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This article examines the fate of people who had escaped slavery in colonial Cartagena de Indias as well as that of their descendants. In the 1690s, colonial military troops captured many individuals of African descent who had long lived as free in the hinterlands and forcibly transported them to Cartagena city. In the aftermath of these military campaigns, some putative owners filed lawsuits claiming that their ancestors had never relinquished ownership claims to the ancestors of freeborn residents of the forests. Since many of the captives had lived in the hinterlands all their lives, strategies such as performing acts of possession over people of African descent were not available to the claimants. This essay shows how some claimants were nonetheless able to obtain rulings that granted them rights of ownership over free Afro-descended people who had been seized and exiled from their home communities in Cartagena province’s hinterlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay juxtaposes the trial of a prominent Hispanic, Manuel Jesus Castillo, in 1882 with the celebrations of the centenary of St. George's Caye in 1898 to gain a deeper understanding of the methods employed by officials in Belize to impose order on the complex post-Caste War society there in a way that was materially and politically advantageous to colonial rule at the nineteenth century's end. Colonial officials used the language and theme of loyalty to further imperial and class agendas in the context of political, social, and economic contestation. The idiom of loyalty served to simplify the complex reality of an often discordant multiethnic society into a simple binary of loyalty versus disloyalty that determined the Britishness of the colony's subjects and provided beleaguered colonial officials with the vehicle for counteracting the dominance of the unofficial members of the colonial government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noxious airs from trash discards, irrigation canals, marketplaces, hospitals, and plazas vitiated colonial Lima's environment. Using olfactory history, this article examines how residents reacted to their pungent environs. Early modern Iberians believed that foul smells were harmful. Fully understanding this relationship, municipal leaders subjugated the San Lázaro district by relocating its indigenous population and moving noxious trades and institutions to the area. I argue that the concentration of miasmas in San Lázaro represents an environmental conquest. San Lázaro's ethnically and socially diverse population lived with unhealthy airs that threatened their health. By contrast, central Lima enjoyed fresher airs in locations primarily occupied by Spanish vecinos (male, landowning citizens, who were allowed to participate in local politics) in and around the Plaza de Armas, the cathedral, the viceroy's palace, and the municipal hall. The protection of central Lima's airs reveals that environmental management corresponded to social status and political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay interprets Chilean accounts of a loyalty oath by Chinese coolies to the Chilean army during the War of the Pacific against a broader social history of Chinese agrarian resistance in Peru and military experience in China. The essay argues that masculinity and labor were central to articulating divergent political agendas and defining national differences as racial differences. Chilean tales about emancipating Chinese slaves affirmed Chile's superiority over despotic Peruvians. Moreover, in stories about a Chinese oath, Chileans affirmed their civilizing mission by recognizing Chinese men as similar to themselves: brave warriors prepared to die for freedom and nation. For Chinese men, the oath was not about loyalty to Chile but loyalty to each other in an ongoing fight against bondage on Peruvian plantations. The ceremony enacted a Chinese fraternity of mutual protection and hierarchy that helped leverage Chile's invasion to replace coolie arrangements with Chinese-controlled subcontracting and free peonage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When recognition of independence lay tantalizingly out of reach, officials of the first Colombian republic devoted funds and expertise toward hiring French-trained naturalists for an expedition. These officials' plan to gain diplomatic recognition of Colombia through European scientific patronage networks initially seemed poised to work. As promises of Colombian platinum piqued British moneylenders' interest, French mapmakers etched the naturalists' early findings onto copperplates. But both the expedition and the Colombian republic emerged amid the transatlantic geopolitical changes and local economic and political crises of the 1820s. The illness and death of key actors compounded these uncertainties. Drawing on published and manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and the naturalists' findings, in addition to a close reading of changes made to French-printed maps, this essay explores the entangled fates of the expedition and the Colombian republic to reveal the materiality and spatiality of natural history knowledge production and the praxis of geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains two unique aspects of the New World Spanish empire: its production of hundreds of thousands of royal decrees, and the unique