The annual CLAH Breakfast/Business Meeting was held on December 29, 1987, with CLAH President Peggy K. Liss presiding; Paul Ganster (San Diego State University) was the executive secretary. First, results of the fall elections for officers and general coommittee members were announced. Elected as CLAH Vice-President was Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr.; elected for two-year terms on the CLAH General Committee were Susan Ramírez and Catherine LeGrand. Next, winners of the 1987 CLAH prizes and awards were announced. The Distinguished Service Award was given to John J. Johnson (Stanford University) and Charles R. Boxer. The Herbert Eugene Bolton Memorial Prize was awarded to Alan Knight (University of Texas) for The Mexican Revolution (Cambridge University Press). Charles W. Bergquist (Duke University) received honorable mention for Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (Stanford University Press). The Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize was received by Ross Hassig for Trade, Tribute and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press).
The Conference on Latin American History Award for the best article published in a journal other than HAHR was given to Mark D. Szuchman (Florida International University) for “Household Structure and Political Crisis: Buenos Aires, 1810-1860” (Latin American Research Review, 21: 3, 1986). Honorable mention went to David G. LaFrance, “Germany, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Downfall of President Francisco I. Madero: The Covadonga Killings” (Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 2: 1, Winter 1986).
The James Spence Robertson Memorial Prize for the best article published in the HAHR was awarded to Robert S. Hasksett (Colby College) for “Indian Town Government in Colonial Cuernavaca: Persistence, Adaptation, and Change” (May 1987). Honorable mention went to Marshall C. Eakin (Vanderbilt University) for “Business Imperialism and British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d’el Rey Mining Company, Limited, 1830-1960” (November 1986).
The James R. Scobie Memorial Prize winners were Michael Stanfield (University of New Mexico) for “The Rubber Industry and the Definition of State Limits: Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru in the Putumayo, 1880-1910” and Peter Beattie (University of Miami) for “From Tattoos to Desertion: The Experience of the Brazilian Army Praças in the Barracks and the Community, 1890-1930.”
The final event of the day was the keynote address by A. J. R. Russell-Wood (The Johns Hopkins University) who spoke on “The Columbus Quincentenary: The CLAH Initiative.” Russell-Wood, who is also head of the CLAH Quincentenary Committee, succintly outlined the task before the conference, which “as an association of historians with research interests in Latin America is uniquely situated to make a major contribution to the Columbus Quincentenary.” He posed five goals for the CLAH effort:
Encourage scholars of Latin America to reassess their own work and give this broader meaning beyond the regional or even continental.
Establish lines of communication between universities/colleges and the U. S. public, both in and out of school.
Create networks between organizations (local, regional, national, and international) which would not customarily work together and urge them to look beyond the narrow interests of their own memberships.
Ensure that no region of the United States lacks resources for particpation in the quincentenary.
Instill in citizens of the United States the notion that they are joint players with citizens of other American republics in a historical experience which transcends differences of language, race, religion, and national origin.
Russell-Wood identified five basic concepts to which priority will be given by CLAH: time and timelessness; exchange; cultural identity; ethnocentrism; and the American experience. After elaboorating on these topics, he called on all members of the conference to participate in carrying out the blueprint designed by the CLAH Quincentenary Committee.
The 1987 CLAH Breakfast/Business Meeting ended as Peggy Liss turned the gavel over to John Lombardi, CLAH president for 1988.
P. G.
The session on “Regional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America” met on December 28, 1987. Hugh M. Hamill (University of Connecticut) chaired the session. Héctor Lindo-Fuentes (University of California, Santa Barbara) spoke on “The Costs of the Collapse of the Central American Federation: The Case of El Salvador.” Donald Stevens (Drexel University) presented a paper on the “Social Origins of Regional Conflict in Post-Independence Mexico,” and Kristine L. Jones (Bowdoin College) concluded with “Regional Policy and National Politics in Argentina: Conflict and Negotiation on the Frontier.” Lyman L. Johnson (University of North Carolina, Charlotte) commented.
In an effort to create a context for what might seem superficially to be a collection of incongruities, Hamill proposed that these topics fit into what he called the “Debris of Empire.” While attention in the papers was exclusively on postindependence conditions, he argued that the disintegration of the Spanish crown’s moderating role helped lead to the disparate regional conflicts represented by the panelists.
Lindo-Fuentes demonstrated this political vacuum as El Salvador emerged from the ruins of empire and the aborted Central American Federation. The divisions, rivalries, and enmities led to several decades of enervating warfare. In addition to the human attrition in battles and the disruption of a stable labor force, the Salvadoran economy was deprived of capital for the development of a healthy infrastructure. Forced loans imposed by contending armies drained the country of funds for investment. Destruction of indigo production and the constant seizure of mules and other animals further undermined the possibility of stability. Trade patterns were also disrupted. Lindo-Fuentes reported that contemporary travelers who visited the region during the 1840s talked about sad landscapes of abandoned fields and a major slump in indigo exports. El Salvador began its independent existence as a barren country. Lindo-Fuentes concluded that today Salvadorans are learning again about the innumerable ways in which war can destroy an economy.
