The dramatic changes in the Latin American church since the Second Vatican Council have taken many observers by surprise. In search of an explanation for these changes, much recent scholarship has devoted itself to analyzing the changing political climate, the influx of foreign religious personnel, the creation of radical priests' groups, the impact of Vatican II itself and the episcopal assemblies of Medellín and Puebla and, of course, the varying currents of liberation theology. In contrast, the tendency has been to overlook pre-Vatican II history. The pre-conciliar Peruvian church in particular has been characterized as tradition-bound, obscurantist or subservient to the upper classes. One author writing in the early seventies stated:

On August 23, 1931, the galleries of Lima's bull ring, the Plaza de Acho, rang with deafening applause. The object of this public tribute was Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a young provincial politician who had just finished exhorting his fellow countrymen to join him in a movement for the regeneration of Peru. This day truly belonged to Haya, for it symbolized his return to the lists of Peruvian politics and the resumption of an active national political career that would be stilled only by death almost half a century later. This moment of triumph in the Plaza de Acho must have been especially sweet, for a little over eight years before, on May 23, 1923, Haya, as a young student leader, had organized a protest against the government of President Augusto B. Leguía. Military forces, however, dispersed the demonstrators killing several and wounding many in the process. Haya's reward for this manifestation of anti-establishment behavior was arrest, imprisonment, and ultimately, in October of 1923, deportation. Thus Haya's triumph of 1931 served, at least in part, as a vindication for the events of 1923 and the subsequent years of exile.

Participation of women in the Cristero rebellion, the Catholic uprising against the anti-clerical revolutionary government of Mexico, has largely been ignored by historians. A fresh reading of the documents, and more important, conversations with the principal women in the movement, reveal that the traditional role of women in the church gave way to changed behavior in the 1920s. Not only were Catholic women of a traditionally oriented society capable of assuming leadership in a violent enterprise, but they were equally capable of falling back into their conservative patterns once the crisis had ended. Nevertheless, the vital role women played in the church-state conflict prepared them for the emerging role of women in the twentieth century.

The tasaciones de tributos compiled between 1548 and 1554 under the supervision of Alonso López de Cerrato have long been recognized as the most important tribute documentation extant for mid sixteenth-century Central America, being of particular interest to all those whose inquiries have focussed on various aspects of the economy and demography of regions stretching from Chiapas and Yucatán in the north to Honduras and Nicaragua in the south. For the purpose of this paper, we wish to concentrate simply on one spatial component of the Libro de tasaciones forming part of the celebrated legajo 128, a rich set of documents housed in the Archivo General de Indias in the section of the archive classified as the Audiencia de Guatemala: that spatial component referred to by contemporary Spanish officials as “los términos y jurisdictión de la ciudad de Santiago de Guatemala,” that is, the territory which in early colonial times fell under the administrative authority of the city of Santiago.

The rediscovery of classical civilization and the rapid spread of Humanism through the writings of Erasmus, ushered in the Renaissance. The reawakening turned people outward from the involuted, mystically oriented outlook of the Medieval era. It was a time of rapid change, the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The new philosophic outlook was manifested in the arts, and the Gutenberg press and copperplate engraving disseminated new ideas along with classicism. The discovery and publication in 1511 of the Roman builder, Vitruvius, was the catalyst to the renewed interest in Greco-Roman forms. These classical forms, however, were for the most part, an external expression of classic Roman “orders” (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite) imposed upon structural innovations formulated in the Gothic period. Since highly skilled craftsmen such as Cellini, Ghiberti, Donatello and Brunelleschi worked as painters and sculptors as well as architects, buildings tended to be treated as surfaces and backdrops for embellishment.

As part of its religious, social and political mission, personnel of Mexico's Holy Office of the Inquisition were organized into a brotherhood, the Cofradía de San Pedro Martir, patron saint of the Inquisition. Although the Inquisition had functioned in New Spain from 1522, the brotherhood was not formally established until 1656. San Pedro Martir differed in many respects from other urban and rural confraternities in the viceroyalty. An outgrowth of Cruce-signati in the medieval inquisition, the Cofradía founded by Pope Innocent IV in 1252 after the murder of Inquisitor Peter Martir of Verona, came to Spain in the late fifteenth century. In the Iberian peninsula “Colegios de Familiares” formed and later developed into Cofradías whose membership was drawn from the Familiatura, a body of non-salaried Inquisition police known as Familiares.

Although the Albuquerque Coelhos, lords-proprietor of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Pernambuco, have been carefully studied, there has been relatively little archival research on other principal families in that captaincy during this period. This paper presents an account of the Pais Barreto family, especially of the father, João Pais, and to a lesser extent, his son, João Pais Barreto, who were respective heads of the family from its founding in Pernambuco until about 1657. Because the Pais Barretos were not closely tied to the family of the lords-proprietor and at the same time were, by most reports, the richest senhores de engenhos in Brazil, their concerns and activities may be taken as archetypical of the affairs and aspirations of a rising colonial planter elite.

