The appearance of no less than four books in English marked 1971 as a banner year for Black Legend studies, especially for their colonial side. As in the past discussion emphasized the sixteenth century, dominated by the commanding and controversial Dominican, Bartolomé de Las Casas on one hand, and the grim Indian demographic catastrophe on the other. This was no less so during the Enlightenment's passionate debates on the subject. Modern research gives greater credence to mortality rates suggested by Las Casas, but centers on the dire effects of disease as the main agent causing mass death. As this essay will suggest, eighteenth century discussants were somewhat betwixt and between concerning the American experience and the Hispanic impact. Clearly much of the ongoing appeal of Las Casas' interpretation of the Indians' calamity, which stressed the conquerors' brutality, comes from its foreshadowing of modern agonies over race relations and western treatment of other colonialized peoples.

On November 14, 1904, the eve of the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the Brazilian Republic, General Silvestre Travassos, leading a corps of several hundred cadets from Rio de Janeiro's military school, fell fatally wounded before the forces loyal to the constitutional government he had pledged to overthrow. His loss came only hours after the uprising had begun, but in those early moments the revolt had already foundered. This brief armed movement climaxed nearly a year of unrest, a month of agitation and almost a week of running clashes between working-class groups and local government forces. Although the revolt continued sporadically for two days more, the death of its leader in the early hours of fighting signalled its failure.

For nearly three decades after the turn of the twentieth century, the United States took upon itself the policing of the Caribbean and Central America. Under an expanded interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine known as the Roosevelt Corollary, American policymakers justified numerous military interventions in those small republics until Monroeism became a synonym in Latin America for imperialism and expansionism. By 1930, this policy of attempted hegemony by force was a failure: Public opinion at home and abroad had opposed the “big stick” concept of hemispheric relations almost from the beginning; the interventions seldom achieved their nebulous goals.

Royal officials of the Indies found the contraband trade one of the most critical and debilitating problems in their administration of Spanish America. Contraband existed throughout the colonial period, despite occasional strenuous efforts to stamp it out. Various ideas have been advanced to explain the failure of Spanish counter-contraband in America, and these largely reflect on the quality of Spanish administration of the Indies. The implication is that governors and royal officials were generally guilty of corruption, of passive or active connivance in the contraband trade, or, at the very least, of incompetence or inefficiency in preventing it.

The Mexican Constitutional Congress of 1916-1917 represents in many respects a culmination of the struggle begun before 1910 against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. The Constitutional Congress was not only a culmination of the violent phase of the Mexican Revolution. It also involved a codification, if not a crystallization, of goals and perspectives that either pre-date 1910 or emerged during the struggles of 1910-1917. These struggles involved competing mobilizations within the Revolutionary coalition and, finally, a civil war within the Revolution between the forces of the Convention (the unstable coalition between the Zapatistas and the Villistas) and those of the Constitutionalists. The Constitutional Congress takes place after the military victory of the Constitutionalists and delegate eligibility was restricted to those who had actively supported the Constitutionalists. The radical economic nationalism and other innovative features of the Constitution have captured the attention of commentators. While the interpretation of the economic nationalism and other features remains the subject of considerable dispute, the notion that the Constitutionalists had a democratizing thrust in the political realm has remained unchallenged. Our analysis of both the articles and, more importantly, the debates at the Constitutional Congress leads us to challenge the premise of a democratizing impulse. This is not to say that the Constitutionalist delegates were for dictatorship, but it is to suggest that compared to the Constitution of 1857, the Constitutionalists do not emerge as radical democrats but as elitists that are fearful of mass participation as well as fearful of the possibility of a new dictatorship. We will examine the debates on four issues for this purpose: (A) suffrage; (B) literacy requirements to serve as a Deputy (member of Congress); (C) directness of electing officials; (D) no re-election.

In the nineteenth century Cuba was the focus of Spain's overseas commercial involvement. The Cuban sugar boom keep alive an otherwise moribund and truncated empire. Spain's interest in Cuban sugar brought her into a web of trade contacts stretching to the other side of the Atlantic. Sugar production still required the exploitation of black labor; Spain, whose trade in West Africa had been minimal in the eighteenth century, became, through the presence of her slavers, a major presence in the region. The impetus for this involvement came from the community of interests between Cuban planters and Spanish suppliers of labor. Mid-nineteenth Spanish involvement in West Africa can be seen as a curious form of Hispano-Antillean commercial imperialism, in which Africa was seen as the answer to Cuba's demand for black emigration as well as immigration.

ON show throughout the world, Mexico's rural police force, the famous Rurales, nearly always got top billing and an enthusiastic press. For example, after reviewing a contingent of Rurales at the World Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, New York, an American newspaper reporter wrote that the Rurales were “somewhat similar to the old Texas Rangers, but even tougher than the Rangers. Bred from infancy among the hills and valleys of old Mexico and accustomed not only to the saddle but the most meager rations, well does the robber know that with these troops in pursuit, his game is up. It's due to the Rurales that interior Mexico is so free of crime. Rurales are all over Mexico.”