Historians of nineteenth-century Mexico typically agree that conservative strength lay in the country’s core of Mexico City and Puebla, and that liberalism was stronger in a crescent that arced around this region from Veracruz northwest to Zacatecas and south to Guerrero. Stevens argued that until now the evidence for this hypothesis has been largely anecdotal and unsystematic. His paper modified and extended this hypothesis through a statistical analysis of presidents and cabinet members from 1824 to 1867 by place of birth. While the conservative capital did produce a preponderance of conservative politicians, it also produced a fair number of moderates and even a few radical politicians. The central region was ethnically and socially complex and produced a diverse group of politicians. In both the north and the south, social structure was less complex and the relationship between politics and social divisions was more direct. An abundance of land in the north and the danger of Indian attacks required cooperation between large and small property owners. This social environment produced liberals, especially moderate liberals, and few conservatives. In the south, conflicts between Indian villages and creole haciendas were internal. The antagonistic social structure there produced radicals and conservatives but few moderates. Regional divisions among the political elite reflected social distinctions and class relations in the region of origin.
As part of her effort to explore comparative frontiers, Jones focused on the campaign led by Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1833 to secure Argentina’s southern frontier against Indian raids. Local ranchers and Indians subsequently forged a complex alliance and annuity structure that permitted two decades of mostly peaceful frontier ranching development between 1835 and 1859. This frontier policy had significant national consequences as well. The national government soon took control of the frontier alliance and annuity structure and manipulated it for its own purposes. Rosas and his followers favored their allies, the Pampas, Tehuelches, and Araucanians. At the same time, Rosas denied subsidies to those groups accustomed to treating with the opposition “salvages unitarios, ’’ who then turned to raiding in the western frontier, hindering the expansion of unitario ranching. Jones argued that examination of this notorious and costly “negocio pacífico con el indio” illustrates how effective negotiation and manipulation of frontier alliances with Indian groups were converted into national political power for frontier caudillos.
Johnson remarked that the paper by Lindo-Fuentes revealed a low level of violence (an average of only 64 deaths per battle and 2. 1 battles per year), but a pervasive culture of chaos in El Salvador. As for Stevens’s paper, Johnson emphasized the difficulty of defining values along a political spectrum and questioned how what was inherent in a region could determine political identity when individuals changed positions so often. Johnson commented further that Jones illuminated a process whereby Argentine Indians who engaged in commerce with creoles found themselves dependent on commodities like Brazilian tobacco which became necessities. He summed up the thrust of the papers by noting that the emergent state apparatus in all cases became a means to status for individuals.
Much of the vigorous discussion from the audience of some 50 people centered on the problems of regional analysis and comparative frontiers. For example, Stuart Voss (SUNY, Plattsburgh) suggested that perhaps the locus of a politician’s academic training was more formative than his birthplace.
H. M. H.
The session on “Indian Community Landholding in Colonial Mexico: Recent Research on Nueva Galicia, Cuernavaca, and Toluca” consisted of three papers. William B. Taylor (University of Virginia) chaired the session.
Agueda Jiménez Pelayo (Guadalajara, Mexico) discussed community holdings in southern Zacatecas and adjacent parts of Jalisco that bordered on the Chichimec frontier and were connected to mining districts and the urban centers of Guadalajara and Zacatecas. She noted the one-square-league pattern of patrimonial lands (tierras por razón de pueblo) in this area, distinguished these patrimonial lands from other community holdings (tierras de comunidad and cofradía ranches), and described variations from this pattern and the interplay of legal principles and local pressures in the actual distribution of land toward the end of the colonial period. She discussed how community land rentals were more important than alienation as land pressure increased after about 1700, and observed differences between pueblo landholding in this region of comparatively sparse population, scarce water, and dependence on Indian villages for defense against Chichimec incursions and better-known areas of dense settlement in central and southern Mexico.
Robert Haskett (University of Maine) concentrated on the “primordial titles” prepared by or for Indian pueblos of the district of Cuernavaca early in the eighteenth century as documentation in defense of community lands. Using these and related records, Haskett described different types of land held by pueblos and how they were used. Like Jiménez Pelayo and Wood, he used manuscript evidence to define types and terms with new precision. He, too, found evidence of rentals and sales that suggest privatization of land, and posited that this may not have been a completely new development in the colonial period. At the same time, he found that sales were unusual in the eighteenth century, and attributed this pattern in part to local and colonial concepts of inalienability. The primordial titles were shown to contain important information about community identity and continuities with the pre-Hispanic past that deserve further study.
