When smallpox threatened the Mexican province of Guanajuato in October 1797, Juan de Riaño, the Intendant of Guanajuato, instituted a program of inoculation to protect the children of his province against the disease. Realizing that many parents would resist having their children inoculated, he decided to provide an example by having his own six children inoculated first, thereby encouraging other parents to bring their children forward. Accordingly, a physician made deep scratches in the arms of his children, three of whom were under the age of five, and rubbed organic matter containing live smallpox virus into the wounds. Thanking Riaño for this gesture, Dr. Juan de Islas praised him for showing “true mercy for your children, banishing the timidity from the minds of others.” Nor was their timidity entirely unjustified. People occasionally died from inoculation, for inoculation provided immunity by artificially inducing a case of smallpox, but one that was usually benign. The risk of dying from inoculation was much lower than from contracting smallpox naturally. That was the point Riaño was trying to make to the people of Guanajuato.

Cotton growing and textile production in the northern regions of newly independent Argentina, as in many other parts of Latin America still relatively unaffected by the industrial revolution, were linked to the gender division of labor and the type of landholdings found in agrarian societies. As early as 1970 Ester Boserup pointed out the divergent roles that women and children would play in societies based upon extensive properties farmed or ranched by slave or hired help as compared with smaller, more intensive farms and ranches. She, like many others, however, presumed that wage labor, large scale agriculture, and ranching dominated the Latin American landscape, and she emphasized the role of women compared to other family members in rural production.

One of the most important aspects of the recent mass migrations of Latin Americans into previously remote regions of the hemisphere is the impact these have had on areas cut by international boundaries. With the exception of the United States-Mexico border, however, historical examination of the process is still in its infancy. And few observers have developed a satisfactory theoretical basis explaining an admittedly complex process.

One exception was Cuban historian Jorge Mañach, who spoke of “balanced” and “unbalanced” frontiers, largely in the context of the United States-Mexican boundary. He believed that power distribution between nations determined the degree to which their frontier interrelationships were equal or unequal. In Mañach's view, when a politically or economically weaker nation shares a boundary with one that is stronger, overall communication is sacrificed and the stronger power inevitably “spills over” into the neighboring region, economically and culturally.

In his 1884 address to the National Assembly, President Justo Rufino Barrios gave a glowing report of a polity fired by the torch of Liberal progress. “When I see the movement and the animation in everything and everywhere, in our streets, in our plazas, in our roads and in our ports, I cannot repress a feeling of vanity.” He extolled not only commerce and new technology, but model prisons, a disciplined professional army, and “a school in the most miserable town and in the most hidden corner.” This is a world of flowing capital, technological linkages, and the ceaseless penetration of enlightenment into every corner of the Republic, where before there had been only a “dark mansion of apathy, of immobility, of stagnation and silence,” and where now we (Guatemalans) “can say that we have–if not everything–almost everything.” The Utopian rhetoric masked a rather different and sorry reality. Still, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, the succession of possessive plurals in Barrios' speech–our streets, our plazas, our roads–assured the listener of a solid sociological and political entity that can only be Guatemala. Surely Barrios spoke from the solid foundations of a Liberal nationalist certainty?