The Holy Office of the Inquisition in colonial Mexico had as its purpose the defense of Spanish religion and Spanish-Catholic culture against individuals who held heretical views and people who showed lack of respect for religious principles. Inquisition trials of Indians suggest that a prime concern of the Mexican Church in the sixteenth century was recurrent idolatry and religious syncretism. During the remainder of the colonial period and until 1818, the Holy Office of the Inquisition continued to investigate Indian transgressions against orthodoxy, and to provide the modern researcher with unique documentation for the study of mixture of religious beliefs. The “Procesos de Indios” and other subsidiary documentation from Inquisition archives present crucial data for the ethnologist and ethnohistorian, preserving for him a view of native religion at the time of Spanish contact, eyewitness accounts of post-conquest idolatry and sacrifice, burial rites, native dances and ceremonies as well as data on genealogy, social organization, political intrigues, and cultural dislocation as the Iberian and Mesoamerican civilizations collided. As “culture shock” continued to reverberate across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Inquisition manuscripts reveal the extent of Indian resistance or accommodation to Spanish Catholic culture.

Seldom has a literary device had such international political resonance as the famous Ariel-Caliban contraposition of José Enrique Rodó's essay. In the decades immediately following its publication in 1900 Ariel was an exceptionally valued credo for Spanish American youth, not only for its intrinsic grace, but also because it provided a timely answer to a widespread need. To a generation depressed by the frequently pessimistic conclusions of racist doctrines and an uneasy sense of inferiority, and irked by the admonitions of ninteenthcentury “Nordomaniacs,” Ariel offered in sonorous periods a set of values assumed to be peculiarly Latin and therefore the patrimony of Latin America. As Alberto Zum Felde says, “It was the longed-for reply of this weak backward America to the Titanic potentiality of the North: its self-justification, its compensation, its retaliation.” Luis Alberto Sánchez's generation must have derived, as he says he did, its primary image of the United States from Ariel. Arturo Torres-Ríoseco describes it as “the ethical gospel of the Spanish-speaking world.”

One of the most provocative questions about the process of Spanish American independence is why Spain was not able during the period of the so-called “first absolutist restoration”— 1814 to 1820—to capitalize on its massive military victories in America and restore royal power to its fullest. In 1814 and 1815 royal armies in America destroyed the rebel governments and suppressed the rebel armies in Mexico, New Granada, Venezuela, Quito, Peru and Chile. Only in the Río de la Plata did an independent government continue to exist. It was clear that independence was not the inevitable destiny of the Spanish kingdoms in America. In Spain itself the king, Ferdinand VII, crossed the Spanish border after six years of captivity in France at the hands of Napoleon and on May 4, 1814, restored the absolute power of the throne by a coup d'etat, annulling the Constitution of 1812 and the liberal Cortes. Throughout the empire loyalists rejoiced. In both Spain and America the forces of conservatism had overcome the threat of radical political and social reforms. Few great imperial states in world history have been granted such a second chance, such an opportunity for rebuilding and reconciliation.

Some contemporary historians maintain that the administrative reforms of Charles III (1759-1788), bear a substantial part of the blame for the disruption of the Spanish empire. These reforms, they argue, alienated the American population. By ending the corrupt practices that had allowed Creoles to control their own affairs, the crown sowed the seeds of independence. Implicit in this view is the thesis that Charles' Minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez (1776-1787), carried out a “revolution in government” which permanently altered the behavior of the high colonial bureaucracy. Presumably, whereas Hapsburg administrators had been chiefly occupied with the pragmatic achievement of tasks, regardless of the means employed, Bourbon administrators became increasingly concerned with the mindless enforcement of rules devised in the Peninsula. In this fashion the autonomy of the bureaucracy was eroded, and the colonial population was deprived of its traditional means of influencing policy formation.

At his trial Socrates described himself as attached to Athens “as a gadfly to a horse.” In Sixteenth Century Spain the Order of Preachers played a similar role. Dominican friars freely criticized royal officials, conquistadors and fellow churchmen. At times their meddling in affairs of state drew down on them the wrath of the authorities. Charles V, though favorably disposed toward the Indians, more than once angrily rebuked their defenders, the friars, for letting zeal outrun prudence. One of the most effective of these critics was Francisco de Vitoria. Vitoria was renowned as the founder of the Salamanca Thomist school. Not content with the elaboration of scholastic doctrines, he carried them into the political forum, delivering public lectures on the problems of his time.