library of Congress containing the following title and description: