This essay is in large part inspired by Fr. Antonine Tibesar OFM, whom I had the privilege to meet in 1982 just after I returned from my doctoral research sojourn in Bolivia. Fr. Antonine was for many years the director of the Academy of Franciscan History when that institution had its beautiful campus in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. I had corresponded with Fr. Antonine earlier and during my visit enjoyed discussing with him the many facets of Franciscan missions in Latin America. He proudly showed me the large collection of books in the academy library. What impressed me about both Fr. Antonine and the friars I had met in Bolivia during my research was their selflessness and willingness to help a budding scholar—one who at that point had little of scholarship to show. These characteristics got me thinking about the Franciscans and their worldviews and how those must have affected the missions. Although I was determined to write mainly about the indigenous population on the missions (after all, they constituted the vast majority of the mission population and were the ones most profoundly affected by the mission experience), I realized that it was important not to ignore the missionaries. Though few in number—most missions had just one or perhaps two friars—it was their desires for the native population and the overall goals and local organization of the missions they founded that profoundly shaped the human settlements they supervised.

On February 8, 1785, the Gazeta de Mxico, one of New Spain's first news periodicals, published an announcement from the city of Guanajuato celebrating the recent birth of a pair of conjoined twins:

In a famous account of his travels, titled El destino de un continente, the Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte describes his somewhat disconcerting encounter with the Cuban ex-president Jos Miguel Gmez while traveling through Latin America during the 1920s. Ugarte, a committed advocate of panhispanismo—the idea that Spanish America was and should be unified by its shared Spanish heritage, especially in light of the threat from Anglo- Saxon culture—had come to Cuba to give a series of lectures. Shortly after one of his presentations, the Argentine was introduced to Gmez, who took Ugarte to task for his criticism of Cuba's close relationship to the United States. You reproach us, Gmez said, for not defending our legacy of Spanish civilization, but what have all of you [Latin Americans] done to encourage us, to support us, to make us feel that we are not alone? Taken aback and made suddenly self-conscious by the accusation, Ugarte concluded that the Cuban was admonishing him for failing to uphold the very principles he was espousing in his lectures. It seemed as if, through the voice of her representative, all Cuba was saying, It is not we who broke the link; it was you who broke it in allowing it to be cut. After some time and much thought, Ugarte came to the realization that Cuba was not alone responsible for the Cuban situation. Some responsibility was also borne by Latin America. Through his encounter with Gmez, Ugarte was forced to recognize the limitations of framing what he referred to as the Cuban situation exclusively in the context of a cultural war between the United States and Spain. Indeed, the expresident's challenge inspired him to reconsider Cuba's nineteenth-century struggles with both Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism in a distinctly inter-Latin American context.

On July 1, 1917, a publication calling itself La Madre Matiana hit the newsstands in Mexico City. The newspaper promised a bold take on politics and society, and its masthead revealed a mission both madcap and grandiose: A prophetic, truth-telling newspaper; it will block the sun with a finger, bark at the moon, and serenade the morning star. This earnest but rather comical statement of endeavor appeared in each issue, and Mexicans of the time would have seen in addition an irreverent parody in the publication's name. The periodical's founder, Angel Prieto, had appropriated a clairvoyant character from popular lore to serve as his paper's alter ego. He chose well—the prophecies of madre Matiana had provoked Mexicans for over half a century and gained renewed prominence during the Mexican Revolution. In the years leading up to the newspaper's emergence, various publications had revisited the Matiana legacy.