I want to take this opportunity to thank Eric Van Young for inviting me to give this speech today. It is a great honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts concerning the development of gender studies in Latin American history as well as the issues that need to be addressed in future years. When I first became interested in gender history in the 1970s, it seemed unlikely that journals such as Luso-Brazilian Studies would ever dedicate an entire issue to women's studies. Yet this year there is such an issue. It helps us appreciate how accepted gender studies have become for Latin American historians.

By now it has perhaps become a commonplace that the “rural democratic model” of Costa Rican history–the idea that Costa Rican democracy is based on a heritage of racially homogenous, egalitarian small holders–is an ideology and should be studied as such, rather than accepted as an accurate portrayal of Costa Rica's history. Recent studies have focused on the Liberal (1880-1900) and Liberacionista (post-1948) periods in which the ideology was formulated and then reformulated, and emphasized its conservative nature. During the period between 1900 and 1948, however, this ideology was far from hegemonic. This period saw much of the militant labor activism and social struggle that Costa Rica's new social historians are trying to uncover.

One evening in April 1926 a party of Italian emigrants outward bound from Genoa aboard the steamer Conte Verde celebrated their impending new life in Argentina by singing the fascist anthem “Giovinezza.” They thereby angered a larger number of passengers and crew, who responded with a lusty rendition of the Socialist “Bandiera Rossa.” Tension grew, but Conte Verde’s captain averted further unpleasantness by escorting the fascists to safety at the ship's bow; at the same time Second Captain Rivarola restored order among the antifascists. The Genoa police prefecture reported the incident to Benito Mussolini's cabinet, but as the quarrel had been transferred to Argentine soil there was little to be done–for the moment. The secret police would maintain surveillance of the troublemakers in Argentina and of their families in Italy.

The European practice of conceptualizing their enemies so that they could dispose of them in ways that were not in accord with their own Christian principles is well documented. In the Americas, this began with Columbus's designation of certain Indians as man-eaters and was continued by those Spanish who also wished to enslave the natives or eliminate them altogether. The word “cannibal” was invented to describe such people, and the Spanish were legally free to treat cannibals in ways that were forbidden to them in their relations with other people. By the late fifteenth century the word cannibal had assumed a place in the languages of Europe as the latest concept by which Europeans sought to categorize the “other.” As David Gordon White has shown, by the time the Spanish discovered America, barbarians were an established component of European mythology, history and theology as well as popular thought, and the categories Europeans employed to describe outsiders date as far back as the Greeks and the Egyptians before them. Therefore, it is not surprising that when they reached Mexico the Spanish easily adopted a word from Nahuatl to describe the Indian peoples of the north whom they believed to be barbarians. This word, chichimeca, which both designated and defined in a very particular way the native peoples of the north Mexican frontier, assumed in Spanish the credibility of longstanding native use, although as we shall see, this was not entirely justified.

Latin American social historians often decry the lack of statistical material available in the region. In some countries national censuses were not taken in the nineteenth century, and municipal information for the period is hard to locate. The lack of data makes it difficult to investigate such questions as family size, mortality, employment, and residency among those groups which were least likely to provide written records of their lives. As a result, many studies are limited by the availability of data. Recently, however, Latin American social historians have begun to propose additional questions, plumbing the potential of those sources which are available.