On February 18, 1724, field marshal Antonio Manso Maldonado arrived in New Granada as the president, governor, and captain-general of the New Kingdom. He had been appointed to this position on December 4, 1723, because both the crown and the Chamber of the Indies thought it would be best executed by a military officer. Manso Maldonado could boast more than 30 years of military service, proven loyalty, and administrative experience, much of it during the first reign of Felipe V. After joining the royal armies as a private, Manso Maldonado rose steadily through the ranks, fighting the Moors in Ceuta and the French in the wars of the late seventeenth century. During the War of the Spanish Succession, he served at the orders of the militant bishop of Murcia and last viceroy of Valencia, Luis Belluga, who praised Manso's valor directly to the king. Most important perhaps, at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and upon the occupation of Catalonia by Bourbon forces, Manso Maldonado had served as teniente de rey in Gerona (1716-1719) and Barcelona (1719-1723), witnessing first-hand the implementation of the Nueva Planta and the enforcement of royal authority over the rebellious principality.

In late 1809 and early 1810, die city of Caracas witnessed an extraordinary spectacle as over 350 men were marched into its prisons. Local provincialauthorities had apprehended these men as part of a leva de vagos, a campaign to coercively recruit vagrants into the army. Such recruitment campaigns were neither novel nor particularly controversial in the late Bourbon period. However, Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 had unhinged the Spanish world, inspiring a profound re-examination of values and traditions. In this context, this new leva generated an unexpected opposition tliat stunned the new captain general of Venezuela, field marshal Vicente Emparan y Orbe. The opposition, which was led by the Caracas audiencia—the province's highest court—ostensibly questioned the legality of die procedures being used to validate charges of vagrancy, but beneath the surface, the resistance reflected a broadbased coalition dedicated to the defense of a status quo that was unraveling under the twin forces of Napoleon and the Junta Central. In this essay, I argue that the Leva de Vagos of 1809 contributed decisively to the overthrow of Emparan, paving the way for the creation of the Junta of Caracas in April 1810.

Modernizers in Cuzco, Peru, ushered in the twentieth century by exalting newspapers as a universal vehicle for peace, prosperity, and progress. Although the city stood at more than 11,000 feet above sea level in the remote and rugged southern highlands, editors, public officials, and intellectuals were convinced that small but plentiful local newspapers contributed to a robust international public sphere. The writer who in 1910 lauded the press as die “aurora of salvation of the people” that “propagates itself through time and distance to keep redemptive thought alive” was hardly alone in his cosmopolitan idealism or emancipatory zeal. In the decades to come, a flood of pretentious self-tributes conveyed the idea that newspapers were almost divinely appointed to propagate a modern liberal project.

After peace was restored in Mexico following the Revolution of 1910, the country's rulers, like their Porfirian forebears, continued to believe in the need to attract foreign immigrants. However, this view began to shift in die mid-1930s in the face of fears about the arrival of foreigners that were considered undesirable. On matters of immigration, the country did not stray far from the restrictive practices that extended across the Americas from Canada to Argentina, yet in Mexico, unlike anywhere else on the continent, the authorities were forced to confront a dual problem posed by migration in the nation they sought to govern.