Although liberation theology may still be considered a “current event,” nevertheless, given its very evident and widespread impact on Latin American Christianity and elsewhere, it seems fairly safe to state that it is the most important theological movement which has emerged in Latin America in the four centuries since evangelization. Many authors would further contend that liberation theology symbolizes the coming of age of the Latin American church: from a peripheral, somewhat dormant and intellectually dependent church to one which actively contributes to Catholic and Protestant thought throughout the world. For this reason alone, without mentioning the many political ramifications of liberation theology, it merits attention as one of the key themes in Latin American church history. The aim of this article is threefold: to briefly outline the origins and development of liberation theology; to examine the different ecclesial, social and political factors which influenced its development, and finally, to indicate what direction liberation theology seems to be taking currently.

The early European presence in California and in the American Southwest in general is identified with missions. Although missions were equally important in Spanish Florida and at an earlier date, the average American does not associate missions with Florida or Georgia. Indeed, as David Hurst Thomas observed in a recent monograph on the archaeological exploration of a site of the Franciscan mission of Santa Catalina de Guale on Georgia's St. Catherines Island, the numerous missions of Spanish Florida have remained little known even in scholarly circles. And as Charles Hudson has noted, this ignorance or amnesia has extended to awareness of the native peoples who inhabited those Southeastern missions or were in contact with them, even though these aboriginal inhabitants of the Southeast “possessed the richest culture of any of the native people north of Mexico … by almost any measure.” Fortunately, as Thomas remarked in the above-mentioned monograph, “a new wave of interest in mission archaeology is sweeping the American Southeast.” This recent and ongoing work holds the promise of having a more lasting impact than its historical counterpart of a half-century or so ago in the work of Herbert E. Bolton, Fr. Maynard Geiger, OFM, Mary Ross, and John Tate Lanning. Over the fifty odd years since Lanning's Spanish Missions of Georgia appeared, historians and archaeologists have made significant contributions to knowledge about sites in Spanish Florida where missions or mission outstations and forts or European settlements were established. But to date no one has compiled a comprehensive listing from a historian's perspective of the mission sites among them to which one may turn for the total number of such establishments, their general location, time of foundation, length of occupation, moving, circumstances of their demise and the tribal affiliation of the natives whom they served. This catalog and its sketches attempt to meet that need.

Historians have long debated the relationship between the Spanish Crown and its colonial subjects. The issue has taken on an additional dimension as our knowledge of the lives of women expands. Recently published works describe the statutes promulgated by royal authorities to regulate the institution of marriage. But what was the actual result of these laws once they crossed the Atlantic Ocean? Were they followed to the letter, partially enforced, or ignored? Did they apply to some groups and not to others? In order to answer these and other questions it seemed appropriate to focus upon the laws governing marriage and the effect of their implementation on a specific group of women—the wives of regular army officers who served in Venezuela during the last half of the eighteenth century.

To observe that events are determined by historical antecedents is hardly informative. What is difficult about history is that it is rarely equally easy to find out how the past shapes the future. Central America presents an interesting case in which indigenous cultures and Spanish conquest have succeeded in reproducing old geographical patterns while the cultures and societies therein have changed in extraordinary ways. The present paper suggests how it is that some of these cultural and social relational continuities, perhaps difficult to understand apart from this long tradition, may have continued down from the pre-Columbian period to the present. A key element in the process seems to lie in the ethnic relations, those relations that have been retained between Ladinos and the state on the one hand, and the highly populous Indian population of Guatemala.

In 1821 Central Americans who had united to throw off the control of Spain, found themselves hopelessly divided on issues concerning the nature of the political and social institutions of the nation they had created. Confidently the Liberals challenged authority and tradition, condemned the past and its institutions and strove to construct a new world of freedom, equality, democracy and progress. Conservatives feared the rashness and the uncertainty of that new world. They thought it both foolish and unnecessary to destroy the old in order to build the new. The confrontation between Liberals and Conservatives was to be lengthy and violent. Both groups aspired to political control and, lacking practical experience in government or statesmanship, each sought political power as a vehicle for ensuring its own ascendancy and imposing its views upon the nation. One of the most troublesome issues on which they clashed was the form of government. And one of the most central figures in that conflict was Father Juan José de Aycinena.

During the period from Mexican independence in 1821 to the end of the French intervention in 1867, Mexico's primary tie to the outside world was based on trade. The foreign merchants, who monopolized this activity, played a crucial role in the economic, diplomatic, and political life of Mexico. The current literature on these nineteenth century merchants includes studies of foreign groups, such as the French, detailed case studies of individual entrepreneurs, firms and merchant families, and one work that provides a unique state-centered perspective on the Mexican/merchant nexus. None, however, have tried to conceptualize the role of foreign merchants as a whole, across national lines and individual rivalries, in the port cities that were the central arena of contact and conflict with the outside world.

We pray [any reader] not to nibble with critical teeth at this work of ours, which has been diligently twisted into shape by love rather than knowledge…

Since its discovery nearly two centuries ago, Las Casas' summary of the diario de a bordo of Columbus' first voyage has fascinated, beguiled, and exercised historians, who have used it time and again in attempting to recreate the events, course, and atmosphere of this momentous occasion. In doing so, most have treated the summary as a quintessential day-by-day account of the events it describes, despite the fact that the document as we have it is at least a third-hand transcription by Bartolomé de las Casas, who was effectively its author, or at least its senior co-author. Despite this tendency to treat the diario as a primary source then, in truth it is, even more than most historical sources, a prism rather than a window on the past, and a prism unfortunately not governed by any known laws of historical optics.

