The question of identity has been one of considerable importance to the study of race in Latin America. Particularly for the multitude of racially mixed offspring produced by miscegenation, it has been debated, what exactly was the degree of consciousness that race could produce? What degree of strength, if any, should be attributed to the caste boundaries created in the colonial period, and how did the reins of “caste” contribute to the 19th and 20th century heritage of the region? With the new and emerging research on the African Diaspora in Latin America, the question has often been asked: did the free mulatto, moreno, or pardo ever feel a specific identity, especially during colonial times, and especially when racial discourse was apparently created by, and served the interests of those who held the supreme positions of power?

Dijo anoche, su canto de muerte
la Canción de la tos en tu percho
y, al mojarse en las notas rojizas
mostró flores de sangre el pañuelo.

Pulmonary tuberculosis substantially influenced societal attitudes and Argentine life style in the nineteenth century. Because tuberculosis was socially defined, how Porteños viewed the tubercular depended on conceptions of the disease, as well as popular and medical views of contagion and cure. Illness did not isolate individuals from society or even from familiar faces and responsibilities. Class, gender, age, attitudes on contagion, and approaches to treatment influenced the choices available to men, women, and children.

The exploitation of Andean villagers under the forced labor regime for the mines of Potosi is almost as infamous as the silver they extracted from the cerro rico is famous. Established by Viceroy Toledo in the 1570s, the mita, as the system of forced labor was known, remained in place until the smoke and shot of Latin American independence struggles were in the air. For over two centuries, Spain forced thousands upon thousands of naturales (a common colonial term for indigenous people) from communities throughout the southern Andean highlands to lend their muscle and sweat, and all too often their blood and their lives, to keep Potosi's veins open and flowing. Through this work the mitayos and their communities not only drove the colonial economy, but also were a major force in sustaining the Spanish empire and in helping forge the modern world's dominant economic system. Conversely, mita exploitation threatened the very survival of the communities subject to it. The mita was so onerous that virtually all indigenous peoples subject to the labor draft, regardless of ethnicity or class, raised an almost continuous voice of protest from their communities against the mita and its abuses. Tensions created by the mita also severely strained the bonds that linked community, curaca, and the state, which were primary ingredients in the social glue that kept colonial Andean society from coming apart. To avoid descending into the mines, and to escape such horrors as laboring over mercury vapors, many people permanently fled their communities, giving up the status of originarios (community members with rights such as access to land and subject to state obligations) to become forasteros (indigenous person not living in community of origin, or descendant of the same, without communal rights but exempt from many state obligations). In this way the mita, one of the few forces that had potential for uniting Andean peoples in opposition to the state also fractured them. Communal solidarity was severely strained and neither the shared experience of the mita nor the commonality of experience in Potosi created sufficient cohesion to overcome the ethnic and regional differences that divided them.

On 11 September 1941, U..S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took to the airwaves to warn his country that “Hitler's advance guards” were readying “footholds, bridgeheads in the New World, to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans.” The most recent sign that the Nazis were coming, the president told his rapt national audience, was the discovery of “secret airlanding fields in Colombia, within easy range of the Panama Canal.”

In Bogotá, the response was pandemonium. U.S. ambassador Spruille Braden, astonished that “the President has gone out on a limb with this statement,” sent his staff scrambling across German-owned farms and rice fields to try to produce evidence for the assertion ex post facto. Colombian President Eduardo Santos scoffed at Roosevelt's claim, telling Braden, “in the final analysis all of Colombia is a great potential airport.” A resentful Colombian Senate voted unanimously that no such airfields existed (that Colombia had fulfilled its responsibility to defend against the Axis menace). In Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was forced to call in Colombia's Ambassador Gabriel Turbay to express “the very deep regret of the President, of myself and of our Government” for the “unintentional reference.”