In the era of the Mexican Revolution, research opportunities on the sub-national level are numerous and varied, although not completely untested. In recent monographs and dissertations, historians have examined the revolution in a few states, leading regional figures, the workings of national reform commissions in selected localities and hinted at the conflict of provincial interests that provoked violence in the name of opposition to national programs. Each of these themes needs further, more systematic evaluation. Still wanting are studies of local demographic changes and concomitant political and economic adjustments accompanying the revolution, of the appropriation of state and local administration, and of the local issues that confused reform programs such as land reapportionment and educational missions. Professor James W. Wilkie has made important national studies of efforts to implement revolutionary programs and to evaluate statistically the church-state question. Both of these themes should be assayed through case studies of states or somewhat larger regions. But rather than cataloging research possibilities, this paper concentrates on one sub-national topic: the state governors.

In the autumn of 1509 the explorer Alonso de Ojeda landed on the northern coast of South America, near where is today the city of Cartagena, and claimed the region in the name of Spain. As some of the natives appeared inclined to question the acquisitive proclivities of the Crown, Ojeda had read to them the principal articles of the Christian faith, hoping to demonstrate the benign nature of his invasion. Apparently feeling that his obligation to the Church was not yet fulfilled, he then informed the local residents “ especially of the supreme jurisdiction of the pope ” and required that they embrace the Catholic religion. Ojeda barely escaped with his life.

Nativism has proved an enduring theme in the history of the New World. Successive waves of immigration have brought groups of diverse cultural and ethnic origins into intimate contact within the nations of the Americas. The bitter fruit of such contact has frequently been nativism, which here refers to a social movement that seeks to purge elements considered alien to a culture.

Nativist movements have usually been directed against latecomers who pose a threat to established groups. In 1798, for example, the Federalist administration of the United States attempted to use popular hostility toward French and Irish immigrants as a weapon against Jefferson's Republican party, which tended to attract new arrivals from Europe. The Alien Acts limited the political activities of immigrants and marked the foreign-born as potential subversives. The Sedition Act was designed to suppress criticism of the administration and indirectly challenged the liberal ideas of the French Revolution.

Gold and silver production in Honduras probably never exceeded 5% of that produced in Spanish America at any one time during the colonial period, but it was of considerable importance to the local economy and employed a significant proportion of the total workforce. In Spanish America as a whole the types of labour that were employed in mining were extremely varied. During the early Conquest period Indian slaves were used to pan gold in the Antilles, and later Mexican silver mining relied on the employment of free labour supplemented by that of Indian and Negro slaves. In Colombia the repartimiento provided Indians for mining up to 1729, by which time the Indian population and gold production had declined, but in Peru the mita continued to supply labour for the mines until its abolition in 1812, although by that time the mines had become heavily dependent on free labour. The dominant type of labour employed in mining in any one area at any one time appears to have been strongly influenced by the availability of Indian labour, which was largely determined by the size of the Indian population and the number of competing demands for labour, and by the profitability of mining, which determined the ability of miners to overcome shortages of labour. These influences were very apparent in the mining industry in Honduras, where during the colonial period many different types of labour were employed: Indian slaves, Indians working in the service of encomenderos, Negro slaves, Spanish immigrant workers, Indians working under the repartimiento and free labourers.

Thus Did the wife of the first Spanish Minister to Mexico describe, in October, 1840, the reception given a letter written by José María Gutiérrez Estrada and published in pamphlet form together with an essay which amplified and clarified his position. The letter, addressed to President Anastasio Bustamante, carried the date August 25, 1840, whereas the pamphlet did not appear until October 18, 1840. The letter pointed to the necessity for a convention to seek a remedy for Mexico’s problems. The remedy advocated by Gutiérrez Estrada in the essay which amplified his position, and which caused such a sensation— was a constitutional monarchy.

It is often assumed that the most creative aspect of Latin American thought, since independence, has been revolutionary. To a considerable degree this is true, as this author has himself pointed out in previous writings. But Latin America has also felt the impact of a different stream of creative thought, Spanish in origin to a considerable degree, though not completely so—the stream of Hispanic and Christian traditionalism. But this traditionalism is a mixed current. Thus, Pablo González Casanova of Mexico has shown that while reactionary forces often opposed it, “modern” Christian thought in Spain and New Spain was absorbing the new philosophy and science of the eighteenth century. Alberto Caturelli and Enrique Zuleta Álvarez. of Argentina, in somewhat different ways, have pointed out a mixture of Christian traditionalism with liberal streams of thought in that country. Moisés González Navarro of Mexico found in the historian-statesman, Lucas Alamán, a mixture of Christian traditionalism and economic liberalism. Carlos Valderrama Andrade of Colombia has found that traditionalists such as Miguel Antonio Caro (1843-1909), and his father before him, mixed with the conservative elements of traditionalist thought progressive elements not unlike those of modern Christian democracy.

Although, at the beginning of the year 1911, there was practically no aviation activity in Mexico, the development was so fast that by 1913 the airplane had demonstrated its usefulness in war and had even been used to bomb naval vessels. To those who would see, the events taking place in and over Mexico clearly foreshadowed the future importance of this weapon. While flying was not new in 1911, for many generations had worked on the problem, still it was only a couple of years before that Bleriot’s flight across the English Channel had convinced the world that flying was indeed a reality.

One of the major obstacles preventing Argentine national unificacation in the 1870s was the hostility of the poor interior provinces, victims of the ravages of civil wars and economic stagnation, toward the richer and more powerful coastal area dominated by export-oriented merchants and cattlemen. From 1874 until the first decade of the twentieth century, a major attempt was made to resolve longstanding grievances. A definitive political compromise and program of economic integration emerged in 1880 when a group of politicians, representing both the interior and the littoral, joined together and made their slogan a reality: Peace and administration. This group, known as the Generation of Eighty, brought a national capital and a modicum of peace to Argentina in 1880. Eventually they helped create a new Argentina linked by networks of transportation, communication, banking facilities and other trappings of modernity. They courted regional industries with protective tariffs and political favors in hopes of providing an economic stimulus to the interior which would complement rapid growth in the littoral. But even though Buenos Aires and surrounding areas flourished, by the turn of the century most interior provinces remained as destitute as they had been thirty years earlier.