Stephanie Wood (University of Maine) presented a paper on the Toluca Valley in central Mexico which looked closely at the legal “townsite” (Jiménez Pelayo’s tierra por razón de pueblo) over much of the colonial period, tracing provisions for a base of six hundred varas in each of the cardinal directions, and showing how such lands were actually measured and used. She found that these lands were not absolutely fixed or uniform, and connected the interest in assignment and confirmation of the legal “townsite” after the 1680s to validation of pueblo status. Wood demonstrated both the precarious balance between protection and exploitation in the provisioning of corporate lands by colonial authorities and the importance of the “townsite” to the persistence of independent Indian municipalities in eighteenth-century Toluca.
The comments by Rebecca Horn (Richmond, CA) centered on the issues of continuity and internal management of corporate properties raised in Haskett’s paper, and regional differences in land retention and the pressures for change introduced by Wood and Jiménez Pelayo. Horn discussed these themes in relation to two models of patrimonial lands described in earlier scholarship for the Valley of Mexico and the Valley of Oaxaca. She enlarged on the circumstances in the Valley of Mexico from her research on Coyoacán in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and contrasted her findings on alienation of Indian lands with the Cuernavaca case. Agreeing with Haskett on the importance of local distinctions between alienable and inalienable lands, she observed that in Coyoacán (apparently unlike Cuernavaca) the distinction served as an opening for individuals to alienate lands assigned to them by the community as the Indian population approached its low point before 1650. She urged that regional differences in Indian interests and behavior be considered within the context of demographic changes, the timing and intensity of non-Indian intrusions, and shifting patterns of commercial agriculture.
Discussion during the last half hour of the session was active, but without much disagreement or challenge to the presentations. Several members of the audience wanted to know more about water rights within pueblos and inequalities and dissension within Indian pueblos, since the papers tended to emphasize pueblo solidarity and semi-independence. David Robinson (Syracuse University) urged the panelists to find their boundaries “on the ground” and determine the carrying capacity of the lands they embraced. All three papers drew attention to the period 1680-1720 as the turning point in the consolidation of pueblo lands and growing land pressure from inside and outside these communities. This may prove to be an important chronological refinement in the study of colonial Latin America, since 1580-1750 still is widely regarded as a long period of few clear social and economic transitions.
W. B. T.
The session “Slavery on the Colonial Brazilian Frontier” convened to a full house of 75 to 100 persons. Chaired by Alida Metcalf (Trinity University), the session featured papers by David Sweet (University of California, Santa Cruz), John Monteiro (Universidade Estadual Paulista), and Kathleen Higgins (Dartmouth College), and comments by Mary Karasch (Oakland University) and Stuart Schwartz (University of Minnesota). The goal of the session participants was to explore the characteristics of slavery in Brazilian frontier regions—Amazonia, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais—and to consider whether slavery exhibited similar characteristics in core and peripheral areas, or if frontier regions allowed distinctly different kinds of slavery to emerge.
David Sweet presented the first paper, on “ ‘Domestic’ Indian Society in Pará, 1650-1750: A Prospectus.” Sweet argued for a social history of Indian slavery, especially in Portuguese Amazonia, where Indian slavery lasted longer than anywhere else in the Americas. Sweet introduced the idea that the legal status of Indians, whether they were slaves or free, actually made little difference in their lives. Instead, all “domestic” Indians, those who lived with or near whites, experienced the same realities of hard work, poor nutrition, epidemic disease, and high mortality. Sweet concluded with a call for the study of how these Indians adapted to the institutions of European colonial society, and how they, despite the hardships of their lives, managed to survive.
John Monteiro presented the second paper, “From Tijupar to the Senzala: Notes on the Transition from Indian to African Slavery in São Paulo, 1695-1730.” Monteiro examined the decline of Indian slavery in São Paulo during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the increasing importance of African slavery in the region. He observed that disease, the decline of Indian slaving expeditions, and Indian resistance caused the numbers of Indian slaves in São Paulo to drop. After the discovery of gold in the 1690s, Africans began to be introduced into São Paulo in significant numbers, but they complemented rather than replaced Indian slaves. Merchants who plied the trade between São Paulo and Minas Gerais purchased Africans, especially adult African males, while planters bought Africans to supplement their Indian slave labor forces. The slaves owned by merchants tended to be Africans, males, and adults, while those owned by planters remained predominantly Indian. On the agricultural estates, African slaves tended to be evenly distributed among the sexes and ages; thus Monteiro argued that African slavery fit into the foundation laid by Indian slavery, where female slaves and children had predominated.
Kathleen Higgins presented the third paper, “Masters and Slaves in a Mining Society. A Study of Eighteenth-Century Sahará, Minas Gerais.” Higgins argued that slaves in the mining areas were able to exert far more autonomy than those on the plantations of coastal Brazil. Slaves had more control over their relationships with their masters, and they had greater freedom in their “own” social and community lives. Higgins maintained that the conditions of Minas Gerais, both its frontier characteristics and the way the mining of gold was organized, enabled slaves to bargain effectively with their masters. This freedom began to diminish, however, as the mining regions fell into decline. After the 1750s, it became more difficult for slaves to secure manumission, accumulate cash incomes, and obtain freedom for the mulatto children of slaveowners. Slave autonomy, Higgins concluded, strongest during the time of expansion and prosperity in Minas Gerais, grew weaker as the gold economy declined.
