Mexico's Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition founded by Philip II in January 1569 had developed its bureacratic structure by the first decade of the seventeenth century. Spectacular autos de fé between 1574 and 1601 allowed the Tribunal to establish its reputation in the colony and to augment its financial base beyond the yearly 10,000 peso subvention provided by the Spanish monarchy. Trials of crypto-Jews in the 1590s netted considerable income and caused the king to cease his payment of inquisitional salaries for a time. During the first decade of the seventeenth century the Tribunal petitioned the crown to assign the income from a series of cathedral canonries for support of the Inquisition bureaucracy. Between 1629 and 1636 “reserved” canonries were established for Holy Office income and by 1650 nine of these were generating the Inquisition's salary budget. It was always understood that royal subsidies were to decrease as canonry income paid salaries. All other expenses had to come from judicial fines.

Historians have long been interested in shedding light on the numerous, habitual transactions that constitute economic life at its basic level. Yet, questions about how men transact business as individuals, and how they feel about it are largely unanswered by traditional political and bureaucratic records, perhaps because these activities were so commonplace to the society, so well-known and unremarkable to contemporaries as to obviate remark in the records. A study of the extensive records of the Roman Catholic Church, however, can shed light on this, and many other aspects of Spanish colonial society in Mexico.

In June, 1945, Time Magazine informed its readers that the North American singer, Robert Todd Duncan, had been refused accomodations by three prominent hotels in Caracas, Venezuela. This news, came as a shock to many Venezuelans who had considered their nation a racial democracy in which discrimination and prejudice did not exist. They felt doubly disturbed because a North American news magazine charged that the hotels had refused to admit Duncan, his wife, and his accompanist, William Allen, because of their race. They resented the fact that representatives of the press in the most racist society of the Americas accused Venezuelans of practicing racial discrimination of the sort found in the United States.

Frontiers are, by definition, unsettled and wild places; populations are shifting and mobile, social conditions are in state of constant flux, and governmental authority is generally weak. Frontier populations tend to be resentful of any type of control, and are often engaged in entreprenurial activities whose degree of legality varies widely. In frontier conditions, people the state defines as vagabonds and marginal tend to flourish. Their tenure as frontiersmen is usually brief, for they depend on the very conditions of instability which exist in areas with underdeveloped economies, weak authority, and sparse and spatially dispersed populations. Nevertheless, they can have an effect out of proportion to their numbers in a frontier society.

Historical demography—the study of the growth, decline, and movement of past populations—has played a critical role in efforts to reconstruct the historical experiences of native peoples during New World colonization. The subject of historical demography has been of interest because it is closely connected to a wide range of still significant issues, including the nature of prehispanic Indian societies, the brutality of conquest, and the degree of disruption wrought by colonization. Nonetheless, scholars have yet to calculate a measurement of the precolonial New World population that meets with general acceptance.