categories that these edicts contained, such as mestizo and mulato. I outline the petition and response system, through which vassals of all social backgrounds constantly suggested new laws to the ruling Council of the Indies. Pressed for time, the council's overwhelmed ministers often transplanted petitions' vocabulary verbatim into decrees. This meant that subjects often phrased imperial laws minor and major, regional and Indies-wide. Using a four-step archival methodology, this article demonstrates how scholars can match vassals' petitions to decrees. This essay then shows how legal categories such as mestizo and mulato came about through the petitions of not only Spaniards but also Indians, mestizos, and mulatos themselves. Subjects of any social background could therefore introduce and shape Indies legal constructs, and the empire's agenda, from the ground up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arrests for participation in the global cocaine trade surged in Peru during the 1970s. This article uses court cases to explore complaints in Ayacucho of wrongful arrests in the cocaine trade, examining claims of innocence, false confessions under torture, and police and judicial misconduct between 1976 and 1981. What emerges is a picture of abuse and lives upended by the cocaine trade's repression, often on dubious grounds. Ayacucho police routinely tortured during interrogations, engaging in the kinds of violence that became systematic during counterinsurgent warfare against the Shining Path and its presumed supporters. These cases reveal that many Ayacuchanos profoundly distrusted their police and court systems. That was especially true for impoverished--and predominantly rural and indigenous--men and women who could not afford lawyers or bribes. Ayacuchanos' devastating experiences of cocaine repression fueled anger toward the police, which Shining Path militants capitalized on early in their armed struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the politics of dance collaborations between Cubans and Mexicans from 1959 to 1983. During this period, Mexican modern dancers worked in Cuba, and Cuban ballet dancers in Mexico. Over years of close, visceral encounters, Mexican and Cuban dancers built cultural institutions and international relationships filled with emotional ups and downs. Focusing on the sentiments that guided dancing revolutionaries, this article examines the everyday process of international relations as creative diplomats from Cuba and Mexico coordinated movements in classes, rehearsals, and performances. This article contends that in contrast to the friendly but distant bilateral relations forged by elite politicians in a tense Cold War context, dancers made the Cuban-Mexican relationship an intimate, creative partnership among revolutionary citizens. This demonstrates how the personal and interpersonal, in dialogue with geopolitics and ideology, shaped the cultural Cold War in Latin America and how it changed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hundreds of Castilian free blackmen and women obtained royal travel licenses to cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as black Old Christians. They settled across the Spanish Indies and developed trades as artisans, traders, sailors, healers, and small business owners, often becoming prominent and wealthy vecinos (residents). Exploring these often obscure and long-invisible biographies of individuals, the article revisits key historiographical debates about race, purity of blood, and vassalage in the early Spanish empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1867 the Benito Juárez government prohibited the teaching of Christian doctrine in public schools. The ensuing debate over religion and education became part of Mexico's Kulturkampf. This article briefly surveys this debate but focuses on whether the same tensions that animated national discourses around education were felt (and acted upon) locally. The article analyzes detailed responses submitted by priests to an 1885 archiepiscopal questionnaire on schooling in their parishes. Although some priests reported vehement opposition to teaching doctrine on the part of municipal authorities, most priests were able to fashion alliances with teachers that permitted doctrine to be taught in almost two-thirds of the public schools. With these alliances in place, the significant increase in the number of schools after 1867 meant that all but the students in the most rabidly anti-Catholic schools were exposed to Christian doctrine more effectively after the supposedly de-Catholicizing school reforms than before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the institutionalization of Chilean social security policy and its unequal distribution of resources from 1920 to 1970. From 1924 to 1931, when new labor legislation was introduced, Chile built a social security system divided into two major bodies: one comprehensive and public, the other private and organized by type of employment. This article seeks to demonstrate that the combined efforts of these two sectors to extend benefits to the entire Chilean population were insufficient to eradicate inherent inequalities. To explain this trajectory, the article examines the legally defined space for action by public, semipublic, and private administrative entities in which the various actors discussed and negotiated how to implement social security. This