Almost eleven of the twelve million Africans who survived the trauma of enslavement in Africa and the horrors of the Middle Passage, remade their lives in territories claimed by Spain or Portugal. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused sources, the authors show that although plantation slavery was a horrible reality for many Africans and their descendants in Latin America, blacks experienced many other realities in Iberian colonies.

Paul Lovejoy analyzes a treatise by a seventeenth-century Muslim scholar in Morocco and argues it shaped the slave trade to Latin America. John...

Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortes in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521. "Malintzin," at least, was what the Indians called her. The Spanish called her dona Marina, and she has become known to posterity as La Malinche. As Malinche, she has long been regarded as a traitor to her people, a dangerously sexy, scheming woman who gave Cortes whatever he wanted out of her own self-interest.

The life of the real woman, however, was much more complicated. She was sold into slavery as a child, and eventually given away to...

Bahia is a province of Brazil on its northeastern coast and is the size of the country of France. From the sixteenth century through the 1850s, at least 1.2 million African slaves entered Brazil through Bahia, many of those through the major port city of Salvador.

Dale Graden's study is divided into four parts. He first examines the cause of the demise of the slave trade to Bahia by 1851. International political pressures combined with internal slave resistance forced an abrupt decline in slave importations into the province. Second, he traces Bahia's abolitionist movement through the...

Between 1778 and 1784 the Spanish Crown transported more than 1,900 peasants, including 875 women and girls, from northern Spain to South America in an ill-fated scheme to colonize Patagonia. The story begins as the colonists trudge across northern Spain to volunteer for the project and follows them across the Atlantic to Montevideo. However, before the last ships reached the Americas, harsh weather, disease, and the prospect of mutiny on the Patagonian coast forced the Crown to abandon the project. Eventually, the peasant colonists were resettled in towns outside of Buenos Aires and...

The 1946 Mexican presidential election signaled the ascent of a new generation of cosmopolitan civilian government officials, led by the magnetic lawyer Miguel Aleman. Supporters hailed them as modernizing visionaries whose policies laid the foundation for unprecedented economic growth, while critics decried the administration s toleration of rampant corruption, hostility to organized labor, and indifference to the rural poor. Setting aside these extremes of opinion in favor of a more balanced analysis, Sons of the Mexican Revolution traces the socialization of this ruling...

The 1946 Mexican presidential election signaled the ascent of a new generation of cosmopolitan civilian government officials, led by the magnetic lawyer Miguel Aleman. Supporters hailed them as modernizing visionaries whose policies laid the foundation for unprecedented economic growth, while critics decried the administration s toleration of rampant corruption, hostility to organized labor, and indifference to the rural poor. Setting aside these extremes of opinion in favor of a more balanced analysis, Sons of the Mexican Revolution traces the socialization of this ruling...

Famous for its majestic ruins, Mexico has gone to great lengths to preserve and display the remains of its pre-Hispanic past. The Pursuit of Ruins argues that the government effort to take control of the ancient remains took off in the late nineteenth century during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Under Diaz Mexico acquired an official history more firmly rooted in Indian antiquity. This prestigious pedigree served to counter Mexico s image as a backward, peripheral nation. The government claimed symbolic links with the great civilizations of pre-Hispanic times as it hauled...

Famous for its majestic ruins, Mexico has gone to great lengths to preserve and display the remains of its pre-Hispanic past. The Pursuit of Ruins argues that the government effort to take control of the ancient remains took off in the late nineteenth century during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Under Diaz Mexico acquired an official history more firmly rooted in Indian antiquity. This prestigious pedigree served to counter Mexico s image as a backward, peripheral nation. The government claimed symbolic links with the great civilizations of pre-Hispanic times as it hauled...