Mary Karasch commented first on the three papers. Concerning Monteiro’s paper, she wanted to know why merchants owned more African slaves than planters did. She suggested that the Africans might have been used as porters to the mines. She wondered why there were so many African female slaves on the agricultural estates. Turning to the paper on Minas Gerais, Karasch questioned whether the high degree of autonomy Higgins found among slaves in Sahara was unique to the mining regions, or if it was a common feature of slavery throughout Brazil. Karasch put forward an alternate explanation for slave autonomy: that masters allowed their slaves limited autonomy in exchange for loyalty. This, she argued, was but another means that masters used to control the slave population. With respect to David Sweet’s paper, Karasch was interested in his call for a study of the adaptation of Amazonian Indians to the institutions Europeans established among them. Why did some survive? Why did so many die? Karasch hoped that Sweet’s research will shed light on this process of adaptation and survival.
Stuart Schwartz began his comments by suggesting that frontier regions could change rapidly when Europeans found exploitable resources there; such changes could transform a peripheral region into a core area. He noted that the Amazon was one area which never made the transition from Indian to African slavery. Instead, as Sweet illustrated, Indians satisfied the essential labor needs of the Portuguese. In São Paulo, on the other hand, major changes in the structure of labor did take place after the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais in the 1690s. Schwartz applauded Monteiro’s efforts to study the difficult process whereby merchants and planters made the shift from Indian to African slavery. He wondered if it would be possible to completely reconstruct the history of Indian slavery in São Paulo. Turning to Minas Gerais, Schwartz found Higgins’s emphasis on the shifting relationships between masters and slaves to be a particularly useful approach for understanding slavery. He questioned the degree to which slaves were autonomous, and suggested that given the frontier nature of Minas Gerais, everyone was more autonomous, not just slaves. In his view, slaves did not seem any more rebellious, independent, or autonomous than anywhere else in Brazil. He agreed with Karasch that slaveowners in Minas, as elsewhere in Brazil, used many incentives to control their slaves. Schwartz concluded by remarking that African slavery remained the unquestioned labor form in colonial Brazil in core and peripheral regions. Only in the Amazon did colonists find an alternative in the Indians. He suggested that the adaptability of slavery, its acceptance, and its widely diffused character explain its strength and longevity in Brazilian society. A few questions were entertained from the floor before the session adjourned.
A. C. M.
The session on “Regional Perspectives in Early Eighteenth-Century Economic Life” was chaired by John Jay TePaske (Duke University). The following papers were presented: “Economic Crisis and Popular Upheaval: The Quito Riots of 1765,” by Kenneth J. Andrien (Ohio State University); “Santo Domingo in the Early Eighteenth Century: Fortress and Fortune,” by Jacques A. Barbier (University of Ottawa); and “Frontier Workers and Social Change: Pilaya y Paspaya (Bolivia) in the Early Eighteenth Century,” by Ann Zulawski (Smith College). Murdo J. MacLeod (University of Florida) served as commentator. An audience of 120 attended the session.
Kenneth Andrien dissected the Quito riots of 1765, demonstrating that they were promoted initially by a conservative but broad-based coalition of Quiteños in response to attacks on various economic interests. Creoles and Indians in the barrios surrounding Quito forged an alliance to challenge the royal government, but these ties were soon shattered because of creole fears of a social revolution. For early eighteenth-century Santo Domingo, Jacques Barbier emphasized the ability of Santo Domingo to cope with new Bourbon policies, also to ensure their success. By midcentury, the frontier with Saint Domingue was secure, trade with its French neighbor was flourishing, the north coast was being resettled, and the British asiento was abolished. Keys to the colony’s coping with Bourbon reforms were the situado, corsair activity, and the profitability of the cattle trade with the French. Ann Zulawski focused on the roles of forasteros and yanaconas in Pilaya y Paspaya, an area in the southern reaches of Alto Perú which produced wine. Social dislocation, she showed, was far greater among yanaconas than among forasteros, in part because the latter were designated as free, while the former were put into a “servant” category.
In his comments, Murdo MacLeod pointed out that Andrien’s analysis of the 1765 Quito revolt hardly fit into the epoch of the “early” eighteenth century, but that the paper demonstrated well the caste-class alliances which were reflected later in other areas of Spanish America during the Wars of Independence, and that in the end the rebellion was actually counterproductive for the Quiteños. Barbier, MacLeod noted, suggested a new periodization for the eighteenth century, and showed that the situado was a deterrent to economic development rather than a stimulant, a change in the conventional wisdom. Ann Zulawski’s analysis of a peripheral area, said MacLeod, was especially valuable in that it showed the complexities and nuances in social structure and caste status in a little-known wine-producing area, although in some cases she may have been “jumping her evidentiary guns” in explaining the reasons for the difference in status between forastero and yanacona.
