An important shift is under way in the scholarship on Latin America during the Cold War. This special issue on the Global Sixties presents many of the leading academic voices of that historiographical movement. In part, today's shift is influenced by a new generation of historians unencumbered by the ideological baggage carried by those who witnessed and participated in the political struggles and artistic exuberance of the 1960s as they occurred. With this shift, we are finally reaching a point where more historia than memoria. is being written. Without question, the numerous memoirbased narratives written by participants have helped to inform our understanding of the epoch, providing rich primary-source narratives of personal recollection and witness. The new historical investigations build on these memoirs, yet are firmly grounded in archival research. In turn, this archival research has fleshed out old historical questions and brought to the forefront many new ones. The results have often been fundamentally revisionist interpretations of the prevailing assumptions of the period.

The seventeenth century opened with a bang, literally. In the year 1600, on the first Friday in the season of Lent, sometime between noon and 3:00 PM (that is, at the hour of the accustomed Lenten penitential processions), the Peruvian volcano of Huaynapudna began a protracted series of explosions and eruptions. It was the largest recorded volcanic eruption in the Western Hemisphere, greater by far than that of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, or Mount St. Helens in 1980, and only slightly smaller than the colossal eruption of Krakatoa, Indonesia, in 1883. The event sent both Christian Spaniards and neo-Christian Indians searching for answers to apocalyptic questions. On that same Friday, February 18, 1600, several other violent earthquakes leveled buildings nearby.

Before I begin, I want to thank the Conference on Latin American History[CLAH] and the Distinguished Service Award Committee for giving me thissignal honor. This organization has always been important to me, and it'sreally nice to know tiiat it thinks I've been important to it.

The last talk I gave to CLAH was in Atlanta five years ago. I told the storyof one man, Santiago de Liniers, and his good and bad fortune. Just as forLiniers, luck has played a huge role in my life.

The 1599 portrait Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons, Pedro and Domingo by Andean artist Andres Sanchez Gallque (Figure 1) is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced paintings in the modern literature on colonial South America. The painting has been extensively praised, parsed, and interpreted by twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors, and heralded as the first signed South American portrait. “Remarkable” is the adjective most frequently employed to describe this work: modern authors express surprise and delight not only with the persuasive illusionistic power of the painting, the mesmerizing appearance of its subjects, and the artist's impressive mastery of the genre, but with the fact that the artist chose to sign and date his work, including a specific reference to his Andean identity.

In 1796, the commander of die Guatemalan presidio of Peten, Jose de Galvez, together with its leading prelate and the caciques of the nearby pueblos of San Andres and San Jose, registered a formal complaint: an increasing number of runaway black slaves from Belize taking refuge there had been marrying Maya women in their villages. The officials objected to these unions, stating that they did not want “their blood mixed with these newly Christian blacks” and alleged that the asylum seekers took Maya brides in thinly disguised attempts to exploit native female labor. The cacique of San Andres, don Raimundo Chata, backed by the leading civil and ecclesiastical authorities in a rare moment of unity, advocated the removal of the escaped slaves to a site set aside for blacks on the other side of Lake Peten (see map in Figure 1). The result of this proposed policy of segregation was the creation of a “new pueblo for blacks converted to the faith.”

Between 1842 and 1848, a violent conflict erupted on the banks of the SãoFrancisco River in nordieastern Brazil. Militão Plácido de França Antunesand his faction declared war on the family of Captain Bernardo JoséGuerreiro. Both families were based in the river town of Pilão Arcado, butthe fighting spread to the nearby town of Sento-Sé, and by 1848 violence hadengulfed the entire region from Barra to Juazeiro (see Figures 1 and 2).Bands of armed men loyal to Militão roamed the streets and attacked thehouseholds of people they considered to be on the side of the Guerreiros.Many people were killed, and others fled the region altogether. The violenceended only after Militão's faction killed Guerreiro's last adult son onAugust 1, 1848. Although a family feud in the backlands was not unusual,this fight resonated with coastal lawmakers who, in Brazil's Second Empire,had been looking toward conquering the west and consolidating their own vastterritory. The reports of wrenching violence in the backlands, unchecked bythe rule of law, represented the deepest fears of the coastal elite and madethe need to conquer the Brazilian interior even more urgent.

