During the 1980s, more than 20,000 Salvadorans fleeing the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War entered the neighboring country of Nicaragua. Their flight was part of a larger multidirectional migration out of El Salvador in which Salvadorans sought refuge across Central and North America. In response to this unprecedented influx of Salvadoran refugee men, women, and children, the Nicaraguan government—newly under the control of the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)—declared that all refugees would be permitted “the opportunity to survive and produce.” This article argues that the timing of the refugees’ arrival proved mutually beneficial for both the Salvadorans and the FSLN by illustrating how Sandinista officials sought to further agrarian reform projects via refugee integration into agricultural cooperatives. As such, Nicaraguan refugee policy functioned as an integral part of Sandinista statecraft. Through an analysis of refugee-produced sources, government and UNHCR documents, and news reports, this article sheds new light on the entwined histories of Salvadoran refugees and the Sandinista state in the transnational context of the late Cold War period in Central America.

In Lima in the seventeenth century, both free and enslaved black women held elected leadership roles in black confraternities (corporate bodies of lay Catholics). These women occupied a public position generally reserved for men; their Spanish and indigenous counterparts did not hold comparable roles. Though their experiences have not been documented in scholarly literature, they were highly visible in their own lifetimes. In ecclesiastical court, they acted as the confraternity's legal agents. In everyday operations, they were primarily responsible for collecting and managing funds. This gave them a large say in how money ought to be spent, whether on festivals, members’ funerals, medical aid, or financial support for imprisoned members. Though black limeños made up a majority of the city's population, other forms of mutual aid were often inaccessible to them. Confraternity leaders in general, and these women in particular, managed one of their community's only officially recognized spaces for civic organization. As the century wore on, men successfully challenged the women's authority in court, and militia officers became more and more central to leadership. Yet even with that curtailment, these positions gave black women in Lima a degree of publicly acknowledged power highly unusual for early modern women.

Scholars often assume that women's exclusion from the modern civil-religious cargo system in Mexico is a colonial legacy. But an analysis of Chiapas's surviving colonial cofradía books, approximately 200 in all, reveals that formalized female religious leadership was widespread in this region during the colonial period. Close to 50 cofradías in over 20 different towns elected female officials. Indigenous cofradías were clearly at the forefront of this practice; however, it also became remarkably popular among ladino, Black, and even Spanish cofradías during the eighteenth century. Not just symbolic figures, female cofradía officers managed finances and cared for the spiritual and physical welfare of fellow members and the community. Their labors often overlapped with the work of town councils to ensure community well-being and survival in the face of extreme economic exploitation, migration, and forced resettlements. These findings challenge the common generalization, based on studies of central Mexico, that women in colonial New Spain were excluded from officeholding and the prestige and authority it provided. By shifting focus beyond central Mexico, this article illustrates the diversity of female experience and the ways in which gender shaped native communities, cross-cultural exchanges, and dynamic adaptations in religious organizational leadership and Church policy.

This short essay, prepared on the occasion of the conferral of the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History, uses various examples to illustrate the pleasure to be drawn from the day-to-day work of academic history. It opens with reflections on the practice of transcription, the act of bringing recognizable syllables and words out of the often baffling strokes of the pen that have left ink on paper. Although the wave of digitization has increased the sum total of material easily available to us, it is when we do the work of paleography, reducing the continuous lines of manuscript to something close to the discontinuities of type, that we find that our brains can hold on to the words and carry the interpretation forward. After transcription often comes translation, converting the formulas, idioms, and idiosyncrasies of past speech into language intelligible to our readers. As we translate, we are forced to acknowledge our own uncertainties about the meaning of texts, and to make the provisional choices that resolve ambiguity. Across both of these tasks we are nourished by collaboration, the talking and writing together that makes the study of the past into a social activity. Eager collaboration turns the practice of history into a double dialogue, with the documents and with our colleagues, engaging the mind and the spirit and bringing what can only be called joy.

