In 1960 the May 3 feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross was removed from the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church in order to reduce the number of major feasts and to focus devotion to the Holy Cross on September 14, the day commemorating its Exaltation. For many Mexicans, this change was more distressing than papal authorities had anticipated. People from various walks of life and places were not inclined to give up this favorite feast day, which they felt was a lifeline to well-being here and now and the promise of salvation hereafter. For them it was an essential practice, not a vestigial one Workers in the building trades were conspicuous dissenters. Virtually every construction site in Mexico must have its protective cross, to be decorated and honored on May 3. And communities all over Mexico, especially in rural towns and villages, celebrated the day by decorating their special crosses in public and private places, attending mass, praying for rain and an abundant harvest, and celebrating with food, drink, fireworks, music, and dancing. For many, it was the only Day of the Holy Cross they had known. To steer clear of a prolonged dispute over popular traditions of faith, Mexican bishops successfully appealed to Rome for May 3 to remain a major feast there.

In 1773, a Mexico City expert in gold embroidery named don José Mariano Sánchez de Salazar Zitlalpopoca petitioned for a license to operate his own shop and take on apprentices. As handling precious metals was politically and economically sensitive, such professions were by law exclusive, open only to those of proven character, standing, and reputation—qualities understood to be inherited by blood. Thus, to establish his sufficiency for the license don José called forth witnesses to his family's honor, reputation, and good lineage.

On January 14, 1954, Bahians gathered in the city of Salvador, in Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia, for the Lavagem do Bonfim, the annual ritual washing of the Church of Bonfim and its front patio and steps that was for them a highlight of the Festival of the Senhor do Bonfim. The archbishop of Salvador, Augusto Álvaro da Silva, had recendy banned the syncretic ritual, primarily because it combined elements of popular Catholicism and an important ritual obligation to Oxalá, a principal deity or “saint” in the religious practice of Candomblé, an African Brazilian religion that grew out of West and West Central African antecedents. The water for the lavagem, for instance, was ceremonially prepared and transported in vases during a procession by African Bahian mães-de-santo (priestesses) and filhos-de-santo (initiates) of Candomblé, known together as “baianas” and dressed entirely in white.

Scholars of colonial Spanish America are divided between those who cherish Spaniards for respecting indigenous land rights and those who denounce them for not having done so. For the first group, Spanish respect was enshrined in political and theological debates and in legislation and practice that from the sixteenth century asserted that natives had right to the lands they possessed before Europeans arrived. For the second group, native dispossession was a dominant feature of colonial life. Whatever the theory may have mandated, the balance of power favored non-natives by allowing them access to a wide variety of social, legal, political, economic, and cultural instruments enabling them to control the land.

On September 28, 1927, the central atrium of the Museo Etnográfico on Buenos Aires's Calle Moreno was crowded with people. More than 100 men and women were in attendance, from Universidad de Buenos Aires rector Ricardo Rojas to Argentine president Marcelo T. de Alvear, wrapped in heavy jackets against the spring chill to participate in the inauguration of the museum's new building. Previously housed in “the gloomy catacombs” of an administrative basement, the Museo Etnográfico had now relocated to an airy, Baroque-style building two blocks south of the city's central Plaza de Mayo. In his inaugural speech on that chilly September morning, museum director Salvador Debenedetti proclaimed that the Museo Etnográfico, until then a predominandy academic museum, was undergoing a powerful transformation: it was becoming a public museum. Debenedetti proclaimed that the museum's new incarnation would be a place “of tranquility and of meditation, which will move the spirit of the people and lead them from epoch to epoch, from region to region, from culture to culture.” He described the museum's public visitors, or “the people,” as active participants in the institution's openly nation-building agenda, and celebrated their participation as a “patriotic conjunction, inspired by die desire for scientific progress, the love of truth, [and] the desire to know better and penetrate in its essence the thought of our native ancestors in the land of América.”

