Land ho!” rang out in the stillness of that fateful dawn in October, 1492, when a New World was discovered. After months of suspense the approaches to a land whose existence was unknown had been reached. It was not India, nor fabled Cipango and Cathay. It was, as Columbus said after his third voyage, Otro Mundo, another world, risen out of the unknown to confound an astonished world, where an era was closing and a new one opening. It lay athwart the route to the desired goal, a vast land mass, peopled by many men of varying cultures, who emerged in their seemingly guileless nakedness to confuse the theologians and learned men of the Renaissance.

Los bandidos de rio frio, the famous Mexican “costumbrista” novel set in the decades prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, has been considered the outstanding production of its author, Manuel Payno y Flores (1810–1894). Critics of Spanish American literature frequently have dissected the work for merits and defects primarily from a literary standpoint, although many of them have called attention to its unusual sociological-historical elements. Professor J. R. Spell has ranked it, along with other novels of Payno, the best social presentation of Mexico through a fiction medium since Francisco J. Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento, while Antonio Castro Leal has stated that “the spectacle is so rich and varied that it may well be said that the novel is the painting of an entire epoch.”

While the panama congress of 1826 might be termed a failure relevant to its lack of immediate accomplishments, it nevertheless played an important role in the development of inter-American relations. Moreover, the Panama Congress polemic provided a sounding board for ideas and trends manifested in the evolution of the Latin American policy of the United States. Further, the action of the Adams Administration and subsequent approval by Congress represented the first concrete attempt of this country to participate in the formation of an American continental system.

Students of the famous first contingent of Yankee Hispanists and of North American literature in general, during the national and revolutionary periods, are prone to overlook the pronounced influence of British, American, and French travel books about Spain and Spanish America. The popularity which travel accounts enjoyed in the nineteenth century is attested by a well-known publisher’s observation to the distinguished pioneer explorer of Central America, John L. Stephens, author of the recently reprinted Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas & Yucatan (1841, 1949). On the latter’s query as to what forms of literature Harper Brothers favored, Harper is said to have replied: “Travels sell about the best of anything we get hold of. They don’t always go with a rush, like a novel by a celebrated author, but they sell longer, and in the end, pay better.”

Some twenty years after cortés consolidated the Conquest, New Spain experienced its most serious Indian uprising. This was the Mixtón War, which flared up unexpectedly in New Galicia during the rule of Mexico’s first and very celebrated Viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza. The immediate cause of the insurrection was the relapse into paganism of the chieftains of those tribes inhabiting the area surrounding Tlaltenango, situated inconveniently close to Guadalajara. Here the obnoxious rites of the pre-Conquest religions were suddenly re-established, and, before the Imperial Government at Mexico City awakened to the extent of this threat to the general peace, large numbers of tribesmen had been drawn into the dismaying retrogression and commenced violent aggressions against the colonists and the friendly Christian Indians of that section.