Despite the considerable scholarly attention given contemporary interest groups (also known as pressure groups), there are few studies of their governmental influence and operations in a premodern setting. Such studies could tell us much, not only about the historical roots of interest groups, but about governmental processes in premodern nations. Brazil in the nineteenth century is a good subject for such research. With its economy largely based on varied agricultural and raw material export, it was also the scene of incipient industrialization. Under a constitutional monarchy, it had modified representative government, and basic political rights were respected. Nineteenth-century Brazilian interest groups, in addition to illustrating the characteristics of pre-modern interest organizations, strongly influenced governmental decision-making and public opinion and foreshadowed the activities of the much more numerous and varied groups of the twentieth century.

Since the 1920s, the San Antonio sugar mill in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua has been that country's largest manufacturing establishment. The ingenio (the sugar mill along with the plantation) employed close to 2,000 workers in 1920, and has since consistently employed far more workers than any other single enterprise. The owners of San Antonio were—and continue to be—the most economically powerful group within the Nicaraguan elite, In contemporary Nicaragua, the above affirmations remain valid: San Antonio is still the largest employer and economically most powerful financial group in the country.

Any consideration of the development of Nicaraguan capitalism must take into account the history of the Ingenio San Antonio (ISA). In this article, I will examine the development of relations among labor, management, and the state in San Antonio from the 1890s until 1930 using archival and oral sources. Throughout this period, politics and economics were inseparable for the workers. Particularly after the U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and bolstered the Conservative regime, the political Liberalism of the San Antonio workers was something of a popular revolutionary

Waldo Frank, who is now forgotten in Latin America, was once the most frequently read and admired North American author there. Though his work is largely neglected in the U.S., he was at one time the leading North American expert on Latin American writing. His name looms large in tracing the careers of Latin American writers in this country before 1940. Long before Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the Good Neighbor policy, Frank brought back to his countrymen news of Latin American culture.

Frank went to South America when he was almost forty. The youthful dreams of Frank and his fellow pre-World War I writers and artists to make their country a fit place for cultural renaissance that would change society had waned with the onset of the twenties.1 But they had not completely vanished. Disgruntled by the climate of "normalcy" prevailing in America after World War I, he turned to Latin America. He started out in the Southwest. The remnants of Mexican culture he found in Arizona and New Mexico enticed him to venture further into the Hispanic world. In 1921 he traveled extensively in Spain and in 1929 spent six months exploring Latin America.

The Indian is an inexhaustable layer of exploitation and his best song is his taciturnity…. Guatemala is sad; a desperate, horrid, fearful sadness … a sad people living with a totally alien world within us. (Ernesto Juan Fonfrias, “Guatemala: un pueblo triste,” Diario de Centro América, Sept. 1, 1950.)

Fonfrias’ assessment of Guatemala in 1950 contains important clues to understanding the “revolution” from 1944 to 1954 and its overthrow. The revolution has been extensively studied; but most works have concentrated on American involvement in the overthrow of the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 and have thus only provided us with limited views of the various conflicts that developed during the two revolutionary administrations (Juan José Arévalo, 1944-51, and Arbenz, 1951-54). This has most certainly been the case with studies of rural Guatemala during the revolution. Despite the importance of the agrarian reform initiated in 1952, the reform and the conflicts that it fostered are not clearly understood. Recent research has suggested, however, that the tensions were more complex and more deeply rooted in Guatemala's rural history than earlier works had indicated.

Ella impulsó a su hermano a la pelea,
ella siguió a sus hijos al combate…
En medio de la noche, su silueta
se destacó en el campo funerario de la
batalla, pues buscaba, inquieta
el cuerpo de su amor entre el osario.

E igual que con su esposo compartiera
el tálamo nupcial en la morada,
con su esposo cayó, fiel compañera, en el lecho mortal de la jornada.

She encouraged her brother to fight
she followed her children into combat…
In middle of the night, her silhouette
stood out in the funeral battlefield
for she was restlessly searching for
the body of her love in the burial grounds.

And just as she had shared the nuptial bed
with her husband in the shelter of their home,
with her husband, she fell, faithful companion,
on the death bed of the day's journey.

From “La mujer paraguaya,” written in 1899 by a Paraguayan poet, Ignacio A. Pane.

“Our institutions,” remarked a North American Protestant missionary in Guatemala in 1910 referring to his denomination's missions, schools and clinics, “can do more than gunboats.” From the time of the Liberal reform of Justo Rufino Barrios, most of Guatemala's Liberal rulers had agreed. Valued by nineteenth century Liberal rulers for their development projects, their usefulness in the struggle against Catholic clericalism, and, most importantly, for the packaging of North American values, beliefs and culture in which they wrapped the Word of God, Protestant missionaries worked in Guatemala with the blessing and encouragement of the government from the late nineteenth century until 1944. That year, the “last caudillo”—the old Liberal dictator Jorge Ubico —was ousted from power and replaced by a reformist junta, marking the beginning of Guatemala's decade-long flirtation with progressive revolutionary government.