J. J. T.
The session entitled “The Columbian Legacy: First Encounters in the New Atlantic World” was sponsored by the AHA Columbus Quincentennial Committee. It was chaired by Wilcomb E. Washburn (Smithsonian Institution), and featured three papers.
“Euro-African Contacts in the Columbian Era: Military Aspects,” by John K. Thornton (Millersville University) emphasized the role of African military resistance in shaping the form of the Portuguese-African relationship. Thornton emphasized that both trade and religion were affected by African strength, and that it was that strength and not Portuguese toleration or preference for trade over conquest that was determinative.
Anthropologist J. Jorge Klor de Alva (State University of New York, Albany) discussed certain Nahuatl texts that reveal a native Mexican metaphysics that made Spanish conquest less threatening and destructive to the natives than it would have been if seen from a European perspective. Because that metaphysical outlook conceptualized the order of things as involving replacement of one thing by another in regular rotation, Spanish hegemony could be accounted for as part of the natural cycle of constant change rather than as reflecting a permanent destruction of native existence. This philosophy was incorporated in certain “primordial title” documents that Klor de Alva quoted, which validated preconquest native history in terms of postconquest Spanish authority.
William R. Swagerty (University of Idaho) presented a paper on “Indian-White Relations in the Protohistoric Southeast and Southwest” in which he stressed the importance of precontact cultural patterns as determining the form of native responses to European human and biological invaders in the Southeast and Southwest, 1513-1600. Both Spanish invaders and native groups were able to adapt their traditional responses to meet the challenges posed by each other: in some cases Indians allied themselves with the Spanish and the Spanish with the Indians in order to better promote their perceived interests; sometimes, the extensive trade relationship among different Indian groups (which included, for example, those between the mainland and the Caribbean isles, the importance of which has been overlooked and even doubted) was abandoned for fear of European diseases. Swagerty discussed at length the continuing debate over Indian population estimates, and the need for continued research to resolve some of the disputed aspects of the early European contacts with the natives of the Southeast and Southwest.
Grant Jones (Davidson College), the single commentator on the papers, praised their high quality, and emphasized the significance of the interdisciplinary approach to the study of first encounters that characterized the presentations. A vigorous exchange of views, questions, and comments came from the audience, which filled the room in which the session was held.
W. E. W.
The session on “New Light on the Mexican Boundary Survey,” chaired by David J. Weber (Southern Methodist University), included two papers. Harry P. Hewitt (Midwestern State University), “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Revisited: Myths and Realities of the Mexican Boundary Survey,” argued that U. S. studies of the survey of the border following the Mexican-American War have relied too heavily on U. S. sources. As a consequence, those writers have exalted the U. S. role and belittled the work of Mexican surveyors. Hewitt’s work in Mexican archival sources suggests that Mexican engineers played a more active and important role than historians from the United States have supposed. Joseph Richard Werne (Cape Girardeau, MO), “Mexico’s Interpretation of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Boundary Line,” analyzed newly available papers from the Mexican boundary commission and concluded that the Mexican commissioner, Pedro García Conde, like his U. S. counterparts, sought to stretch the treaty in order to provide Mexico with a more favorable boundary. The astute García Conde nearly achieved a great diplomatic triumph for Mexico. Graciously filling in for Angela Moyano Pahissa, who was unable to travel from Mexico City, Barbara Tenenbaum delivered an extemporaneous critique in which she deplored the lack of interest in the border region and offered specific suggestions to each author. Some 30 people attended the session; several applauded the use of Mexican archival materials and expressed appreciation of the more balanced picture offered by Hewitt and Werne.
D. J. W.
The session “From Imperial Reform to World Depression: The Middle Period of Latin American History” was chaired by Stuart F. Voss (SUNY, Plattsburg). The following papers were given: “Peasants and the ‘National Problem’ during the Middle Period of Latin American History: Alternative National Projects in Mexico and Peru, 1850-1910,” by Florencia Mallon (University of Wisconsin, Madison); “From Eighteenth-Century ‘Depression’ to Nineteenth-Century Industrialization: Analyzing the Mysterious Modernization Process in São Paulo, Brazil,” by Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof (University of Kansas); and “Between Capitalism and Regionalism: State Agency and Social Conflict in Mexico, 1760-1940,” by John Tutino (St. Olaf College). Stuart F. Voss commented.
The premise of this panel was that a new, “middle” period in Latin American historiography has gradually been coming into focus: that profound changes began to take place in the latter half of the eighteenth century which took more than a century to work themselves out and which, having attained maturation by the early twentieth century, in turn gave way to new directions in the wake of the worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s.
