On April 19, 1914—two days before the seizure of Vera Cruz by United States marines—North American radicals gathered at Carnegie Hall in New York City to protest the expected use of force against Mexico by the administration of Woodrow Wilson. One of the speakers, William (“Big Bill”) Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, threatened a nationwide general strike should the United States go to war against Mexico, and the crowd approved a resolution condemning any act of armed intervention.

But the Mexican crisis was not the only issue that aroused the crowd at Carnegie hall. A second resolution was approved which denounced the imprisonment of a young immigrant called Frank Tannenbaum, who had recently been sentenced to a year in the penitentiary for participating in an illegal assembly. On March 4 — his twenty-first birthday — Tannenbaum had led an “army of the unemployed” into the Roman Catholic Church of St. Alphonsus on West Broadway and had demanded shelter. His arrest that night and subsequent trial had become a cause célèbre among liberals and radicals who believed that he had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

In the summer of 1835 Mexico chose to abandon the federal form of government instituted a decade earlier in 1824 and to replace it with a centralized republic. The dismantling of federal laws and institutions and the enactment of those designed to replace them occupied the next eighteen months until on December 30, 1836 the process of change to the new system culminated in the publication of a new constitution, the so-called Constitutión de las Siete Leyes. This fundamental change in the political structure of the nation was not achieved without considerable dissent and the protracted transitional period permitted many groups who opposed the new order of things to air their views and in some cases, notably in Zacatecas and Texas, to attempt military resistance. The supporters of centralism found themselves, therefore, obliged to make and justify their case for change and to convince themselves as well as their opponents that their proposals represented the popular will. It is with this centralist case for change, or manifesto, that this article is primarily concerned.

More than two decades of scholarship on colonial Mexico has established both the role and character of merchant class communities, especially in Mexico City and Guadalajara. Beginning with David A. Brading's seminal Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810, several additional studies now constitute a significant body of literature on the subject. Collectively, Brading, John E. Kicza, Doris M. Ladd and others have demonstrated how Mexico City merchants consolidated their fortunes by acquiring haciendas (landed estates). Moreover, their studies describe how Mexico City entrepreneurs maintained commercial hegemony by purchasing large quantities of European merchandise and then reselling it at grossly inflated prices. These businessmen monopolized colonial trade through extensive familial ties and trading networks extending back to Spain. Although these and other revelations are important with respect to Mexico City merchants, they neither explain the position nor the significance of entrepreneurs in the principal Spanish colonial port

When you look at these picture postcards, you sense how they felt — these invading U.S. sailors and marines at war with Mexican soldiers and civilians defending their territory. These photos are not the work of professionals, although a number of salaried photojournalists in 1914 recorded the American landing at Veracruz for their respective publications. Instead, these are, by and large, simple snapshots, unplanned, some unfocused, taken at a moment's opportunity by the participants themselves. They picture the way in which common combatants hoped to remember the event, and how they wanted others to view it. All the more so, because these are not simply photographs, but also postcards, the images reinforced with handwritten messages and mailed elsewhere to share the experience of Veracruz and to indicate how they felt about it. Americans full of bombast and arrogance in their display of Old Glory, disdain the enemy. Mexicans, returning the fight (some of it in posed pictures), eager to display the destruction caused by the foreign intervention and to mourn their dead. Picture postcards such as these beg analysis, yield insights, raise questions; they are a new and fascinating piece to be fitted into the puzzle of history.

The Dominican Republic, which has once again exhibited the fragility of its political institutions by taking over two weeks to ascertain a winner in its last presidential election, is, in many ways, a land of shared commonalities with other peoples. Its merengue rhythms point to a common musical bond with West Africa; its language and cultural institutions suggest a heavy Spanish stamp and its affiliations with other regional entities such as Puerto Rico and Venezuela are well known. Unfortunately for the Dominicans, however, they share their own island with another society — a decidely unique situation, especially since this schism represents an antipathic clash between different languages, histories and racial philosophies.

“ A few days ago,” reported the newspaper El Bien Público (Quezaltenango), “in the town of San Juan Ixcoy…the Indians rose up, killing the ladinos, including several habilitadores (labor recruiters)”. As first news of this soon-to-be famous massacre filtered out of the Cuchumatán mountains, it became clear that some of the country's highland Indians had struck back, as many ladinos long had feared they might, against the intrusions of the rapidly expanding coffee economy. The sanjuaneros' tumulto was, in fact, simply a particularly dramatic instance of a struggle played out in various forms throughout the western highlands of Guatemala in the one hundred years after 1850. With the onset of the new crop of coffee, export monoculture threatened the integrity of Indian peasant agriculture as no crop before had done. If, in this case, the immediate target of the Indians' wrath was a hapless group of habilitadores, the more serious underlying problem for the indigenous population was access to and control of land. It is on land, and particularly on the land of San Juan Ixcoy as an example of the struggle, that this paper will concentrate.