implementation was not an inevitable outcome but rather the result of a series of specific policy choices. This perspective allows insight into how the paradigm of welfare as a social right resulted in practice in segmented social security policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1885 Wistano Luis Orozco was a known political opponent of Jalisco's state government. Orozco was beaten and jailed because of a journalistic note published in his newspaper, after which finally he fled from Jalisco. That episode reveals values of the Porfiriato's political culture like honor and decency, as well as some contradictions between the discourses and practices that gave meaning to social and political order. The beating lets us know that in Guadalajara there were alternative conceptions of values. By acting as a representative of the aspirations and values of opposition groups, Orozco became a victim of political persecution by the Jalisco government and local elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the consumption of foreign machetes and, to a lesser extent, imported textiles by peasants, smallholders, and artisans in nineteenth-century Colombia to show that the popular sectors of society were the largest consumers of foreign goods and as such were able to change market conditions and make specific demands regarding the quality of imported products intended for their consumption. By so doing, the article questions the premise that because of their poverty Colombian popular classes were always drawn to buying cheaper imported goods and sacrificing quality for price. Thus, the article adds not only to the recent historiography of consumption in Latin America but also to the broad literature on nineteenth-century popular groups by inviting historians to start viewing peasants, artisans, and smallholders as active participants, both as citizens and as consumers, in a new political and economic reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes through the prism of exile and return the journey of General Juan Lavalle’s remains from the battlefield to Bolivia, Chile, and then Buenos Aires. After the death of Lavalle at the hands of Federalist militias in Jujuy province in 1841, his followers carried his bones and heart with them to Bolivia. His remains became a focal point of exile politics in Bolivia and Chile, where republican funerals were held in Lavalle’s honor. The return of Lavalle’s remains, sponsored by the Buenos Aires government and organized by e´migre´s in Chile, became part of the conflict between the province and the Argentine Confederation in the 1850s. Exile and return, embodied by the remains, were important yet conflictual experiences that legitimized the post-Rosas order. The role played by e´migre´s in the repatriation of Lavalle and the debates over his memory highlight the politics of transnational exile at the heart of the new republic’s organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When analyzing the effects of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution in the countryside, scholars have highlighted the political role of the colonos (tenants) and the extended program of land redistribution of large estates that started soon after the government decreed the agrarian reform. None of these studies have looked at the distinct political agenda led by comunarios—members of independent Indian communities—who had lost their lands to latifundio expansion. Uneasy with the government agenda that proclaimed land for those who work it, they petitioned restitution of their communal property rights, proclaiming “land to the original owners.” Revisionist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, critical of the revolution, argued that the nationalist party eroded communal property rights. This article demonstrates that comunario political action after the revolution not only succeeded in reshaping the government agrarian agenda but also used the new legislation to regain lands lost to hacienda landlords since the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH, 1967–1976) was the first political movement of homosexual men in Argentina. Despite its short life span, this organization set the ground for future developments. The FLH emerged in the context of increasing authoritarianism rather than being the result of a transition to democracy. The relationship with homophobic Peronists and left-wing traditions was, paradoxically, crucial for the emergence of the FLH. Most homosexual activists came from the Left, and they understood homosexual liberation as one aspect of the struggle against capitalism. These activists were highly critical of anticapitalist politics as it existed in Argentina at the time, but they also actively sought to become allies of the expanding New Left during the period. Eventually, however, the 1976–1983 military dictatorship made all forms of dissidence impossible, and the FLH had to dissolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sonoran women who organized anti-Chinese auxiliaries in the immediate postrevolutionary years participated in Mexican women's movement into the public sphere from a more constrained role in the private spaces of home and church. While a particular ideal of womanhood imposed on women a duty to defend country, race, and gender—increasingly in the public sphere—the lack of suffrage constrained women's political participation. At least two Sonoran women, María