In the early 1620s, D. Luis de Sousa, a former governor-general of Brazil, complained to the Crown about the inhabitants of Pernambuco and their unreliability as witnesses in matters affecting the Albuquerque Coelho family. The colony’s population, he charged, “consists of relatives, friends, followers, and dependents of Duarte de Albuquerque [the fourth donatário or lord-proprietor] and justice officials nominated by him; and because of their land grants and the quitrents they pay to him, they are all his subjects.”

Perhaps the most significant scientific works published about Spanish-America during the entire era 1800–1830 were the botanical and zoological findings of the German scientist, Alexander von Humboldt. He had traveled in the Spanish colonies from 1799 to 1804. Humboldt has been acclaimed as the greatest naturalist that the world had seen since Aristotle and as the foremost man in Europe during his lifetime with the exception of Napoleon. He had taken a scientific education in several German universities and had once held an appointment in Berlin as a mining official for the Prussian government. On his way back to Europe in 1804 at the conclusion of his scientific survey in Spanish-America, he stopped in the United States to visit President Thomas Jefferson who asked him to fix the new boundaries of the United States following the purchase of Louisiana. This side trip probably saved Humboldt’s life because the ship which sailed from South America with his specimens was lost at sea.

Jesuits arrived in Mexico in 1572. They had come from a Spain unified by an imperial ideology—its prime components a single faith, shared cultural values and traditions, and belief in a royal mystique—allowing, indeed encouraging, expansion of the monarchy overseas. Spanish Jesuits, some of whom articulated adherence to this ideology, by 1580 had established their religious order among the most respected corporations in Mexican society. Through preaching, ministering to the needy, and missionary work, but above all through gaining a near monopoly on secondary education in New Spain, members of the Society of Jesus achieved a position of prestige and influence within all strata of society. In order to understand, therefore, how Jesuits contributed to the maintenance of Mexican ties to Spanish empire, it is first necessary to get some idea of the nature of their system of education, its curriculum, teaching methods, and aims in New Spain.

In June, 1908, Sir Harry Johnston, explorer, historian, diplomat and African colonial administrator, wrote to Theodore Roosevelt expressing a desire to come to the New World. In Johnston’s own words,

What I want to learn is the present condition and possible prospects of the Negro in North America, the West Indies and tropical South America.

This English Lord had written extensively about blacks in Africa, and while his knowledge of racial and historical conditions in the two Americas was hardly profound, his reputation opened doors that might otherwise have been hermetically sealed. Roosevelt’s reply was recognition of this fact:

During the nineteenth century Latin America produced a significant number of thinkers and philosophers who recognized that their countries were failing to keep pace with Western Europe and the United States in material progress, social equality and political stability. Some of these men were primarily abstract thinkers, but many were politically active and exercised considerable influence through their writing. Juan Bautista Alberdi, an Argentine, was a member of the latter group whose ideas are still discussed frequently today.