This article examines the life and career of Alejandro Lipschütz, Chile's most accomplished indigenista, to investigate his influence on the scientific and political discourse about the role of indigenous peoples in modern American states, known as indigenismo. Trained as an experimental biologist, Lipschütz criticized prevailing views of race in the Americas, arguing for a social interpretation and analysis of racial categories that defined indigeneity. Lipschütz then promoted the creation of an indigenous institute within the Chilean state and advocated on behalf of the Mapuche people. Because indigenous leaders themselves developed a strong political movement in the mid twentieth century, transnational indigenismo failed to produce meaningful or lasting progress in Chile. That failure convinced Lipschütz that indigenous peoples should preserve and strengthen traditional communities and seek political autonomy. This analysis joins a growing body of scholarship that challenges conventional views of indigenismo, which characterize it as a repressive ideology used by paternalistic states. This study of Alejandro Lipschütz prefigures the shift toward acknowledging the greater indigenous agency that accompanied identity-based social movements emerging in the 1980s.

This special issue, fruit of an American Historical Association panel on the entanglements of Catholicism and nationhood after Mexico's Cristero War (1926-29), offers five new histories that cumulatively give the lie to anything so monolithic as a twentieth-century “Catholic history.” As is well known, the Cristero War was a major armed confrontation between the Church and the postrevolutionary state and their respective bases, followed, as the story goes, by an uneasy truce and an enduring coexistence lasting for decades, to the 1950s and perhaps to the 1970s.

This article examines the cultural and political repertoire that contributed to Catholics’ understanding of violence as a legitimate means to resist the secular state in 1930s Mexico. Following the end of the Cristero War (1926-29), the Church officially and overtly rejected the use of violence by Catholics as a means to defend religious freedom. However, many Catholic militants and organizations continued to support violence as a last but necessary recourse to resist the country's so-called tyrannical government and to build a Catholic nation that would recognize the kingship of Christ on earth. Informed by noncanonical understandings of martyrdom, sacrifice, and redemptive violence, as well as by an intransigent view of politics, these Catholics regarded violence as a moral response against the injustices and dangers posed by what they considered an oppressive and blasphemous state. The article is based on the examination of a series of violent events perpetrated by Catholic militants during the 1930s, as well as on the analysis of several newspapers, official documents, and Catholic publications. Contrary to government portrayals of Catholicism as a top-down, monolithic, and unchanging set of institutions and practices that promoted recalcitrant forms of religious militancy, Catholics were in fact deeply divided regarding the legitimacy of violence along theological, moral, and practical grounds.

This article deals with the emergence of the Nazas-Aguanaval group of priests in the northern region of La Laguna, in northern Mexico, after the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 Medellín Conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM). I argue that both the reformism of the Second Vatican council and the push for a “preferential option for the poor” provided the space for an alliance between the progressive priests of the Nazas-Aguanaval group and the Maoist activists of Política Popular (People's Politics, PP). In this context, it was the Nazas-Aguanaval priests who introduced Política Popular's Maoism in La Laguna and Chiapas among peasants and students. At the same time, the radical tradition and economic conditions of La Laguna made it possible for local left-wing activists to connect with transnational currents such as the Movement of Priests for the Third World and Christians for Socialism. Based on a broad array of sources—including oral histories, Maoist pamphlets, local newspapers, Mexican security archives, and documentation from Mexican and Latin American priests’ organizations—this article brings together the regional history of protest in La Laguna, the historiography of the Global Sixties, and the history of the progressive factions of the Catholic Church in Latin America.

This article traces women's involvement in Colombia's mid nineteenth-century Liberal Revolution, particularly the 1860 Liberal-Federalist revolt led by General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera and the two-and-a-half year civil war, or Federalist War, it precipitated. It uses personal correspondence and other archival sources to trace that involvement, highlighting how women both participated in the war, taking sides with one or another of the country's two rival political parties (Liberals or Conservatives), and shaped the larger partisan contest in which the fighting was embedded. It shows first how Mosquera's female supporters cooperated with him, offering logistical support and information that proved critical to the Liberal-Federalists’ eventual victory. It also shows how Conservative women opposed or resisted Mosquera and his followers. The article, moreover, examines the efforts of members of both groups of female partisans—pro-Mosquera Liberals or “Rojas” and anti-Mosquera “Godas”—to influence politics and public opinion, whether through private, behind-the-scenes personal conversation or through the spread of news, and sometimes disinformation. Above all, it reveals how women shaped the wartime public sphere through their active participation in the so-called ‘war of words’—the fierce ideological and rhetorical struggle that defined the very terms and meaning of the conflict.