de Jesús Váldez and Emélida Carrillo, imagined the vote for women, a vision in which women's suffrage depended on and was instrumental to racial hierarchy and discrimination against Chinese. As leaders of anti-Chinese committees, chineras, pelonas, voters in newspaper contests, and Independence Day Queens, Sonoran women acted both within and against evolving notions of ideal Mexican womanhood, an ideal that was gendered, racialized, and classist. Women's anti-Chinese activism in Sonora complicates the story of women's enfranchisement in Sonora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The silver produced by indigenous mine workers in Potosí, Bolivia, helped fuel early modern global trade. While historiography has analyzed the structure of the labor force, one important question has not been addressed: how workers themselves acted on and changed the conditions imposed on their lives. This article argues that they fundamentally shaped Potosí's labor system. I analyze, then, the interaction between coerced and free labor—mitayos and mingas—and emphasize their interconnection with k'ajchas (self-employed workers) and the rudimentary ore mills known as trapiches. The article demonstrates how k'ajchas and trapiches contested the property rights of the traditional Spanish mine- and millowners in Potosí. I also highlight the key role of women in refining and trading ores, which challenges standard gender assumptions about mining labor. By the eighteenth century a heterogeneous popular economy broke the monopoly over production once held by Spanish mine- and millowners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early eighteenth century witnessed the rise to power of the Miskitu Zambos within the Miskitu Kingdom on the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. The Zambos were the offspring of African slaves from a pirated slave ship and the indigenous inhabitants of the region engaged in long-range raiding. Their rise is explained here by showing that the original core of the group, some 200 slaves taken from two Portuguese vessels by Dutch privateers in 1636, were prisoners of war captured from the army of Mbwila, a small kingdom in today's Angola. Their cohesion and military skills helped them maintain a special identity within the Miskitu Kingdom and then wage a civil war against its indigenous leaders. The subsequent history of the Miskitu Kingdom involved rivalry between the Zambos and the indigenous Miskitu (Tawira) components of the population, involving the English and Spanish in their ongoing conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although indigenous languages elsewhere in the Americas declined during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in eighteenth-century Yucatan fluency and literacy in Yucatec Maya became more common among castas and creoles. During the later colonial period, interpreters were readily available, with an upsurge in literacy in Maya among criollo clergymen, merchants, militia officers, and provincial administrators. They in turn observed that almost as many mestizo and Afro-Yucatecan subjects and parishioners spoke only Yucatec Maya as their indigenous counterparts. In criminal cases, indigenous, casta, and even creole witnesses and suspects required interpreters to translate their statements. This article builds on earlier research into indigenous-language documentation but shifts its emphasis to mundane genres produced by non-Mayas, demonstrating that the linguistic persistence of Yucatec Maya should be viewed not only as an instance of effective cultural preservation but also as an example of multidirectional transculturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the rich corpus of stories about the dandy-turned-beggar Raúl Grigera, a popular Afro-Argentine street figure from early 1900s Buenos Aires. Stories about El Negro Raúl, told in hundreds of printed texts and images across multiple genres from the early 1900s to the present, reflected and reproduced ideas about degraded and disappearing blackness, and triumphant whiteness, in Argentina. Reading these racial stories alongside information about Raúl's life gleaned from archival sources, the article not only seeks to highlight the power of collective storytelling to construct ideas of whiteness and blackness in modern Argentina and to shape individual fates; it also offers a critical counternarrative of black presence and self-fashioned celebrity in a period for which the historical scholarship on Afro-Argentines has been scarce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines newspapers in late nineteenth-century Buenos Aires in order to analyze the effects of the submarine telegraph cable. After a brief description of the cable's installation, I analyze how international news was circulated, focusing particularly on the role of Havas, the first European press agency to provide such news to South America. The analysis focuses on two dimensions of the submarine cable's effect: changes in the spatial breadth of news coverage, and the acceleration of news circulation. In critical dialogue with the scholarly literature on this topic, the essay argues that the incorporation of the press into the submarine cable network was part of a long process that introduced extremely fragmented representations of the world and placed new reading demands on South American news consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the