In the years prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the Hamburg-American-Lines (HAPAG) steamer Ypiranga gained a special reputation in the Western hemisphere. It was known for transporting several Mexican Presidents into exile, and it became especially famous for its 26th voyage, a trip from Hamburg to Veracruz in the spring of 1914.

Its hold filled with weapons for the Mexican President Huerta, the steamer approached the entrance to the Veracruz harbor on April 21. At that time, its captain had not the slightest idea that on Woodrow Wilson's order American troops had landed to take control of the harbor in order to prevent the weapons his ship carried from reaching the Mexican President.

In the introduction to his The Jews in the Canary Islands, Lucien Wolf wrote almost a half-century ago that “The work of the… branches of the Holy Office in America has only been made known to us piecemeal… For social data relating to the great body of Marranos the records have not hitherto been studied.” These records of the trial proceedings, called procesos, still constitute a fairly virgin field of social, religious and economic Latin American history in general and specifically for the history of Jews and Judaism.

A few have written articles about Mexican Jews in colonial times after a cursory study of a few documents and several acclaimed texts. It is, therefore, not surprising that the results are superficial and often suffused with errors. The foregoing may be illustrated by statements in an article published in the American Jewish Historical Quarterly. Among the numerous errors that appeared therein are “among 2,281 trials of the Mexican Holy Office, 351 concerned crypto-Jews…” and that “By the end of the seventeenth century, the whole crypto-Jewish community had been destroyed.”

An opinion often expressed by historians of Mexico and Latin America is that the age of Don Porfirio's Mexico was one in which the philosophy of positivism, wherther Comtean or Spencerian, was the dominant and official ideology of the day. In contrast to this viewpoint, an important supposition of this essay is that the intellectual history of the Porfiriato can only become intelligible if and when other ideas, concepts, and philosophies are distinguished from positivism. In addition, an accurate description of the role of ideas necessitates that some attention be focused upon the function of ideas in society. Thus a concern of this essay, apart from differentiating ideas, is that of suggesting the interrelationship of ideas to certain political and socio-economic groups during the Porfiriato. To do this properly will first require a statement about the social structure of Mexico between 1876 and 1911.

The multifaceted character of economic growth in Latin America has several distinctive qualities. Research is now uncovering some basic features of different stages and areas in industrialization. In Latin America, where personalism assumes a more significant role than in the system oriented Anglo-America, the lives of individuals can be quite decisive in the functioning of society. Francisco Javier Cisneros played several highly meaningful roles, all of which are important not only for the legacy left by his agitated, dynamic and dramatic life, but also because his experiences illustrate a not uncommon pattern of economic development in Latin America.

Although the Panama Railroad Company had operated commissaries in the nineteenth century, not until the United States had begun canal construction in 1904 did pressure increase for supplies and services. In 1905 Canal Zone Governor Charles Magoon reported that two salary increases had been granted to meet rising food costs on the isthmus. On each occasion, however, the salary increment was offset by the Panamanian merchants who had raised commodity prices. Laborers purportedly slipped into the jungle in search of food. In July, 1905, Governor Magoon and Chief Engineer of the canal project, John F. Stevens, agreed to establish a commissary system to distribute food at cost to the canal labor force totalling approximately 17,000 men. Apparently reacting to the jungle environment and to greedy Panamanian merchants, the United States government turned to the commissary operation. With time's passing, the commissaries blossomed “from a pork and beans beginning to silk stocking maturity.” By the late 1940's, the casual visitor wondered if he had stumbled upon a typical United States Department store in the tropics. Many Panamanians were deeply angered by this business activity, believing that their country's economy had been crushed and their right to live and expand denied. Some Panamanians charged that an international crime had been committed by the United States against the small nation. The Republic's merchants contended that most of the commissary trade actually belonged to them.

During the early, most chaotic years of the Mexican Revolution, there flourished in the capital city a briefly successful communication between the young intellectual elite and the workers. In the Universidad Popular Mexicana from 1913 through 1922, intellectual leaders of the Generation of 1910 sought eagerly to instill in the popular classes not only immediately practical knowledge but also the signal intellectual awakening they themselves had recently experienced. Their revolution against positivism was not precisely identical with the political revolution beginning in 1910, but insofar as the official positivist doctrine was discredited, so was the old regime itself fatally undermined.