Four years before the suppression of male religious orders in Mexico (1859) the Minister of Justice and Ecclesiastical Affairs, Ezequiel Montes, asked the provincials to inform him on the number of friars, their activities and their monasteries' properties (December 22, 1855). The data, which began arriving to the Minister in January 1856, provides some of the most complete information on the nineteenth century Franciscans in Mexico. Comparing this data with what is available for the end of eighteenth century we can draw the following comparative table.

A quick glance at these figures reveals the great deterioration through which the order had gone in a period of seventy years. From 1786 and 1856 the Franciscans had lost three fifths of their members, two fifths of their monasteries and four fifths of their missions. It can be pointed out as a counterweight that, during the same period, two colleges of Propaganda Fide were founded: Orizaba in 1799, and Zapopan in 1812.l But it also should be noted that during the same time a province disappeared, Yucatan.2 The general conclusion, then, is that in no other period of their presence in Mexico, had the Franciscan

In spring 1939 Sonoran ranchers shared with one another the latest mockery of Mexico's president, whom they ridiculed as trompa chula—a reference to his fat lips. It came in the form of a poem:

Siervo de los rusos, patrón de extranjeros,
que a los mexicanos has dejado en cueros
como una consecuencia de tu obstinación
que es madre y señora de tu entendimiento.
Por que es muy difícil que pueda un jumento
aceptar alguna rectificatión.

Confórmate, hermano, con volver a Uruapán,
piensa que a los brutos de cierto los matan,
y si has de hacer algo en nuestro favor,
una cosa puedes de qué estar ufano
córtale las uñas a tu ilustre hermano,
Lombardo Toledano.

With the Spanish conquest came racial miscegenation, depopulation, forced relocation, and migration, which resulted in the implosion of many ethnic (as well as linguistic) distinctions among the Indian peoples. Facilitating this implosion was a European-invented label “indio,” which eliminated—philosophically, juridically, and legally—virtually all ethnic differences. Yet it bestowed upon the Indian peoples a separate existence. In the Peruvian Andes, Indians themselves during rebellious episodes contributed to this ethnic leveling when they called for pan-Andean unity or the return of the pax incaica. To be sure, numerous Indian groups did not entirely loose their distinct identities, and the ethnic implosion itself varied in time and space. Ethnic differences could be maintained through the upkeep of cultural and racial traits, such as in dress, language, marital patterns, or territorial and social boundaries. In large measure, the leveling or disappearance of precontact ethnicities occurred at a faster rate in the urban environments where Indians from rural areas took up residence, or in any region where Spanish culture or non-Indian peoples predominated. There, the invented “indio” or new ethnicity was the viable alternative and thus stronger, while the autochthonous base and ethnic distinctions remained weaker. This weakness differentiated urbanized Indians from their rural counterparts who sustained their links to the past far longer.

The “horseman of hope,” Brazil's “undefeated column”—much is known about the legendary Luis Carlos Prestes and his rebel column's march through thirteen Brazilian states in the 1920s. Indeed, legends are made of such stuff. Roughly one thousand rebellious federal soldiers and state policemen pushed their way through 25,000 kilometers of Brazil's isolated interior. Forced marches day and night helped them elude capture and defeat from late 1924 until they chose exile in Bolivia in early 1927. Soon the column's fame and impact reached worldwide. Even today, for example, the study of Prestes's tactics is still a part of Red Army officer training in China.