colonial theater of New Spain, multiple actors utilized the rhetoric of disease to discuss and describe the ongoing discoveries of indigenous traditional religion, which they termed idolatry. Focusing primarily on Yucatán, this article closely analyzes these usages, arguing that the two primary modes of understanding the spread of illness in the early modern world, that of miasmic factors and that of contagion, provided rationalizations for the perseverance of idolatrous practices, informed the institutionalized prevention of these heretical acts, and ultimately provided models for their possible cure. As the definition of idolatry was expanded to include all religious crimes committed by New Spain's indigenous population, it was severed from the material aspect (idol worship) that had originally defined it. The result was the conceptual conflation of two of the defining characteristics of early colonial experience: epidemic disease and ongoing idolatries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In midcolonial Villa Alta, Oaxaca, New Spain, indigenous political conflict intersected with the extirpation of idolatry to shape an arena of native social life and colonial legal culture about which we know little: Indian jurisdiction over crime. Through analysis of bilingual missionary texts and a unique corpus of Zapotec-language criminal records, this article highlights the role of indigenous judges as translators and innovators of legal procedure, notarial form, and criminal discourse. As they prosecuted crimes in Indian tribunals while seeking justice in Spanish courts, native judges and litigants--in conflict and alliance with Spanish civil and ecclesiastical officials-engaged in a spiraling process of translation that vernacularized colonial criminal justice. By putting the histories of Christian translation and of law and empire into productive dialogue, we reconstruct the processes whereby a Spanish and Christian moral order became locally meaningful and politically useful in indigenous communities far removed from Spanish administrative centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the second half of the eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain commissioned two mapping expeditions to determine a border between Brazil and Spanish viceroyalties, agreeing for the first time to define territorial possession through collaborative cartographic efforts. These efforts were mediated by autonomous indigenous communities, who asserted their own land claims. This article explores this dynamic at the borderline's southernmost portion, an area corresponding to present-day Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and southern Brazil. I argue that native peoples known as Charrúas and Minuanes appropriated imperial border-making efforts for their own purposes. As royal officials sought to materialize a border in lands that they did not effectively control, they solicited native agents' support. In response, Charrúas and Minuanes took up arms, crisscrossed the border to develop informal economies or elude imperial armies, or sought to incorporate new settlers into indigenous sociopolitical networks. These actions undermined imperial designs yet made the border a meaningful form of territorial organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent scholarship that has problematized the evidentiary status of archived sources and created new methods and analytical categories for reading sex and gender in those sources, this essay considers the case of Mariano Aguilera from mid-eighteenth-century New Spain. Raised as a girl, Aguilera upon reaching adulthood petitioned ecclesiastical authorities to order a physical inspection of his body so that he could be declared a man and marry Clara Ángela López. The essay shows how both abjection and criminality--or a discourse of "queerness"--led Aguilera to be exiled from his community, denied his petition, and prohibited from having any contact with López. The essay opens further questions about the meanings of hermaphroditism and androgyny in the Atlantic world, the ways in which they shaped medical and legal discourses on sodomy in metropolitan and colonial contexts, and the role of doctors and surgeons in legal cases involving queer bodies and lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Atlantic slave trade came to an end in Brazil in the 1850s, a new form of trafficking began across the borders of Brazil and its neighboring countries. Free persons--mainly women and children living in small communities in Uruguay and Argentina--were kidnapped to be sold as slaves in Brazil. By analyzing the illegal enslavement of the African Rufina and her family along the border between Brazil and Uruguay in 1854, this study argues that Brazilian catchers opened up a new frontier of enslavement, kidnapping free persons in countries where slavery was already abolished. The kidnappings and the diplomatic problems that they generated brought tensions to the development of international relations between Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Britain in the 1850s and 1860s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between sound recordings and history, with a particular focus on the early 20th century. The author comments on the concept of ethnographic sound recordings and their importance to understanding the culture of the time, including social history and inter-group relations.