Paralleling the larger framework of recent socioeconomic studies that suggest the reorganization of Latin American realities in the context of the maturation of world capitalism between the 1780s and the 1920s, Mallon focused on the process and continuity of politics during these years. The key issue of who was to be included in the new concepts of nation and reform of colonial society emerged in the late eighteenth century. By the late 1920s, the initial process of state formation was complete, built on strong state structures, but also on exclusionary concepts of nationhood. That was the enduring political legacy of the middle period.
From the perspective of the two regions examined as case studies—sierran areas in the Peruvian Andes (Junín) and the central Mexican highlands (eastern Puebla)—the period was less a transition that a violent struggle over how the nation would be constituted. Faced with the efforts of prominent economic and regional interests to consolidate political and economic power, and taking advantage of the half century of civil strife and foreign intervention that frustrated those efforts, Indian peasants in both regions formed resistance movements that nurtured a localized nationalist vision. It was a vision of federated, autonomous, and ethnically pluralistic localities which joined to defend this framework, and to support it educationally, administratively, and judicially. It sought to guarantee all social elements sufficient resources for subsistence and the right to choose their leaders. This vision was part of an ongoing violent peasant struggle to force inclusion in the nations being forged within the old viceroyalties, but it sought to do so through multiclass coalitions. Yet the triumph of a capitalistic economy, in the context of the colonial legacy of hierarchy and exploitation, led to the defeat of this vision by a centralized, exclusionary nation-state. Despite the new period of social struggle and of experiments with inclusion ushered in during the 1930s, Latin American countries “must still confront the enduring baggage of an authoritarian political culture fashioned during the middle period of Latin American history.”
Kuznesof sees three main features of São Paulo’s middle period. 1) The general late eighteenth-century stagnation and depression in Brazil seems not to have been the economic climate in the São Paulo region. Instead, there was an expansion of the monetary exchange economy and an increase in the status of merchants greater than has previously been thought. 2) Independence reflected the changes of the Bourbon era—especially in the growing alliance between merchants and the elite of the agrarian-based clans—and provided the opportunity to express those changes in law. The years from 1828 to 1889 were marked by economic and political cooperation at the provincial level between members of the commercial and agrarian elite. Control over the distribution of resources moved from a local to a provincial focus, and interest association unrelated to territorial clans developed. However, marriage and other primary group association for political and economic cooperation continued.
As a whole, the middle period saw a change towards the development of a unified elite, without at the same time stimulating a sense of “class” among nonelite groups. Participation in economic production and politics was sharply limited to facilitate this change. The new sociopolitical structure was less segmentary at the top (with alliances at all geopolitical levels). But nonelite groups continued to attach themselves as clients to local elites.
Tutino contended that the expansion of external capitalism and the development and political incorporation of areas long on the periphery focused difficulties on a reformist colonial state, and later more intensely on a struggling national state, resulting in a long era of political instability and social violence. Four dynamic forces were at work during Mexico’s middle period: 1) the demise of the institutionalized church; 2) the rise of a politized military; 3) the persistence of political instability; and 4) the escalation of social conflict, agrarian violence in particular.
As long as the commercial economy of colonial society remained strong, as population densities permitted commercial and subsistence economies to coexist, and the colonial state mediated conflicts within the complex colonial structure, a remarkable stability endured. But the economic boom and state activism from 1760 to 1800, accompanied by an emerging regionalism and growing external pressures, set in motion a period of transition. The succeeding years from 1800 to 1880 were marked by political disintegration, capitalist pressures, and agrarian violence. The apparent era of stabilization under Porfirio Díaz was built on state coercion, harmony with external forces, and economic expansion. When the regional elites came to doubt the fairness in the distribution of opportunity and the solidity of dependent external ties, at the same time as there was a rising tide of unrest from below, Díaz’s failure to institutionalize the state left the regime without effective means of coercion.
Stabilization through a new central state was slow in the face of regional opposition, popular demands, and foreign pressures. The rural risings (especially that of the Cristeros) and the Depression’s weakening of external forces enabled Láraro Cárdenas in the 1930s to create a state with limited autonomy, a true mediating force that he institutionalized in an official party, with a revolutionary ideology providing a new legitimacy. Since 1940, however, claims to mediating autonomy have been undermined by external pressures, a population explosion, and the failure to implement the revolutionary ideology to any measurable degree, necessitating more coercion.
The commentator observed that the three papers encompassed a number of critical questions that are at the core of demarcating a middle period in Latin American history. What was the colonial world from which the middle period departed? Why and how did the last half of the eighteenth century initiate change? What were the key determinants or variables at work in this period? How can the period be best characterized? What brought the middle period to an end? Other important questions were addressed less directly in the three papers. 1) What is the relation of nation and state? 2) Was the middle period essentially a response to a new set of historical circumstances, or did it entail the emergence of fundamental opposing visions which sought to shape those circumstances? Was the middle period only an era of transition, or was it a self-contained, internally defined period in its own right?