Abraham Lowenthal in characterizing the Peruvian military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado cautioned that the regime was not a “typical caudillo” venture but rather an essentially “institutional” effort. His caveat is certainly justified when one considers that Peru was dominated until recent decades by such modern era military chieftains as Luis M. Sánchez Cerro, Oscar R. Benavides, and Manuel A. Odría. Yet when General Odría seized control of Peru on October 27, 1948, the Peruvian army was striving desperately for increased professionalism. In order to retain the army's support, the caudillo was thus compelled to enact institutional reforms that made the officer class more conscious of its modernizing mission and, ironically, far less tolerant of Odría's personalism. This study will analyze the military policies of the Odría regime in order to explain the changing outlook of the Peruvian armed forces during the caudillo's eight year rule.

Padre António Vieira commenting on the colonial government of Brazil to the Crown in 1654.

On the Tagus River approximately eight kilometers from the center of Lisbon stands a monument to Portuguese overseas exploration and expansion—O Padrão dos descobrimentos — erected in 1960 on the 500th anniversary of Prince Henry the Navigator. Facing the Tagus is Prince Henry. Flanking him on each side and representing the reasons behind the success of Portuguese exploration and expansion are several symbolic figures. King Manuel, during whose reign many of the discoveries were made, illustrates the complete support of the Crown that many of the expeditions enjoyed. A priest carrying a cross depicts the religious motives behind expansion—the spreading of Christianity to the heathen. There are also a caulker and a carpenter both important in the production of new sailing vessels. A pilot with an astrolabe portrays the significance of the scientific aspects of overseas exploration. Luís de Camões holds his Os Lusiadas, the epic poem that depicted the triumphs of Portuguese expansion. There are even widows in tears to remind viewers of the great loss of men that Portugal suffered during her conquests. Another important figure depicted on the monument is the conquistador with drawn sword, the symbol of the military—“the backbone of the empire.”

Conventional wisdom holds that two sharp breaks occurred historically in Mexican church-state relations: the first during the Reforma (1857-1861), and the second during the Revolution (1910-1920). These breaks reflected growing estrangement and hostility between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, culminating finally, with the Constitution of 1917, in the most anti-clerical and even anti-religious legislation ever enacted in the hemisphere. This paper has no quarrel with the above interpretation as far as it goes. What I will argue here is that, despite these very real changes, certain basic continuities have persisted in the conceptualization of the relationship between Church and State. Moreover, a number of specific quarrels and modes of government response have roots that extend well into the colonial period. Anti-monasticism has some precedent in the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, and the nationalization of Church property in 1859 and again in 1917, in the royal Consolidation of 1804.

When the cottage textile industries in 18th century England were moved to urban factories, women and children also left their private existence and moved into public work in the mills. The situation was similar in Mexico and Colombia when their factories started to produce cloth, but after an urban labor force developed, men replaced women in the plants. In developed nations, women still dominate the textile work force, especially when products compete on a world market. Few studies have attempted to analyze the difference historically as the labor force divides into sexual roles, either in advanced or underdeveloped nations. Although Ester Boserup's study of third world women indicates that this transition occurs (in one direction) when mechanization advances to replace manual or simple tasks, lately her conclusions have been questioned as technologically advanced industries such as computers have hired women rather than men to assemble instruments. The textile industry has often been viewed as a force in the beginning of industrialization and can illustrate how women are used as a transition element as they first move from private home activities into public roles in the factories and then as plants become more capitalintensive, they are again returned to their private space. At first their willingness to accept low wages in the mills left the men performing agricultural labor. As promotion of industrialization brought an urban labor force into existence, a variety of social and economic pressures removed them from participation in production of goods. Their reserve labor remained available for other functions as the need arose.

In the Treaty of Ancón ending the War of the Pacific, the government of Peru signed away two provinces on the south coast and much of the country's future guano income. The settlement stripped Peru's treasury bare and exposed the narrow, extractive and agricultural base of the country's economy. A few years later the same Peruvian government, led by the hero of the Chilean war General Andrés Cáceres, signed the Grace Contract whereby the foreign debt was canceled and railway development for the next 66 years fell under the control of the foreign-owned W. R. Grace corporation. The economic and political consequences of these decisions were deeply felt in Peruvian society. Economically, they placed renewed emphasis on export agriculture and mining at the expense of primary industrial development and made stronger demands upon the rural labor force. Led by these sectors, modernization of the economy proceeded in a regional form, with accelerated growth in the coastal valleys and a few highland areas and stagnation elsewhere. A shift of population from the highlands to the coast accompanied this process.