This article discusses a late 1920s comedic recording of Argentine comedian Tomás Simari entitled "Un viaje en ómnibus." The author comments on the concept of aural modernity, which establishes a relationship between sound and history. She also considers the importance of vocal performance in comedy, including inflection, timing, and accent.

In the midst of Guatemala's nineteenth-century coffee boom, a frost struck the department of Alta Verapaz, destroying coffee harvests and catalyzing a debate over the "slavery" of mandamiento (forced wage labor). At the heart of these disputes was the problem of how to achieve Guatemalan political modernity, which focused discursive struggles over mandamientos around questions of national progress and related conceptions of history as the teleological march of nations and people forward in historical time toward modernity. While state officials justified mandamientos by arguing that Mayas were not yet civilized enough for equality and freedom, Q'eqchi' Maya patriarchs and their ladino allies argued for abolishing mandamientos by drawing upon the metanarrative charting the end of slavery and feudalism and the rise of capitalism. While scholars have illustrated the importance of history to nationalism, this article argues for a broader understanding of historical discourse as a conceptual framework for ordering the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how and where women participated in Brazilian commerce between 1869 and 1904. Over half of Rio de Janeiro's female population worked at the twentieth century's turn, but very little is known about women in commerce. Evidence from formal business partnership contracts demonstrates that women comprised a significant and dynamic sector of the merchant community, despite legal and social barriers. More importantly, their business habits largely paralleled those of their male counterparts. These findings break from current scholarship that narrowly defines businesswomen as exceptional. An analysis of female economic activity, along with the institutional structures regulating their market participation, suggests that gender shaped women's entrance into the market but only narrowly affected their pursuits. Recognizing the various ways that women considered the legal and social demands of their civil status with the broader demands of the market offers a more complete portrait of female economic activity during one of Brazil's most impressive eras of expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewed interest in the linkage between finance and the state has led historians to reexamine corruption. While there is scholarly consensus that the royal sale of appointments (beneficio) corrupted governance and weakened royal authority in a stagnant Spanish empire, the historical record suggests otherwise. Beneficio allowed social newcomers to buy their way into the judiciary. Traditional elites thought that these newcomers were innately corrupt and that making them judges violated distributive justice, or the fair awarding of entitlements by traditional notions of merit. Between 1650 and 1755, enlightened thinking challenged these precepts. The idea that corruption entailed violating royal laws in office gained strength. Performance mattered more, and accepting money for appointments instead of considering traditional merit was part of a utilitarian approach. Thus in 1675 absolutist governments in Madrid began selling appointments to alcaldes mayores in New Spain to gain oversight, appropriate resources, and weaken the viceroys, who lost half, if not more, of their patronage power. Beneficio therefore strengthened the monarchy and should be seen as part of yet another cycle of royal reforms beginning in the late seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1870, the women's association La Siempreviva established a school for girls and a journal of the same name; it both exposed the gender gap in educational opportunities and championed women's emancipation, which challenged patriarchal norms. Yet by 1872, La Siempreviva had abandoned its journal and the public debate on women's emancipation. While La Siempreviva directed the Instituto Literario de Niñas in 1877-1879 and in 1886-1902, men from various social sectors publicly discussed multiple models of womanhood, ranging from the Catholic Marian ideal to the conservative "angel of the house" and the model of Hypatia promoted by Protestants and freethinkers. This article analyzes La Siempreviva's drive to reform traditional gender roles and expand women's rights while tracing how this bargaining resulted in a new model of gender during the Porfiriato marked by the double shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay chronicles the mounting conflict between indigenous peasants and Catholic Church authorities in mid-twentieth-century Chuschi, an Andean community in Ayacucho, Peru. What began as a local conflict between villagers and individual priests developed into an open rebellion against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Ayacucho. Taking advantage of Peru's changing social and political landscape, as well as a vocational crisis within the church, Chuschinos ultimately succeeded in ousting the church from the community, thus contributing to the Catholic Church's final collapse in the Ayacuchan countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the pre-Lenten