In the 1960s, a generation of Latin American youth entered political life inspired by a heroic view of activism tiiat coincided, often contentiously, with the spread of new cultural trends from youth movements in Europe and the United States. This study focuses on how the notions of “being young” in circulation at the time affected the construction of political identities in Uruguay, particularly among the different branches of the Uruguayan left. I am especially interested in analyzing the relationship between the cultural representations of youth and the requirements for activism as conceived by these Uruguayan leftist groups.

The year 1577 was a watershed for linguistic politics in Mexico. After more than five decades in Mexico, the Spanish crown signaled a break from its previous tolerance of the use of indigenous language in catechesis and doctrinal publications. The landmark case is the crown's confiscation of Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia General in 1577. Simultaneously, the Mexican Inquisition pursued an assault on vernacular Scripture, confiscating dozens of Spanish scriptural editions, and culminating in the Inquisition's prohibition of Nahuatl and other indigenous-language translations of Scripture, in particular Ecclesiastes and the Epístolas y Evangelios (Epistles and Gospels). Also central was the second trial of a noted Erasmian, Alonso Cabello, who had spent much of the same year in house arrest in Tlatelolco. All this came on the heels of the establishment of the Holy Office in Mexico in November 1571 and its first full-scale purge of prohibited books, including well over 200 editions of Scripture—dozens of them in Spanish and a few in Nahuatl—that had circulated freely in Mexico. Prior to the 1570s exico had witnessed intense debates about the role of language in missionary projects, in catechesis, and in the education of indigenous Mexicans, alongside those regarding the proper language for Scripture and devotional works.

Argentina, and Buenos Aires in particular, was a preferred South Americandestination for great numbers of European immigrants who crossed theAtlantic beginning in the late nineteenth century in search of newopportunities. Most Latin American governments, from the early days of theirnations' independence, sought to attract European workers. These newlyfounded countries considered immigration an essential element for creating asociety that would become economically, politically, and socially modern.They hoped to attract mainly foreigners from Northern Europe, among them theBritish, whom they considered to have superior labor skills and to beaccustomed to the habits of order and work the new nation required.

On March 30, 1973, three weeks after Hctor Cmpora won the first presidential elections in which candidates on a Peronist ticket could run since 1955, rock producer Jorge lvarez, himself a sympathizer of left-wing Peronism, carried out a peculiar celebration. Convinced that Cmpora's triumph had been propelled by young people's zeal—as expressed in their increasing affiliation with the Juventud Peronista (Peronist Youth, or JP), an organization linked to the Montoneros—he convened a rock festival, at which the most prominent bands and singers of what journalists had begun to dub rock nacional went onstage. Among them were La Pesada del Rock- 'n'Roll, the duo Sui Gneris, and Luis Alberto Spinetta with Pescado Rabioso. In spite of the rain, 20,000 people attended the Festival of Liberation, mostly muchachos from every working- and middle-class corner of Buenos Aires, as one journalist depicted them, also noting that while the JP tried to raise chants from the audience, the boys acted as if they were untouched by the political overtones of the festival.

In March of 1929, die young Peruvian poet and political activist Magda Portal departed from die Yucatan in Mexico to give a series of lectures in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. She traveled as an emissary of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA), a recendy founded political organization that sought to transform Latin America by creating a united front against foreign imperialism. On July 14, in Santo Domingo she gave a lecture titled “Latin America Confronted by Imperialism,” at “the largest theater in town” to an audience of about 200. Her presence as an intelligent, energetic, and beautiful woman, standing on stages normally reserved to men, enhanced the power of her words, and she was well aware of the striking effect on audiences of seeing a woman in the traditionally male role of political orator

In 1570, the Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta bestowed a rare gift on Juan de Ovando, then president of the Council of Indies. Mendieta placed in Ovando's hands a small manuscript volume in superb Gothic script with illuminated initials and color illustrations, one of several important manuscripts he had brought to Spain for various prominent recipients. Were it not for its contents, one could have thought it a meticulous version of a breviary or a book of hours, but its contents were unprecedented. This tome contained a scholarly Nahuatl translation of the most popular devotional work in Western Europe in the previous century. It was Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, which caught Iberian Christians under its spell between the 1460s and the early sixteenth century by means of multiple Latin editions and translations into Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish, including a version in aljamiado (Spanish in Arabic characters). Indeed, a decisive turning point in the Iberian reception of this work had taken place three decades earlier, through the 1536 publication of Juan de Ávila's influential Spanish-language adaptation.