In this paper I carry out a microphilological study of a section of the Codex Indianorum 7, a colonial devotional manuscript in Nahuatl preserved in the John Carter Brown Library. It contains wisdom teachings derived from the biblical Book of Tobit and directed to both parents and their children. I argue that this hitherto unstudied text reveals the Native author's liberty to creatively mold and adapt a culturally remote European prototype into the Native genre of oratorical art—the huehuehtlahtolli, or “words of the elders.” The author also skillfully embedded and contextualized the content of the biblical instruction in local cultural meanings understandable and valid to an Indigenous audience. As an example of cross-cultural translation and colonial textual production, this source provides new insights into Native forms of agency, intellectual autonomy, and acculturation strategies reflected in creative dialogues with European traditions, developed and maintained despite the seemingly substitutive Christianization policies imposed on Indigenous people in the sixteenth century.

Education was an essential ingredient of the state strategy to address the so-called ‘Indian question’ in the Americas throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Bolivian intellectuals promoted a new educational policy inspired by indigenismo, a trend of thought that sought to solve the problems faced by indigenous people concerning welfare, hygiene, agricultural techniques, and land issues; it also sought, to some extent, to teach them to value their own culture. The educational experience, originally conducted in the village of Warisata and then spread across the Andes, has merited special attention from historiography. However, very little is known about Warisata's replication in the country's lowlands. This paper explores the originality, scope, and limitations of the first project of socialization of ‘non-subjected’ societies of the Amazon Basin. That project was inspired by the postulates of the innovative Warisateño model, which aimed to give birth to a “new Indian” who would contribute actively and voluntarily to the progress of the nation. The categories adopted in that project, and the practices carried out, were inscribed in the positivists’ thought, based on their view of the alleged “wild nature” and “savagery” of the groups with whom educators would interact. This study aims to contribute to the debate on the ‘Indian question’ in the Americas by highlighting the contradictions faced by intellectuals when designing projects for the “integration” of otherness into the nation.

This special issue traces its roots to a workshop on the international, transnational and global dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution held at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in May 2019. Convened by Dr. Eline van Ommen and Dr. Tanya Harmer, the editors of this special issue, the workshop was generously funded by the LSE Department of International History and the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre. Most of the articles that follow were first presented at this workshop, where a lively exchange took place on the revolution's history and present-day legacies.

The history of the Cold War in Latin America in the 1970s is commonly split into two episodes: the establishment of anticommunist dictatorships and the ensuing repression across the Southern Cone in the early and middle decade, and the Nicaraguan Revolution and the eruption of violent conflicts across Central America at its close. By exploring the Chilean and Argentine response to the Nicaraguan Revolution, this article brings these two episodes together, demonstrating how they were understood to belong to one and the same ideological conflict. In doing so, it highlights the importance of the revolution in the Chilean and Argentine perception of the Cold War and explores how the Sandinista triumph directly shaped Southern Cone ideas about US power and the communist threat, also prompting reflection on their own ‘models’ for anticommunist governance. Both regimes responded by increasing their support for anticommunist forces in Guatemala and El Salvador, often conducting this aid through a wider transnational and clandestine network. This article contributes to new understandings of the nature of Latin American anticommunism in this period, challenges traditional understandings of external involvement in Central America, and demonstrates the need to understand events in Latin America in this period in their full regional context.

Acapulco became a global town during the early seventeenth century, characterized not only by transpacific trade, but also by an increasingly large Afro-Mexican population residing and laboring at the port. A cohort of Afro-Mexican women gained prominence and visibility by delivering accurate predictions on the arrival of galleons to Acapulco. They adapted mixed African and Indigenous divination practices to calm port residents worried about galleon losses on the world's largest ocean. Scholarship on the Spanish Pacific has yet to investigate how the globalization of New Spain through galleon travel affected African and Afro-descendant communities. This article contends that the dangers of Pacific travel, and anxieties about them, frequently exceeded the therapeutic capacities of Catholic dogma. Black women, drawing on the profound West and West Central African estimation of female diviners, practiced clairvoyance to report on the location of galleons and whether they would arrive safely. The confluence of an increasing population of Afro-Mexicans with the economic dynamism of transpacific trade transformed spiritual life at the eastern node of Spain's Pacific empire. Black women positioned themselves at the center of these massive structural transformations and ultimately created new cultures as spiritual authorities in Acapulco.