festivities labeled entrudo in early nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and traces the efforts to repress them, which enjoyed a measure of success by the mid-1850s. During this period, the predominant form of pre-Lenten revelry involved various forms of water play that transgressed the boundaries between the sexes but tended to respect other social hierarchies. After independence, authorities and members of a self-proclaimed ''civilized'' elite sought to repress what they condemned as a ''barbarous'' game. These efforts obtained some success in the 1840s and 1850s as masked balls and parading by elite carnival societies came to dominate middle- and upper-class forms of celebration, although entrudo persisted longer among the lower classes. Based on travelers' accounts and the extensive newspaper debates about entrudo and its repression, this article analyzes a major cultural change among the Brazilian capital's elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political jurisdiction of the colonial cacique, or ethnic lord, is often understood to have been truncated or undermined by Spanish political administration. But the role of the cacique was also key to enabling Spanish administrators to extract wealth from native communities. What exactly that role was is undocumented in Spanish-language archival materials. By examining recent literature on the Iberian qadi, or judge of the Islamic community under Christian rule, this study argues that the cacique, like the qadi, maintained his or her local authority and jurisdiction. Evidence for this hidden jurisdiction is found in a sixteenth-century case that was set aside by the Real Audiencia because it fell outside that body's jurisdiction and within the dominion of the cacique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chaco War with Paraguay represented the largest undertaking by the Bolivian state up to that point and proved to be a definitive turning point in the country's social and political history. This article exposes how little we know about the conflict and examines anew how many fought, who these soldiers were, and the mechanisms by which the state recruited and disciplined them. My examination of wartime mobilization and desertion shows that the central government adopted a multipronged approach, ceding power to local actors to enact mobilization orders, negotiating with interest groups to ensure continued production and protect particular men from recruitment, and relying on violence to enforce a documentary regime. Drawing on new archival sources, most importantly the testimony from wartime military justice proceedings, the article concludes that the oligarchic state was surprisingly successful in mobilizing and retaining soldiers as it faced the formidable challenges of modern mass warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1900s, the US government experimented with what they saw as a progressive style of Influence In the Dominican Republic. While the Roosevelt and Taft administrations sought alternatives to armed Intervention, US officers serving as diplomats pushed for more direct military control, through projects such as the creation of a US-officered frontier guard. Established In 1905 to police revenue along the Dominican-Haitian border, this unique organization had neither precedent nor sanction In international law, but it demonstrated the makeshift Caribbean policy of an expanding United States--and how this expansion gradually militarized diplomacy. Paternalist discourse and rapid economic change perpetuated Internal strife, eventually contributing to bloody civil war and outright US military occupation (1916-1924). This article explores the development of the frontier guard and Interventionism, focusing on the roles of Dominican economic and political change and contemporary US expansionist Ideology, with Its goal of exporting US-style democratic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how a drug problem was manufactured in Cold War Argentina. Unlike in some of its South American neighbors, in Argentina most authorities until the late 1960s did not believe that the country had a serious drug problem, though previous episodes regarding drug usage in the interwar period, explored here, had defined the medical contours of toxicomanía (addiction). But as the 1970s progressed, new legislation framed the drug problem as one of national security, proscribing illicit drug distribution, penalizing consumers, and authorizing federal police to closely monitor areas of youth sociability. Promoted by a diverse team of new experts and in cooperation with US antidrug agencies, the campaign helped create a link between youth, deviance, and subversion, which supposedly corroded the national body. Drugs were defined in repressive terms before the military imposed its dramatic dictatorship in 1976, making drugs a lasting issue in modern Argentine politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-1970s, construction of the world's largest hydroelectric dam, Itaipú Binacional, on the Paraná River attracted thousands of migrants to the border of Brazil and Paraguay In search of employment. Single male workers found employment with the consortium companies constructing the project, including Paraguay's flagship corporation, Conempa. In the barracks and community center located within the construction zone, single men were