Sévère Courtois's modest ambition was to revolutionize the world. “It is man's holy cause and duty to protect and aid the defense and to establish Independence in all the Universe,” he instructed his brother Joseph in October 1821. At the time, the Courtois brothers were a mere hundred miles apart; Sévère had set up an independent government on Providencia Island, in the western Caribbean, and Joseph was embarking on a political career of his own in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Though the two brothers were born in the French colony of St. Domingue, the tumults of the Age of Revolutions had swept them away from their native island. At the time Sévère penned the letter urging his brother to support his universal liberation enterprise, Joseph had just come back from fighting in the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Sévère had participated in multiple revolutionary coups and moved from New Orleans to Cartagena, and from there to Texas and then Florida.

In sharp contrast to her mestizo and mulatto neighbors, Costa Rica is one of a handful of Latin American countries commonly regarded as “white.” For more than a century, national elites and foreign observers alike attributed Costa Rica's relative political stability, high rate of literacy, and prosperity to the nation's supposed racial homogeneity. The “Switzerland of Central America” was rarely regarded as part of the African Diaspora, yet people of African descent have been part of Costa Rican society since its colonial beginnings. In fact, the patron saint of Costa Rica has always been depicted as black. Known affectionately as La Negrita, the Virgen de los Angeles is believed to have appeared with a divine mandate of harmony at a remote time when Costa Rica was divided by racial tensions. In the legend of her apparition some have found the key to Costa Rica's tradition of “rural democracy.”

Through much of the history of the Americas, political life took place in two spheres: the colonial realm, in which a complex population of Indians, Africans, and Iberians interacted within the civic framework of European institutions; and the extra-colonial realm, in which largely indigenous populations beyond the reach of imperial authority maintained separate political systems. Encounters across this divide were sometimes peaceful and symbiotic, but at other times violent. Many historical discussions of interethnic conflict presume a general and persistent difference in power between these two groups. On Mexico's northern frontier of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the relative advantage enjoyed by colonial versus extra-colonial peoples shifted radically depending on the moment and place of encounter. This article proposes that differences in topography and ecology, often between places not far removed in absolute distance, produced inversions in the relative power enjoyed by indigenous and settler populations. The cultivation of maize was common to the refuge zones of settlers and northern Indians alike: unassimilated Indian bands concealed and protected their crops in difficult-to-find mountain valleys; settler communities, both Spanish and Indian, protected crops close to their respective concentrations of population and militiamen. Both colonial and extra-colonial peoples subsisted on cattle, and the demand for vast pasture spaces produced inevitable conflict. Thus, the geography of the north produced areas of security and vulnerability for all parties.

At the end of August 1796, Balthasar Ruiz, a weaver from Teotitlán del Valle, departed with his son to sell woven goods in the mountainous region to the south. Over 23 days, he traveled a distance of 45 miles as the crow flies and upon his return was jailed when the boy fell ill with smallpox. The two had made a typical journey in an atypical time: administrators throughout the intendancy of Oaxaca were actively pursuing a program of contagion avoidance as smallpox spread there from Guatemala and Chiapas. What Oaxaca's intendant, Antonio de Mora y Peysal, called the “new project” consisted of regulating travel and commerce and isolating infected residents in casas de curación. In Teotitlan, textile producers found themselves at the outskirts of their village laboring to build a makeshift infirmary for their children and a camposanto, a consecrated field, for burial of smallpox victims. Months later, some from the village would call the regime a violation “like Herod's massacre.” At the time, quarantined in their village without access to markets or crops, there was little else for the men to do.

On the afternoon of August 10, 1959, several dozen Dominican and Cuban women gathered in the streets of Havana. Dressed in black as though headed to a funeral, they mourned the political situation in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Specifically, they targeted the dictator Rafael Trujillo, calling him the “Jackal of the Caribbean.” As they paraded through the streets carrying placards and visiting newspaper offices, tliey were focusing attention on their specific struggles as women and motliers. Their posters read, “Dominican Women Support the Revolutionary Government”; “We Ask for the Expulsion of Trujillo from the OAS”; and “We Represent the Mourning of the Assassinations Committed by Trujillo.”

