Let me begin by thanking you for this honor. Like most of you I belong to many professional organizations and all of them have provided me with the opportunity to grow intellectually as well as forge the enduring professional associations that have so enriched my life. From the beginning of my career, however, CLAH has always served as my professional home. It is because I consider myself fortunate to be one of you that this award means so much to me. I am grateful indeed.

On January 14, 1982, residents of Tula, Hidalgo, discovered the bodies of nine murdered men floating in a sewage drain emanating from Mexico City. All bore signs of gruesome torture. Red Cross workers soon located three more bodies, leading one reporter to describe the homicides as “the crime of the century.” Detectives initially asserted that the victims were drug traffickers who had been murdered by a rival gang. Manuel Buendía, in his weekday political column Red Privada, described the scene as “bloodcurdling,” employing his signature hard-boiled prose. Yet, the nation's most prominent journalist was referring not only to the gore, but also to his suspicions that police had committed the crime.

In 1556 Franciscan missionaries from the city of Mexico arrived in the then remote area of Zacatecas to begin what was expected to be a crucial but difficult evangelization of the area. They had been preceded by several other brothers who had not settled there despite having spent several years in catechizing the indigenous. The intention of these four missionaries was to stay and found a convent. Along with Fr. Pedro de Espinareda and Fr. Diego de la Cadena came one lay brother, Fr. Jacinto de San Francisco, and one donado simply called Lucas. Fr. Joseph Arlegui, chronicler of the order, assumed the presence of those friars would lay the foundation for the difficult task of evangelizing such distant lands and such unwilling peoples.

On February 25, 1937, Mexico's ruling political party, then called the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), announced that for the first time it would permit “organized” women to vote in internal party elections. “Organized” was code for members of labor unions, agrarian leagues, or other groups supportive of the government. The decision reveals that the PNR, under the leadership of revolutionary general and president Lázaro Cárdenas, had found itself in a situation similar to that of other progressive parties throughout the hemisphere. Although many PNR leaders, including the president, had come to support women's suffrage in principle, their shared conviction regarding the essential conservatism of most Mexican women put them in a tight spot. If universally enfranchised, women might thank the party by voting them right out of office, or force them to employ unmanageable levels of electoral fraud to prevent such an outcome. The 1937 ruling conveniently allowed them to be for and against women's suffrage at the same time. Suffragists, however, were not satisfied.

The editorial office has received a number of edited volumes that will be of interest to our readership. To introduce these works, we occasionally list in this section the publication information and tables of contents entries. The five volumes selected for this issue examine the Great Depression in Latin America, immigration and national identities, Latin American foreign policies, Latin American politics and development, and civic life and culture in Cuba's First Republic.