CIVIL congregation of the Indians in New Spain was one phase of the continuing program which Spanish colonial officials had been conducting since earliest days in the New World to civilize and Christianize American native groups by urbanizing them. Application of this doctrine to New Spain as a whole in the years which began in the seventeenth century has been discussed elsewhere. Here the purpose is to fit the general procedures to a specific case by describing in detail the congregation process as it affected San Pedro Yolox, a small center of Chinantec Indian hamlets in the Sierra de Juarez, lying in the modern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

THE history of Ideas is still terra incognita on our map of the Latin American world. We are aware of certain European influences on the Hispanic American people, such as the Spanish mystics, Rousseau and the French romanticists, or Comte and his school of thought. But few comprehensive studies of Latin American thought exist. Not even the impact of Spanish philosophy has been fully evaluated. Although we know that the representative thinkers of the generation of 1898, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Luis de Zulueta and others were widely read, we know little of their effect on the writings of Alfonso Reyes, B. Sanin Cano, Francisco Romero and Jose Carlos Mariategui, to mention only some outstanding examples. Yet Unamuno was deeply interested in Latin American problems and his comments on Bolivar, Sarmiento and Latin American literature command our attention. Many critics recognize this significant relationship. Rafael Heliodoro Valle, for instance, remarks: “No cabe duda de que Unamuno ha sido el escritor espanol que mas curiosidad intelectual ha tenido hacia nosotros.”

WITH the death of Herbert E. Bolton in December, 1953, we close the circle of an important epoch in inter-American cultural relations. We come to the end of a period that, in the United States, had its beginning about the middle of the 1890’s and which eventually culminated with the Good Neighbor Policy and the close collaboration of the American nations during the Second World War.

COLONIZATION of the Negro somewhere beyond the territorial limits of the United States had an irresistible appeal to many nineteenth-century Americans anxious to steer a middle course between abolitionist and pro-slavery extremists. Though united in believing the colored man to be an intruder impossible to assimilate into the predominant Anglo-Saxon culture, colonizationists could never agree on the methods or the agencies of removal, nor on the site for the new Negro homeland. Thomas Jefferson suggested the Louisiana Purchase; others spoke of Florida, Texas, the trans-Mississippi West. As the frontier pressed forward, Canada became a more favored spot, and Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. The American Colonization Society, a national philanthropic body with auxiliaries north and south, sent some twelve thousand Negroes to their protege state of Liberia on the west coast of Africa.

RESIDENT James Monroe’s message of December 2, 1823 to the United States Congress was greeted with a national acclaim and approval seldom accorded the pronouncements of the American chief executive. The statement of foreign policy—since become known as the Monroe Doctrine—embodied in this message met with almost unanimous praise. “It would indeed be difficult,” noted Addington, the British chargé in Washington, “in a country composed of elements so various, and liable on all subjects to opinions so conflicting, to find more perfect unanimity than has been displayed on every side on this particular point.”

ABOUT twenty-five miles to the south of Madrid, lying among the soft rolling hills of the table-land of Castile and surrounded by lands weary of cultivation, lies Valdemoro, a small, picturesque village of only 3,000 inhabitants. Today its main riches lie in the exploiting of gypsum (yeso), and the material from which stucco is made (escayola), both of which are sent to Madrid to be sold. Cultivation of the land succeeds only in producing the bare necessities of life to maintain the sparse population, and does not afford sufficient occupation for the inhabitants. Many of the townsfolk are forced to seek their sustenance by working in the capital city or by emigration to other parts.