As the sun was setting on December 12, 1907, the 16-year-old Tecla Xicay and her sister Inocenta were returning to their village of Tonajuyu, San Martín Jilotepeque (henceforth San Martín), in highland Guatemala when a portly ladino with a thin blonde mustache jumped out from behind a gate, took off his shoes, and attempted to rape Tecla. When she resisted, he hit her twice in the neck and then stabbed her in the back as she fled. Illiterate and monolingual speakers of Kaqchikel-Maya (henceforth Kaqchikel), the sisters recounted their harrowing ordeal through an interpreter the next day in Chimaltenango's municipal court. Apparentiy eager to escape the grasp of the state and ladino world, the two indigenous women did not tarry in Chimaltenango. Despite the military surgeon's insistence that Xicay be admitted to the hospital to cure her open wound, she refused, saying she would take care of it herself. Ladino and patriarchal in their design and operation, institutions such as courts and hospitals that held the potential to assist indigenous women often alienated them.

Appreciated among Latin Americanists in the United States and highly regarded in Chile, Arnold (“Arnie”) Bauer taught history at the University of California at Davis from 1970 to 2005, and was director of the University of California's Education Abroad Program in Santiago, Chile, for five years between 1994 and 2005. Well-known for his engaging writing style, Bauer reflects broad interests in his publications: agrarian history (Chilean Rural Society: From the Spanish Conquest to 1930 [1975]), the Catholic Church and society (as editor, La iglesia en la economía de América Latina, siglos XIX-XIX [1986]), and material culture (Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture [2001]). He has also written an academic mystery regarding a sixteenth-century Mexican codex, The Search for the Codex Cardona (2009). His coming-of-age memoir (Time's Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas [2012]) describes his childhood and was recently named one of the top five books of 2012 by The Atlantic. He has also written some 50 articles and book chapters and more than 60 book reviews.

In studying the nuances of any legal term from the colonial period in Latin America it is always good to have recourse to the Siete Partidas, the compilation of royal law promulgated, and some say written, by the famous thirteenth-century Castilian monarch, Alfonso X, often called “The Wise.”

Long associated with the context of territorial disputes on the definition of the Amazon frontiers of the Iberian empires in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the map of the Amazon River designed by Jesuit Samuel Fritz is as famous as it is misunderstood. The map is, in fact, quite poorly understood, in both the field of cartographic history, where it would certainly occupy a place of importance, and the nascent field of Amazon social history, where it often serves as a supporting illustration. In fact, even the context in which this map was produced raises disputes that require further study, distinct from those undertaken by nationalist historiographies of the countries that share borders in Amazonia. For example, few studies have been carried out regarding the means of territorial occupation and their inherent conflicts during the first centuries of European colonization of this region. It is precisely for such analysis that the map of Samuel Fritz stands as an important document for historians: more than simply rendering the course of the Amazon River it transmits a political discourse, as does any map, intrinsic to the context in which it was produced.

In the Mendel Collection at the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, is an unpublished diary of over 400 pages written by a Spanish soldier during his voyage from Spain to New Spain, and his return voyage to the Iberian Peninsula, between May 30, 1821, and May 17, 1822. The document is titled Apuntaciones que en su viaje a ultramar ha tomado el oficial de infantería Modesto de la Torre (Notes Written by Infantry Officer Modesto de la Torre During His Voyage Overseas). Lieutenant De la Torre was part of the delegation that accompanied General Juan O'Donojú when he assumed the position of captain-general and chief policy officer of New Spain, the highest-ranking office in Spain's overseas territories, following the reinstatement of die Constitution of Cádiz in 1820. The diary discusses a wide variety of topics, including the defeat of the Royalist army at Puerto Cabello (Carabobo, Venezuela) and the subsequent exodus of loyalist officers and troops to Havana. The diary also presents portraits of the people, cities, villages, towns, and flora and fauna that the lieutenant saw during his journey.

Over the course of the past half century, the field of colonial Latin American history has been greatly enriched by the contributions of Father Stafford Poole. He has written 14 books and 84 articles and book chapters and has readily shared his knowledge at coundess symposia and other scholarly forums. Renowned as a historian, he was also a seminary administrator and professor of history in Missouri and California. Moreover, his background and formation are surely unique among priests in the United States and his story is certainly worth the telling.