Much has been written about the spread of Old World crops and livestock in the Americas. However, very little is known, except in very general terms, about the availability of different foods, diets and nutrition, particularly among the common people, in different regions of Spanish America in the early colonial period. This derives in part from the shortage of evidence, but it also reflects the difficulties of researching these complex issues, where environmental conditions, access to land and labor, income distribution, regulation of food supplies and prices, as well as food traditions, all interact.

Twenty-five years ago, English-language scholarship on Latin American film was almost entirely identified with the New Latin American Cinema movement. The emerging “new” cinemas of Brazil, Cuba and Argentina, linked to evolving social movements and to the renewal of the pan-Latin American dreams of Martí and Bolivar (Nuestra América, “Our America”), had captured the imagination of U.S.-based and other scholars. As I argued in a 1991 review essay, unlike other national cinemas which were introduced into English-language scholarship via translations of “master histories” written by nationals (for example, the German cinema, which was studied through the histories of Sigfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner), the various Latin American cinemas were first introduced in English-language scholarship in the 1970s ahistorically, through contemporary films and events reported in non-analytical articles that provided above all, political readings and assessments. Overall, this first stage of Latin American film scholarship was plagued by problems that continued to haunt researchers through the 1980s: difficult access to films, scarce historical data, and unverifiable secondary sources. Above all, this work displayed a blissful disregard of the critical and historical work written in Spanish and Portuguese and published in Latin America.

The public euphoria for pilot Alejandro Velasco Astete’s flight from the capital city of Lima to his hometown of Cuzco, Peru, in 1925 was surpassed only by the anguish over his death in a crash a month later. Residents in the former Inca capital shared the almost universal fascination with flight that two years later transformed Charles Lindbergh into an international celebrity after his electrifying Atlantic crossing. Aviation promised integration for a Peruvian city that resided nearly two miles up in the thin Andean air and lay several days’ journey by train and steamship from Lima. Flight in the indigenous region carried symbolic capital for intellectuals and public officials who bristled at their perceived racial inferiority and resented political, economic, and cultural marginalization by Lima. So when a Quechua-speaking pilot of Inca nobility and Spanish ancestry stepped down from an Italian-made biplane onto Cuzco soil in 1925, elite observers hailed him as nothing less than an Andean superman. Newspapers breathlessly described the authentic sierran blood, vitality, masculinity, and skill of the first Peruvian to make the treacherous if not suicidal flight across the Andes. Elites were convinced this “modern” sierran man and his mastery of the science and technology of aviation were undeniable proof Cuzco belonged at the vanguard of the ethnically and geographically divided Peruvian nation.

Inspired in part by Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic paradigm, the past several years have witnessed a reinvigoration of Black Studies, with careful attention being paid to the approaches and methods of writing black history. The terms “African Diaspora” and “Black Diaspora” have become almost commonplace in scholarly discourse, emerging out of relative obscurity from their roots in the politically inspired Pan-Africanist and Civil Rights discourses of the 1950s and ’60s. Critiques of the Black Atlantic model and its overly narrow concentration on the English-speaking world have fueled new and important discussions that have touched fields and subfields well beyond the traditional boundaries of Black Studies.

In her study of early cinema and modernity in Latin America, Ana López wrote: “Latin American modernity has been a global, intertextual experience, addressing impulses and models from abroad, in which every nation and region created, and creates, its own ways of playing with and at modernity.” Early Uruguayan cinema exemplifies this interaction of global phenomena with local realities and thus provides an instructive window onto some of the ways Latin Americans were “playing with and at modernity” in the early twentieth century. During that era, Uruguay emerged as Latin America’s first welfare state and a model of progressive reform in the region. The complexities of that transition are reflected in so-called cine de beneficencia (beneficent cinema), film made by and for social assistance organizations for fundraising and propaganda purposes. Film historian José Carlos Álvarez identifies beneficent cinema as “something that we think was purely Uruguayan, and specific to this era.”

