Upon the plantations themselves the laborers are not so badly treated, for there they are the property of their owners, and men treat their own property well, especially when it is of considerable value. But they are brought from a thoroughly healthy climate, where disease is almost unknown, to a feverstricken region. Within twelve months their numbers will probably be reduced to one-third, and at the expiration of the three years a woefully diminished number will return to their lovely homes in the Western Pacific.

In recent years much attention has focused on the labor migration of Pacific Islanders, and particularly Melanesians, during the second half of the nineteenth century for work on the export plantations of Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea, and Queensland. A smaller number, but a quantity nevertheless significant for the populations from which they came, went to labor in Latin America. In 1862-63, for example, vessels from Peru kidnapped perhaps 3,600 persons from the smaller islands of the eastern Pacific and ventured as far west as the Gilbert Islands, where they ensnared three hundred or more unsuspecting individuals. A larger migration from the Gilberts occurred almost thirty years later, when in 1890-92 some twelve hundred individuals signed up to work on the coffee plantations (fincas) of the Pacific piedmont (boca costa) of southern Mexico and Guatemala; this constituted almost fifteen percent of the Gilbertese who migrated for offisland labor after the middle of the century. Less than 800 of the 1890s cohort actually arrived, and perhaps a quarter to a third of these died in the first year, so that their impact on an industry which annually mobilized tens of thousands of local Indians was limited. Nevertheless, for the Guatemalan coffee elites the experience confirmed what they had long suspected, that there would be no solution to their labor problems outside of the republic itself. For the Gilbertese this was by far the largest instance of labor recruitment of the decade, a period of economic hardship and political changes in the archipelago.

Prior to the last two decades most scholars paid little attention to the Central American Catholic Church, viewing it in general as little more than a benevolent arm of the elite power structure or as an anachronistic institution intent on regaining privileges it lost during the nineteenth-century Liberal reforms. Traditionally conservative, its sacerdotal leadership had long accepted without question the medieval notions of church-state cooperation and social inequality. Such a mentality had led to a paternalistic approach to the poor. Rejecting as un-Christian all concepts of class conflict, the church believed the lower classes should be patient and ought not take it upon themselves to attempt to better their own condition. Instead, a well- ordered society was seen as a cooperative, top-down venture in which the upper class worked with the church to ameliorate the condition of the masses.

In September of 1907, the residents of a large conventillo, or tenement house, in Buenos Aires protested a 47 percent rent increase by striking against their landlord and refusing to pay. The strikers called on the residents of other rental buildings to join with them and organized a central committee. The strike spread quickly. By October 1 tenants from more than 750 buildings had joined in the strike. That number increased to nearly 2,000 buildings before the end of 1907. Neighborhood and building committees arose throughout the city as nearly one tenth of the total population of Buenos Aires, and tenants in several other major cities as well, joined the strike in one of the largest and most unusual forms of working-class collective action in early twentieth-century Argentina.

The final years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth signified a time in which the Cuban people adjusted to a reality for which they were not fully prepared. The world created by centuries of Spanish colonialism crumbled in a spectacular and miserable manner, leaving in its wake a country desolated by war and famine. On January 1, 1899, the Spanish flag was lowered from El Morro in Havana and replaced with the flag of the United States. During this politico-military transition from Spanish rule to U.S. occupation, the defenders of independentismo and Cuba Libre were ignored and humiliated.