On February 16, 1696, Doña Inés Velarde, the widow of Capitán Don Miguel de Vera, a former notary of the Mexico City Cabildo, redacted her will before Juan de Condarco y Caceres, a notary public in New Spain’s capital. Despite the typhus (matlazáhuatl) epidemic that ravaged the city in that year, Doña Inés was in good health. She had carefully prepared for the pious act of will writing, issuing over thirty meticulously designed religious directives in her last will and testament. Two directives in particular reveal much about colonial Mexican religious sensibilities. In the thirty-seventh clause of her twenty-page will, she founded a perpetual act of charity with the capital of 3,000 pesos.

After Spain’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1757-1763), when the British had occupied Havana and Manila, a series of territorial, commercial, and tax reforms brought significant change to the viceroyalty of Peru. Their economic effects have been matters for debate ever since. Some historians have emphasized their positive effects. Following promulgation of the Reglamento de comercio libre of 1778, the volume and value of European manufactures exported to the Pacific coast of Spanish South America increased. Lima and its port city, Callao, remained important as commercial centers of Spanish South America. But others suggest that the viceregal capital—home to a powerful mercantile elite, the magnates of the consulado (merchant guild) of Lima—suffered a decline in its economic fortunes, as did the entire viceroyalty. Support for this point of view was widespread in late colonial Peru. In spite of the evidence for growth, a rising chorus of complaint bemoaned the increasing poverty of the viceroyalty in general and Lima in particular. How can we account for this discrepancy?

On a spring morning in 1919, worshipers leaving Mexico City’s cathedral were horrified to discover the body of a little girl who had fallen to her death from the Hotel del Seminario. Yet as far as the Excélsior newspaper was concerned, the tragedy that had ended that morning had actually begun with her conception. Her mother was a prostitute who lived in the hotel and busybody guests reported that the mother neglected her child. On the day of Domitila’s death, her mother was not at the hotel, as she had been admitted to the Morelos Hospital, which specialized in syphilitic prostitutes. The hotel’s guests did their best to care for Domitila, giving her food, affection, and chiding when she played on balconies: one moment of inattention allowed the tragedy. The article concluded that perhaps it was for Domitila’s own good that she had died falling off a balcony. Readers did not need to be told why Domitila was better off dead, because the case encapsulated common anxieties about childhood and parenting in Porfirian and revolutionary Mexico.

The relations between the Chilean Movimiento Nacional Socialista (MNS, or Nacismo) and the German-Chilean community, i.e., Chilean citizens of German origin, as well as the attitude of the former towards the Third Reich are still largely unexplored topics. Despite the growing number of studies on the nacista movement since the late 1980s, which rounded off and partly corrected earlier studies, and thereby substantially increased our knowledge of its ideology, political activities and leader, Jorge González von Marées, they have received little scholarly attention so far. In general, and this reservation applies to earlier as well as more recent publications, authors only briefly refer to the similarities between Chilean Nacismo and German Nazism, and either note the important role German-Chileans played in the organization or state that they were insignificant for its overall development. The only partial exceptions to this rule are Olaf Gaudig and Peter Veit’s as well as Jiirgen Muller’s works, which provide some information about these issues, and especially the relationships between the Chilean fascists and the German-Chileans.

The Lipan Apache mission on the banks of the San Sabá River was located on the northern boundary of Coahuila, New Spain, in the center of today’s state of Texas. On March 16, 1758, Norteño tribes, allied with the Comanches, attacked and destroyed the mission, demonstrating their hostility to what they saw as the Spaniards’ unjust support of their traditional enemy, the Apaches. The destruction of the mission contributed to the failure of the most far-reaching attempt by the Spanish Crown and the Franciscan Order to settle the Apaches in Texas. The Spanish believed that the mission was the only means to ensure a peaceful settlement of central Texas native tribes and simultaneously to check French illegal arms trade in the northern borderlands. Once the Lipan Apaches were pacified, the reasoning went, definitive settlement of all the Norteño tribes and their allies would follow. These settlements of pacified tribes would also provide the much-desired direct link between Spanish settlements in Texas and those of New Mexico.