The middle period may very well have been the search, the struggle to decide what kind of an altered society would replace the colonial world, and at what most appropriate spatial scale. As the imperial overlay disintegrated, regional societies were left to move in different directions along two axes: to retain the hierarchy, privilege, and exploitation of colonial society, or reform it to create a more open, participatory society; to retain the regionally based organization of life, with pluralism, multigroup association, and localized initiative, or create a new national, uniform ordering of society. External and internal events initiated the search, the struggle, and brought it to an end in one axis, but not the other. After 1930, the question of a hierarchical versus a popular and open society remained; but to constitute it at a regional scale was no longer an option. The society, by then, was too firmly organized at the national level.
S. F. V.
“Mining and Miners on Three Continents” was chaired by Ann Schofield (University of California, Berkeley). Participants were Candice L. Goucher (Portland State University), Jeffrey A. Cole (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (Portland State University). Malcolm J. Rohrbough (University of Iowa) commented.
The Latin American contribution to this panel was Jeffrey A. Cole’s paper on “The Mining Guild of Potosí, 1575-1650.” Cole argued that the gremio de azogueros evolved from medieval guild into capitalist cartel during the seventeenth century, in response to the changing nature of silver mining at Potosí. Indeed, the azogueros adopted a number of innovations—the demand that curacas provide money rather than Indians to satisfy their mita obligations, for example —to assure themselves continued high levels of profit. Because such innovations were “abuses” of their traditional relationship with the crown, which might justify the recision of concessions won earlier, the azogueros opted for a strategy of confusing the crown in an effort to preserve the status quo vis-à-vis royal policy. This was accomplished in part through the use of idiomatic, technological, and geographical terms peculilar to Alto Perú, and in part through a careful concealing of accurate production data. One result is that the archival sources pertaining to Potosí in the seventeenth century reflect the nature of the gremio-crown discourse better than they do everyday reality.
J. A. C.
Committee Reports
CLAH Caribe-Centro American Studies Committee—Louis A. Pérez, Jr. (University of South Florida) chaired the meeting. Jules R. Benjamin (University of Pittsburgh) presented a paper entitled “Business was Good, But the Customer Died: The Eisenhower Administration and Cuba.” Benjamin provided a historical overview of Cuban-U. S. relations as the determining context of the tensions and ultimate break in diplomatic relations between both countries during 1959-61. He argued that the source of North American hostility toward the Cuban Revolution was related more to historic conditions than immediate concerns, principally the longstanding assumptions that U. S. hegemony on the island would persist unquestioned and unchanged. The moment the Cuban Revolution challenged the assumptions on which U. S. control had traditionally rested and Fidel Castro refused to acquiesce to the presumed primacy of North American interests on the island, U. S. policymakers moved first to force the regime into moderation and eventually to seek its destruction.
Wayne S. Smith (SAIS-The Johns Hopkins University) agreed with the basic propositions advanced in Benjamin’s presentation, but assigned greater emphasis to international considerations as the source of hostility, specifically U. S. security concerns. Smith argued that North American opposition to the revolution was in direct reaction to specific acts by the revolutionary government, measures that were perceived in Washington as indications of a deepening radicalization of the revolution and a Cuban unwillingness to negotiate outstanding differences with the United States. These included the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959, the ouster of Manuel Urrutia, Ernesto Che Guevara’s visit to China, and the invitation tendered to Anastas Mikoyan. A lively discussion followed.
L. A. P.
Historical Statistics and Demographic History Committees—Following the custom of recent years, the two committees met in joint session. David J. Robinson (Syracuse University) acted as convener, Robert McCaa (University of Minnesota) was recorder. Notwithstanding the fact that the meeting occurs the evening before the beginning of the AHA convention, some 25 quantifiers and qualifiers gathered for a presentation by Richard Garner (Pennsylvania State University) entitled “What Do the Numbers Tell Us: Long-Term Economic Trends in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.” Through a regression analysis of an extensive set of eighteenth-century time series data for New Spain—tithes, silver production, maize prices, government revenues (contrasting the Brading and Coatsworth sets), and Mexico City pósito accounts—Garner concluded that the economy of colonial Mexico seems to have grown somewhere between 1 and 2 percent per year of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, maize production seems to have become increasingly inelastic, which may help explain the growing shortages in the 1780s and afterwards. Price and output data for León show that a 10-percent change in price yielded only a very slight increase in production—an inelasticity similar to that which governs Mexican maize production today. Finally, the problem of grain shortages was heightened by the growing ineffectiveness of the Mexico City pósito in acquiring grain supplies.
Discussion centered on questions both of method and meaning. Garner argued that the data are trustworthy for determining long-term trends, particularly where several series move in tandem. The technically inclined suggested that additional or different insights might be derived from a true time series analysis of what are clearly periodic data. Others noted that the heterogeneity of regions like “Oaxaca” or “Michoacán” begs for a refined analysis focused on more homogeneous localities.