Scholars who study Puerto Rico's past have struggled with the question of how to define the island’s national identity. Is the essence of Puerto Rican identity rooted in Spain, does it have its origins in Africa, in the legacy of the native Tainos, or is it a product of two or all three of these? This polemical question has yet to be resolved and remains a subject of much debate. The island's black past is often overlooked, and what has been written tends to focus on the enslaved labor force and its ties to the nineteenth-century plantation economy. Few works are specifically devoted to the study of the island's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Afro-Puerto Rican population. Recent scholarship has begun to address this oversight. For example, the efforts of fugitive slaves and free black West Indian migrants making their way to Puerto Rico have been well documented. Yet, little is known about the number or identity of these runaways. How many slaves made their way to freedom in Puerto Rico, who were they, and where did they come from? Perhaps more importantly, what about their new lives on the island? How were they able to create a sense of belonging, both as individuals and as part of a community within the island's existing population and society? What follows strives to answer these questions by taking a closer look first at the number and identity of these fugitives, and second at how new arrivals were assimilated into their new surroundings through marriage and family formation while their integration was facilitated by participation in the local economy. Through their religious and civic activity Afro-Puerto Ricans were able to create a niche for themselves in San Juan and eventually a community of their own in Cangrejos. In doing so, they helped shape the island's national identity.

In 1641, the rural guard of colonial Trujillio on the northern Peruvian coast, accompanied by “many Indians,” attacked a cimarrón (fugitive slave) encampment led by two congos, Gabriel and Domingo. Indigenous men wished to end the fugitives’ raids on their fields and families. Towards this end, they guided the Spanish lieutenant magistrate and his company to the cimarrón settlement hidden in the hills above the Santa Catalina valley. Indigenous leaders and commoners of the Mansiche reducción—or colonial indigenous village—who maintained lands in the Santa Catalina valley, testified that “negros cimarrones” (fugitive “blacks”) had been assaulting local inhabitants and stealing from valley since 1633. Yet, Mansiche reducción had not registered a previous complaint indicating that fugitive slaves and indigenous people in Santa Catalina had not to this point been antagonistic.

This article analyzes an individual, a context, and an experience. The individual is the photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, widely recognized and occasionally criticized as one of the great modernist photographers of the twentieth century. The context is Mexico from 1932-34. In these years, Strand worked in Mexico amidst state-led efforts to construct a “new” national culture following the social upheavals and military conflicts associated with the Mexican Revolution. The experience was Strand’s effort to create a visual record of Mexico documenting what he thought of as its unique character, while furthering its “revolutionary” transformation through photography and filmmaking.

In June of 1930, Dr. J. M. Puig Casauranc, who held the post of Jefe del Departamento del Distrito Federal (a post then somewhat akin to mayor) received a lengthy letter from the Confederación de Sociedades Mexicanas in Los Angeles, California. The letter asked Dr. Puig if a Committee for the Supervision of Film could be constituted in Los Angeles, a committee to be made up of members of the Confederation and the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles. In their letter members of the Confederation’s steering committee displayed a clear understanding of the history of Mexico’s struggle to exert some control over the content of Hollywood films.

African diasporic communities throughout the Americas played important roles in creating colonial societies, providing both a population base and ways to organize everyday life as evidenced in subsistence activities, housing, language, religion, and artistic expression. In the Andes, Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists provide an example of black participation in forging a place in colonial society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They earned both respect and fear, status and stigma, for their ability to solve a variety of problems and illnesses believed to be caused by the malice of other people or by supernatural forces. These ritualists also show how people of African descent helped invent widely-employed strategies to bridge cultures and link heterogeneous colonial populations in Andean cities.

In 1519 Enrique, one of the few remaining caciques, or indigenous chiefs, of the island of Hispaniola, removed himself and some of his people from the reach of Spanish authority. For nearly a decade and a half he and his followers lived in the remote and barely accessible south-central mountains of his native island, occasionally raiding Spanish settlements for arms and tools and clashing with militia units but for the most part avoiding contact with Spanish society. Enrique eluded the numerous patrols that were sent to eradicate what became a stubbornly persistent locus of defiance of Spanish authority that attracted other discontented residents of the island, including both African and indigenous slaves and servants as well as small numbers of nominally ‘free’ Indians.

The Mendoza wine industry, currently the largest in Latin America and fifth largest in the world, is the inheritor of an almost 500 year-long process of evolution in the cultivation of grape vines and the development of wine making. The most studied period of its history corresponds to the construction of British railroads and the tremendous wave of Italian, Spanish and French immigration that began in the 1880s. Prior to the modern period, however, there was a traditional period in the Argentine wine industry, characterized by artisan production and ecclesiastical control. In the mid-nineteenth century, members of the clergy and religious groups controlled nearly 80 percent of the wine industry in Mendoza. This article examines the origins of viticulture in Mendoza, with particular reference to the influence of the clergy, and the subsequent secularization of the wine industry. At the same time, it discusses the role that the Godoy family played in the rise and consolidation of the wine making and its separation from ecclesiastical control.