Historians are familiar with the short-lived alliance between General Antonio López de Santa Anna and the Mexican Federalists that was formed in July 1832 and lasted until April 1834. After achieving its goal of overthrowing the centralist regime of Anastasio Bustamante, the alliance led to the exercise of power by Santa Anna's Federalist vice president, Valentín Gómez Farías, in April 1833, and it disintegrated a year later when Santa Anna returned to Mexico City from his hacienda to seize personal control of the government. By April 1834 the army officer corps and the ecclesiastical hierarchy had become incensed at the Federalists' anti-military and anti-clerical reform program and were demanding the ouster of Gómez Farías and the dissolution of Congress. Members of the proprietary class of central Mexico and a considerable portion of the masses, who had been incited by the clergy, also joined the clamor against the Federalists. One of the factors that contributed to Santa Anna's extraordinary success as a politician was his shrewd sense of timing. In this case, it is well known that he turned against the Federalists when opposition to them from important sectors of the population became widespread and heated. What is not so well known is that, in the absence of such broad opposition, he chose to suppress an anti-Federalist revolt of senior army officers that broke out in May 1833. He did so even though the rebels offered to make him “supreme chief of the nation” if he adhered to their movement. Just as an understanding of Santa Anna's decision to break openly with the Federalists in April 1834 provides important insights regarding his political methods and goals, an assessment of his decision not to do so eleven months earlier in May 1833 can shed additional light on the tactics and objectives that helped to make him the most formidable political figure in Mexico during the post-independence period. Accordingly, this article will analyze the reasons for Santa Anna's decision not to support the anti-Federalist revolt of 1833.

A number of first-rate scholarly studies in recent years have considerably enhanced our understanding of the troubled, sometimes tumultuous, relationship between the state and the Mexican Church in the century stretching from the reign of Charles III (1759-1788) to the era of Benito Juárez (1855-1876). Nancy Farriss, for example, has detailed the Bourbon drive to exert royal authority over the conduct and activities of the powerful and influential clergy and the latter's claim to exemption from that authority. Farriss, Karl Schmitt, and James Breedlove have demonstrated the connection between the state ecclesiastical reforms and the clergy's decisive role in the Mexican independence movement culminating in 1821. Ann Staples has ably ventured an overview of Church-state relations in the crucial but long-neglected early independence period of the first federal republic, 1824-1835. Michael Costeloe, Asunción Lavrin, Jan Bazant, Brian Hamnet, and Robert Knowlton have examined some of the Church's key economic activities and the impact of state reforms upon each. State policy toward the Church in the northern Mexican borderlands has received the attention of C. Alan Hutchinson, Manuel P. Servín, David J. Weber, John L. Kessell, Lawrence and Lucia Kinnaird, and others. Together with earlier works, these studies have documented a drama which began with the absolutistinspired reforms by the Crown, which regarded ecclesiastical privilege and power as incompatible with its own interests, and ended violently with the political and economic power of the Church and its clergy severely reduced and subordinated to the secular state.

Simón Bolívar has sometimes been called “The George Washington of South America.” Certainly his achievements are so well known as to deserve the apt appelation “El Libertador” by which he is known by many of the neighbors of the United States of America south of the border.

One of the most important propaganda influences in Bolívar's success was the achievement of a good press in nations sympathetic to his cause. He was quite reticent to see the United States in a dominant role in the future regarding the areas he was trying to free from Spanish rule. Because he believed that Britain was “ruler of the world” during this period of world history, he was particularly interested that favorable images of him should appear in the British press.

Scholarly, as well as popular, literature focused on the interaction of the Catholic Church and the Mexican Revolution of 1910 has frequently advanced the contention that the Revolution had “Protestant overtones.” The vagueness of the accusation and its ambiguous implications have thus far eluded clarification. Some of these accusations, particularly those made in the 1920's when memories of the Cristero Revolt were fresh, represent the opinions of the Revolution's detractors and thus their comments have often been dismissed as mudslinging. However, writers of the 1960's in more dispassionate terms have also alluded to this theme. Jean Meyer, for example, includes as a part of his explanation of Cristero dissatisfaction the incompatible juxtaposition of the traditional Roman Catholic Cristero and the Protestant attitude adopted by the revolutionaries. Few investigations have explored the extent or role of non-Catholic religious institutions in Mexico during the revolutionary era. Despite these accusations, systematic research on Protestants has been overshadowed by investigations of Catholics to such an extent that the accuracy and seriousness of accusations of “Protestant overtones” cannot be evaluated.

The Island of Grenada has had an interesting and turbulent history. Its early years were largely under the French, but it was captured by the English in 1763. It was taken back by the French in 1779 but then permanently ceded to England by the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. The census of 1771 showed a population of 1,661 whites, 415 free colored, and 26,211 slaves—largely associated with the raising of sugar. In 1793 the French and the British were again at war, and in 1795 the French republic made a strong attempt to regain Grenada by capitalizing on the strong antagonism which had built up between the French and British settlers on the island. Although the French forces under Victor Hughes could not actually capture the island, the local French planters, slaves and colored planters revolted against the British under the leadership of a colored planter, Julian Fedon, who has since become something of a folk hero in Grenada. In March 1795, Fedon and his followers invaded the old town of Grenville, killing a number of British and capturing others. The band of revolutionaries then retreated to Fedon's plantation where they subsequently entrenched themselves on a nearby mountain with their prisoners. They were dislodged by the British in June 1796 with considerable loss of life. Fedon escaped, but many of his followers lost both their lives and had their property confiscated.