“So, just how did you get interested in Latin America anyway?” Latin Americanists who don't have a recognizably Spanish or Portuguese surname are routinely asked this question by acquaintances, distant relatives, recently hired colleagues, and even by that most dreaded of airline passengers, the garrulous fool in the next seat. I don't have a convenient response—I can't claim to be the daughter of missionaries (my last name is a dead giveaway on that account), nor of diplomats or corporative executives posted to São Paulo when I was a young girl. I did have two great aunts from Minsk who took a boat to “America” and ended up in Buenos Aires, but that's a rather slim biographical reed on which to rest my decision to become a Latin Americanist.

Mining had far-reaching ecological consequences throughout much of colonial Spanish America. It deformed the landscape, introduced pollutants such as sulfur, mercury and salt into the biosphere, and caused human settlement of sparsely populated or uninhabited regions. Forests succumbed to the charcoal makers' axes. Workers' lungs filled with silicosis-causing dust. Cave-ins snuffed out lives or crippled those they spared.

As unhealthy as mining was elsewhere in Spanish America, it was reported to have been especially harmful in the central Andes at Huancavelica. Workers there suffered the common diseases and injuries associated with the industry such as respiratory disease and broken limbs. They also had to overcome the challenges of arduous labor at high altitude. Most pernicious of all was the toxic nature of the mercury they were mining. Colonial critics asserted that Huancavelica was an environmental tragedy that placed workers in exceptionally dangerous conditions in order to produce the mercury needed by silver refiners to amalgamate and refine their ores. The critics claimed that the mercury mines' human cost was immoral, yet their cries of despair and outrage could not overcome quicksilver's crucial importance to the imperial economy. Killing and maiming, Huancavelica earned for itself an infamous reputation as the mina de la muerte (the mine of death).

Much has been written about race and race stereotyping in Brazil in relation to African-Brazilians and their mixed African-European descendants. The situation of Indians and their mixed-blood descendants has been studied much less. In fact, the word mestizo as it is used in Spanish America does not translate well into Portuguese, for in Portuguese a mestiço can be any mixture. In the case of Brazil, it can mean either a descendant of Indian-European parents or of African-European parents.

This paper studies racial classifications in seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth-century São Paulo. São Paulo was a unique region in colonial Brazil and, because of its unique history, these findings cannot be automatically extrapolated to all other parts of Brazil. São Paul was very poor, especially if compared to the northeast, and later to Minas Gerais, the center of the gold and diamond mining region. Though the town was founded in 1554, it lacked exportable natural resources until the late eighteenth century, so that the economy was partly based on the raising of a few cattle and crops for subsistence or for sale locally or to other regions of Brazil. The labor needs of Paulistas (inhabitants of São Paulo) were met through exploratory and slaving expeditions called bandeiras that replenished their Indian labor force or else provided captives to be sold to other parts of Brazil. Though there were a few African slaves in São Paulo in the seventeenth century, the settlers could not afford them in substantial numbers until the second half of the eighteenth century.

Mexico's transition from a colonial society to an independent nation was extremely difficult and civil war seemed to threaten at every turn during the first half of the nineteenth century. Independence required the creation of a new republican order to replace the colonial system of corporate identities and racial domination. The creation of a new liberal order based on individual citizenship was a contested process where competing political actors sought to preserve colonial privileges even as they used the new constitutional system to their advantage. The indigenous communities, the majority of the population at independence, posed a challenge to the new society of citizens. The objective of this paper is to explore the fate of indigenous communities under the new system and how Indians manipulated it in order to survive. The following pages discuss how independence affected villagers by first describing what the change to a new liberal order meant for local town governments. Then using case studies from the gulf region of Mexico, the paper will draw connections between indigenous village politics and the pronunciamientos that frequently destabilized the national government. Pronunciamientos in the provinces had a profound effect that over time tended to create more opportunities for discontented villagers to enter politics. Finally, the paper will discuss how these political divisions played out in the series of rebellions of the late 1840s known as “caste war of the Huasteca.”

In 1978, the Brazilian military government launched a “community development project” for the Xavante Indians of Mato Grosso (“Projeto Xavante”) to promote mechanized rice production and livestock rearing, and to institute educational and health programs. As the project sought to foster indigenous self-sufficiency, the government Indian bureau, Fundaçaão Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) would deploy a team of technicians, agronomists, educators, and health care officials to train Xavante as agriculturists, machine operators, health care attendants, and bilingual teaching monitors. Under the administration of General Ismarth Araújo de Oliveira, FUNAI initially earmarked CR$8,635,207 for the Xavante Project and established a special coordinating unit in Barra do Garças, Mato Grosso, the Ajudância Autônoma de Barra do Garças (AJABAG).