The following speech was written in acceptance of the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) for 2020, would have been delivered at the January 2021 meeting of the American Historical Association/CLAH, were it not for the coronavirus pandemic. I share this award with the majority of the members of CLAH: the scholar-teachers of Latin American history who dedicate most of their professional time and energy to teaching undergraduates across North America. Harking back to Herbert Bolton's project for a hemispheric history, incidents and anecdotes from my own experience learning and teaching about Latin America serve to illustrate that reducing provincialism, chauvinism, and ethnocentrism among North American undergraduates are still valid objectives.

For a half-century, the historiography on Spanish Habsburg rule suggested that the crown envisioned Indies society as best divided into two segregated sociolegal groups: the republic of the Spaniards and the republic of the Indians. This model was popularized by the eminent mid twentieth century Swedish historian Magnus Mörner and has since become a foundational concept in the field. However, using extensive archival evidence, this article suggests that the Mörner Thesis of the Two Republics is flawed. Historicizing sixteenth-century uses of the concept of the republic, it finds that contemporaries conceived of a complex social order in which many political communities such as municipalities and groups of petitioners could overlap within larger meta-republics, such as the Indies republic and the Christian faith-republic. It then turns to subjects’ uses of the two republics, noting that this conceptual duality appeared rarely in the petitions of Spanish officials, commoners, Indians, Afro-descendants, and mestizos, and was also rare in royal and viceregal legislation. Moreover, this binary most often served to suggest Spaniards’ and Indians’ common ground. The article then reflects on other approaches to understanding the Indies’ Spanish-Indian binary, the place of non-Spanish, non-Indian vassals within republic-thinking, and the staggering complexity of Indies laws, categories, and social interactions.

The article analyzes political conflict in Mexico through a powerful social movement that erupted in the massive shantytown of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl between 1969 and 1973. In the summer of 1969, after decades of abysmal living conditions, the residents of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (Neza) launched a payment strike to demand the federal government expropriate the land from private land developers, with the intent to gain urban infrastructure and formal property titles. The rebellion that plunged Ciudad Neza into a state of perpetual strife reflects a juncture in Mexican history when the urban shantytown emerged as a distinct and influential site for mass politics. This article historicizes Mexico's urban shantytown as a political space where the ruling party's entrenched clientelism contended with embryonic forms of local democracy. Revealing numerous contradictions, this case study is emblematic of how the urban periphery was a precursor to the vibrant yet incomplete democratization that would come to define national politics in Mexico and much of Latin America in the 1980s.

The article examines the ideological character of Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship by exploring its ties and dialogue with Francisco Franco's Spain. Known as the “Argentine Revolution,” Onganía's regime (1966-70) was, the article shows, one of the first Cold War Latin American dictatorship to overtly use Francoist ideology as its point of reference. While building on the conventional wisdom that the legacies of the Spanish Civil War informed right-wing thought in Latin America, the study then shifts its focus to Spain's 1960s “economic miracle” and technocratic state model, observing them as a prominent discursive toolkit for authoritarian Argentine intellectuals. Drawing on newly discovered correspondence and archival sources, the article first excavates the intellectual networks operating between Franco's Spain and the Argentine right during the 1950s and 1960s. Once handpicked by Onganía to design his regime, these Argentine Franco-sympathizers were to decide the character of the Argentine Revolution. Second, the article sheds light on the intimate collaboration between the two dictatorships, and further explores the reasons for Onganía's downfall. In doing so, the study adds to a burgeoning historiographic field that underscores the significance of the Francoist dictatorship in the Latin American right-wing imaginary.

This article aims to analyze traces of Aztec cultural memory recorded in sixteenth-century cultural sources of Central Mexico. It is a study of the particular case of an Aztec hero named Tlacahuepan, whose glorious death was commemorated in many songs and chronicles. The texts in question reveal highly symbolic language, as well as clearly established narrative patterns. The study of their discursive tools can cast considerable light on the ideological background that underlies the oral tradition on which these stories have been based. It can also contribute to a better understanding of the methods and strategies employed by the Aztecs to memorize the past and explain the present.