exposed to an array of company programs In health, safety, education, recreation, and social welfare Intended to shape a new cadre of productive workers and idealized citizens for the new Paraguay envisioned by the military regime. Corporate ideas regarding gender and appropriate sexuality for male workers formed a key pillar In such initiatives. However, as the Infrastructure project moved along its construction schedule and toward completion, the popular figure of the arriero pero (beardless macho) emerged In the company press as a counterexample to company formulations of idealized masculinity for male dam workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the Introduction of the duel in Brazil around 1888--along with its proponents' efforts to distinguish it from street fighting or capoeiragem and "men of honor" from dishonored capoeiras and the uncivilized masses--became a meaningful instrument in a process of symbolic reorganization with significant social, political, and legal implications. This process, staged on the streets and in the newspapers of Rio de Janeiro, also reflected the new role of journalists in Brazilian cultural life. Claims to honor reinforced hierarchies and became an important tool for an emerging cultural elite that sought to assert its cultural, social, economic, and ethnic superiority. The article also discusses the role of testas de ferro and recovers the history of Romão José de Lima, one of this profession's most renowned representatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1765 and 1811, Mexico City sent to Manila, Philippines, about 4,000 Mexicans, including recruits and vagrants who had been sentenced to military service or public works. At this time, the Spanish empire was undertaking a military overhaul in the Pacific. However, viceregal authorities used Manila's need for military replacements to exile individuals who embodied despised moral attributes. The office of the viceroy was apparently unaware of or unconcerned by the problems faced by Manila's authorities as they tried to employ these difficult men in defense of the archipelago. By showing that New Spain played a central role in sculpting Spain's relationship with her most remote possession, this article contributes to the scholarship that challenges the interpretation of the absolutist state as absolute. This transportation process also illuminates that the history of the Spanish Philippines is better apprehended by including the history of colonial Mexico, and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how Juan Belaieff's experiences in the Caucasus of Russia during the early twentieth century shaped his later work with the Paraguayan military in the Chaco region. His Russian training in both military science and ethnography prepared him for his scouting work in the Chaco, a territory contested by both Bolivia and Paraguay. This work, done with the native population of the Chaco, helped secure victory over the Bolivians during the Chaco War (1932-1935). It also played a key role in his broader project of incorporating the native peoples of the Chaco into the Paraguayan nation-state, a project that drew upon his work on behalf of Russia with the populations of the Caucasus. Significantly, his postwar efforts and ethnographic studies directly led to rights and considerations for Paraguay's indigenous population. Belaieff's work demonstrates how both the Paraguayan military and society (long considered by historians as isolated) were influenced by outside ideas and people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the movement of Maroons across imperial frontiers in 18th century Belize and Yucatan. The author discusses flight stories of fugitive slaves as they attempted to escape Belizean logging settlements, compares the experiences of Belizean slaves and those that fled to Yucatan, and explores if non-slaves made the same migrations.

The article focuses on civil disputes throughout 18th-century Spanish America and how they impacted indigenous legal customs. The author discusses the temporal concept of custom within native lawsuits, explores the relationship between indigenous law and Spanish law, and examines how customary law was influenced by modernity and the Enlightenment.

The article focuses on social engineering in Colombia during the late 19th and early 20th century. The author explores how diet and nutrition impacted the notion of race, examines how the medicalization of society and a focus on energy influenced workers' productivity, and compares these social thermodynamics to eugenics.

The article explores the history of the economic development of Venezuela and the modernization of fiscal administration during the rule of general Juan Vicente Gómez. Emphasis is given to reforms by Treasury minister Román Cárdenas to end tax farming and establish the collection of a liquor tax. Other topics include the role of patronage, the expansion of the liquor industry, and bureaucratization.

The article discusses the history of the Ushuaia penal colony in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, in the context of the colonial settlement and environmental character of Patagonia. Emphasis is given to the relationship between prison and place in the experiences of prisoners and guards. Other topics include municipal development, administrative prison violence, and the impact of environmental isolation.