Land for the landless, food for the hungry, literacy for the uneducated—not through charitable works, but by forcing the state to take seriously its responsibilities to its poorest citizens. This was integral to the theology of liberation as it was practiced by bishops, priests, and nuns in Brazil beginning shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Important sectors of the Brazilian Catholic Church were “opting for the poor” at a time when economic development, modernization, and democracy were not considered appropriate or meaningful partners in the repressive environment characterized by the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).

Inscribed on the outside walls of Quito’s Cathedral is a list of the men who invaded, occupied, and ultimately renamed the Inka city of Quito for Saint Francis on August 28, 1534. Listed among these individuals are two blacks—Juan (de color negro), and Anton (negro). Juan and Anton represented the hundreds (and perhaps thousands by this date) of blacks, explorers, conquistadors, slaves, and squires who had come to the Americas during the age of conquest (1492-1550). Although the biographical records for Juan and Anton are sketchy, sources indicate that they were freemen.

‘During World War II, the United States created a political, economic, I land cultural policy aimed at improving hemispheric relations between the U.S. and Latin America. Dubbed the “Good Neighbor Policy,” its objectives were twofold: 1) to insure that nations in Latin America were joined in the Allied war effort and were not associated with the Axis or Communist sympathizers, and 2) to allow the U.S. access to Latin America as a source of raw materials and a market for goods, including films. Because Argentina did not side with the Allies, instead preferring neutrality, it was castigated by an economic boycott. Beginning in 1941, the U.S. sold small rations of raw film stock to Argentina, and over time, refused to sell it all together. The film industry in Argentina, at the time considered the most profitable and advanced in Latin America, began to lose its hold on the Spanish-language market.

Two years in a row (1885 and 1886) Señora Teresa, a native and resident of Oaxaca de Juárez, pleaded with the court to prosecute her daughter's suitors. The first time, after seeing Primitiva chatting with Juan in the street and finding his love letter in her home, she grew apprehensive. She hurried to court when Primitiva disappeared that evening to accuse the young man of seducing and abducting her 13 year old daughter. Police officers apprehended the young couple and the judge listened to their testimonies. Primitiva swore that she was 16 years old and had run away to her aunt's home because she feared her mother's wrath at discovering the love missive. She further stated that she had in fact broken up with Juan some weeks earlier and that they had never engaged in sexual relations. The following year, Primitiva eloped with a different suitor and her mother surfaced in the historical record once more. This time she indicated that she saw her daughter conversing with Francisco in her home's doorway and after he spirited her naïve daughter away, he returned the next day to taunt her husband, boasting that “he took Primitiva because he was a man.” In both cases, Primitiva's mother demanded swift justice. She asked the judge to prosecute her daughter's seducers to the full extent of the law, arguing that Primitiva lacked the maturity to choose her mate wisely. Assenting to the indignant mother's wishes, judges ordered police officers to pick up both young men to face charges of rapto (abduction by seduction) in municipal court. In the first case, the judge dropped the suit for lack of merit. In the latter case, the judge sided with Señora Teresa's minor daughter, in effect emancipating her from parental authority by allowing her to begin family life with her second suitor, Francisco.

In 1586, the royal audiencia of Quito received a letter from a fugitive African slave written with the aid of an itinerant Spanish missionary. The judges were dismayed by what they read. The African, Alonso de Illescas, head of one of the maroon communities that had been flourishing on the coast of Esmeraldas since 1553, petitioned the court with a proposition and a veiled threat. The proposal implored the judges to honor an earlier promise giving Illescas political authority over Esmeraldas, the coastal province comprising the maroons’ homeland, and to desist in their plans to establish Spanish settlers in the region.

As a historian of Mexican history who studies Middle Eastern immigrants to Mexico in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have approached the topic of ethnic film with both trepidation and great interest. Attuned to the historiography of what and who is Mexican, I view the films El baisano Jalil and Novia que te vea for their representations of ethnic difference and suggestions of a multicultural Mexico. Here, I wish to explore how these films not only show the presence of immigrant groups in the cultural fabric of Mexico, but also how the films demonstrate that public discourses (via film) can enhance scholarly understanding of multiculturalism. My purpose is to make a discrete intervention in Mexican historiography by underscoring the importance of film in conceptualizing the dimensions of ethnic identity. I suggest that these films are rooted in a particular Mexican social context in which both Arab and Jewish immigrants have been able to manipulate the ambiguities of what it means to be Mexican.