“For my generation,” writes Alex Polari, “our option was precisely this: either pirar [flip out], trip out on drugs, or join the armed struggle. Heroism vs. alienation, as we who joined the armed struggle saw it; caretice [conformity] vs. liberation, as they saw it.” Born in 1951, Polari was a teen during the cultural effervescence and political struggle of mid-to-late 1960s Brazil but reached adulthood during a period of severe repression—the so-called sufoco (suffocation)—between late 1968 and 1974, when public protest and left-wing cultural expression were suppressed and censored. Polari opted for the “heroic” option of armed struggle, as he recounted in his memoirs published in 1982 during the abertura, a period of political opening leading up to the restoration of formal democracy in 1985. Yet he also expressed a deep affinity for those who “flipped out” and embraced attitudes and practices associated with the counterculture.

In June 1787, Lieutenant Colonel Gabriel de Hervías, on behalf of the Spanish crown, took possession from Major James Lawrie of the small British settlement of Black River (Río Tinto), marking the formal end of three decades of diplomatic wrangling over the existence of the British Superintendency over the Mosquito Shore (1748 to 1787). Within three years of Lawrie's departure, along with that of 537 British settlers and 1,677 slaves, the narrow stretch of territory extending along the Atlantic coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua and known to the Spanish as costa de mosquitos was engulfed in violent conflicts between leaders of the Miskitu peoples and their followers. The first outbreak of intra-Miskitu hostilities pitted the Indian governor Colville Briton against other prominent chiefs, including his nephew Admiral Alparis Dilson; a second pitted Admiral Dilson and his brother Major Hewlett against the Afro-Indian or “Zambo” King George II. By the time the conflicts had come to an end, both Briton and Dilson had been executed, Hewlett had escaped the region for the safety of the Panamanian coast, and George had asserted his ascendancy over rival chiefs and their people.

On April 17, 1974, and die two days following, a gathering of 16 indigenous participants from nine different indigenous societies was held in Diamantino, Mato Grosso, Brazil. During the three days, vernacular narratives, trivial announcements, and critiques of the government and local ranchers were presented—without any of the participants significantly engaging with one another. Only one primary source on this event, a short, typed document, is available today. The historicity of this “Assembly of Indigenous Chiefs” is granted by both the anthropological and the historical situations of the participating communities. For the first time, individuals from indigenous societies that did not share ethnic borders or history met to advance indigenous rights; for the first time also, these individuals were granted political representation (of their groups), a notion largely foreign to indigenous political traditions. There was a conscious effort to draw chiefs from as many communities as possible and to establish a large, pan-Indian movement.

During the late 1920s, the Mexican government under President Plutarco ElíasCalles (1924-1928) confronted multiple challenges to state consolidation.These included plots by political rivals, foreign relations crises, andseveral popular revolts. The longest-lasting and most destabilizing of thesewas the Cristero War, which persisted from 1926 until 1929, with sporadicuprisings into the early 1930s. Despite these challenges, Calles and hishandpicked successors not only remained in power at the beginning of the1930s, but also launched the single-party political system that would endurein Mexico until the end of the twentieth century.

In 1958, Roque Dalton, a young poet affiliated with the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), won the first prize in a poetry contest at the University of El Salvador. A few days later, members of Salvadoran Catholic University Action, a student organization known as ACUS or simply Catholic Action, published a demolishing but carelessly written critique of Dalton. The anonymous writer of an article titled Under the Empire of Vulgarity turned his disgust with the poem written by Dalton into a diatribe against Dalton's political persona. Dalton's raw allusions to double standards in the sexual morality of priests and his remarks about the Catholic practice of fasting seem to have especially upset the leaders of ACUS. A month later, ACUS published a rejoinder written by Dalton, along with excerpts of the controversial poem. In his retort, Dalton stated that ACUS dodged debates on substantial political and aesthetic issues by engaging in insults, quick and facile judgments, and rude pigeon-holing that closes all means of intellectual comprehension.

In 1964, at what was surely the acme of her career, Violeta Parra became the first Latin American to have a solo show at the Louvre. During the five-odd weeks that her artwork was on display, Parra was at the museum every day. She chatted with visitors, put finishing touches on her tapestries, sang songs, played her guitar, served empanadas, and turned the exposition hall into a veritable Chilean ramada. The exhibit received favorable reviews in the press, and was visited by important dignitaries and a who's who of the Parisian and expatriate Latin American artistic community. Parra sold several of her tapestries, including one to the Baroness Rothschild. By all accounts, the show was a great success.