The session also heard reports from Cecilia Rabell (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) on the forthcoming conference entitled “The Population History of Latin America” and from Peter Bakewell (University of New Mexico) on a proposal to develop a computerized data base on Brazilian politicians.
R. M.
Committee on Colonial Studies—The committee heard Sabine McCormack (Stanford University) present a paper on “Atawalpa and the Book.” She analyzed the most important narratives of the conquest of Peru to discuss the meaning of the incident of Atahualpa’s rejection of “the book” of Christianity and its ultimate meaning in framing the relations between Indians and Spaniards and between Andean cosmology and Roman Catholicism. She discussed the authenticity of the incident and its treatment by several contemporary historical sources, such as Francisco de Xerez, Cieza de León, Francisco López de Gómara, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Huamán Poma de Ayala. The lecture, however, went beyond comparative historiography, delving into other topics such as the meaning of books as symbols of authority in the sixteenth century and the significance of both the written and the spoken word in either establishing bridges or creating intellectual obstacles in the communication process between conquerors and conquered. McCormack’s presentation was enhanced by visual sources and was followed by an intense and rewarding question period, in which both the audience and the speaker had the opportunity to amplify some of the points of the lecture and pursue their significance. The small room assigned to this meeting was filled to capacity with around 30 persons, who remained riveted to their seats to the end of a challenging revisit to Andean colonial history.
A. L.
Brazilian Studies Committee—The meeting of the Brazilian Studies Committee centered on trends in the historiography of Brazil and was chaired by Marshall C. Eakin (Vanderbilt University); the discussants were Roderick Barman (University of British Columbia) and Mary Karasch (Oakland University); and Jeffrey D. Needell (University of Florida) was secretary.
Karasch reviewed the most recent nineteenth-century historiography by Brazilians and their emphases on the negreiros’ fortunes, regional and rural history, slavery, free Brazilian labor, and an emergent interest in “black pride.”
Barman’s discussion focused on the historiography in English and the patterns of scholarly production and careers over the last several scholarly “generations,” beginning with his own in the late 1960s. The latter stood between an “old guard” presiding over an established colonial tradition, as well as a generation rapidly coming to the fore by having broken new ground in prenineteenth-century research and publication, and, on the other hand, a generation on the rise which was associated with work on the Old Republic and post-1930 Brazil and the new opportunities and demands of archival research.
Barman noted that only six of his generation published their dissertations, that they (as the research of the group as a whole) were divided between pre- and post-1889, and that only 8 or 9 survived as academic Brazilianists. Further, preliminary analysis of Brazilianists’ dissertations and careers found a trend in which dissertation numbers increased between 1964 and 1974, only to fall dramatically from 1976 to the mid-1980s (from a high of 15 per year to a low in 1979 of 2 to a median of 6 to 8 in the 1980s). Other aspects of this group were a rise in the number of women scholars and the appearance of Brazilians, and, in 1986, the possible beginning of a rise, to 10 dissertations. Barman totaled matters up dramatically, noting that since 1968/69, some 140 dissertations had been completed, 16 books published (8 of which were on either the empire or the Old Republic), some 30 or fewer academic careers secured, a shrinkage in the CLAH group of perhaps 30 percent from 1970 to 1981 (compared to, say, 20 percent among Mexicanists) had taken place, and a trend had surfaced demonstrating Brazilianists’ moving away from the 1960s’ emphasis on the empire to increasingly post-1889, even post-1964, preoccupations, with an emphasis on eras of transition.
J. D. N.
Andean Studies Committee—Erwin Grieshaber (Mankato State University) presided over the meeting of the Andean Studies Committee which featured two papers. One of the speakers was Karen Powers (New York University). She delivered a paper entitled “Indian Migrations in the Audiencia of Quito: Crown Manipulation and Local Cooptation.” Powers focused on the crown’s response to the problem of Indian escapees from the Potosí mita. Using sources such as seventeenth-century censuses, letters from Indian caciques, financial records, and crown reports, Powers showed that the Spanish government used a variety of strategies to bring the escapees within the colonial system. By rewarding certain Indians to locate the escapees, and then offering them freedom from the mita and a lower tribute rate, the crown directed the flow of migrants into parcialidades de la real corona. Once these villages were organized, they served as targets for a variety of local individuals, such as “unlicensed obrajeros,” caciques, and later corregidores who needed access to labor and other resources. Rivalries between encomendero interests and the crown, between caciques and corregidores, and the relatively high wages offered by small-time obrajeros provided some advantages to the Indians. But those opportunities, once taken, contributed to the cooptation and relative acquiescence of key groups of Indians to the colonial system. Comment from the audience followed. Comparisons with Mexico were made, particularly with regard to Indian tribute payments and methods of integrating migrants into the colonial system.
Carlos Espinoza (University of Chicago) also presented a paper on Incan concepts of revolt as expressed by caciques during the colonial period. However, he did not provide a copy of the paper to the committee, so we felt that it would be inappropriate to comment on it.
E. G.
