Spain maintained control of Louisiana from 1766 to 1803 primarily through the use of the time-honored judicial system innovated in her American colonies. Her foremost concern was to ward off English and American invasion of the rich mineral province of New Spain by sustaining Louisiana as a buffer zone free of social disorder and calamity between Mexico and Anglo-America. The establishment in New Orleans of the Cabildo and the courts of the alcaldes ordinarios and the governor's civilian court, in addition to the special fueros enjoyed by the military, the Church, and the members of the Intendancy, achieved the judicial foundation. Lesser courts in district wards and rural posts processed criminal cases, referring difficult major crimes to the courts in New Orleans. Appeal procedures existed to the higher courts in Havana and the Council of the Indies in Seville Criminal activity in Spanish Louisiana can be divided into three caregories: crimes against persons, crimes against property, and crimes against public order. Petty theft of items of food and clothing comprised the greatest number of prosecuted felonies. The existence of a large slave population and increasing numbers of free men of color manifested itself as a major sector of criminal activity. Slave defiance to the institution of forced labor plagued the Spanish authorities from 1770 to 1803. The presence of a sizable military garrison and convict labor prone to desertion added an additional dissident population element. Spanish Louisiana also served as a haven of refuge for renegade bandits and deserters from neighboring British and American territories. American settlers, invited by the Spanish into the upper region of Louisiana, fostered a love of individualism and freedom completely alien to Spanish authoritarian rule. The advent of the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue in 1789 and French revolutionary Jacobin sympathizers in Louisiana forced the Spanish governors to enforce rigid restrictions on freedom in the 1790s The dissertation examines the judicial process in the courts of Spanish Louisiana to determine the extent of criminal activity, the composition of the judiciary, and the specific adaptations to the Spanish system of justice to accommodate the Louisiana situation. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI / acase@tulane.edu

This study examines the application of the positivist maxim 'Order and Progress' by the Porfirio D(')iaz government. Two institutions in the Mexican capital, the police force and the system of penal correction, are selected as case studies. Policemen and prisons were instruments of order and symbols of Porfirian progress. They reveal many accomplishments and limitations of the Porfirian program. Source material for the dissertation includes archival documentation, newspapers, and published Memorias The police force was structured in such a way that it constituted a buttress for executive authority. D(')iaz used the institution as an arm of his dictatorship. The police, nevertheless, were essentially an agent against non-political crime. The gendarmes demonstrated an increasing resolve to stamp out social disorder. Mexico City was policed more intensively than were other large cities in Europe and North America. The gendarmes became more and more aggressive in their persecution of minor offenders who detracted from the official image of the capital as a safe and prosperous city The D(')iaz regime borrowed heavily from policing innovations in the developed countries when it modernized Mexico City's law enforcement system. The reorganized police force was more efficient than the law enforcement institutions which antedated it. The government, however, failed to create a truly professional police The history of penal correction also demonstrates a growing intolerance of disorder. Legal changes increased the penalties for crime and encouraged summary justice for petty thieves. At first illegally, and later with the blessing of the law, the government transported large numbers of petty offenders to the Valle Nacional, Quintana Roo, and the Islas Mar(')ias. In all three places, but especially in the first two, the prisoners suffered punishments out of proportion to their transgressions. The urban poor paid a high price for that callousness toward the petty offender The opening of the penitentiary culminated decades of planning to make punishment rational. The highly praised penitentiary, however, was not typical of the capital's penal infrastructure. Most convicts were sentenced to carceral institutions which violated the modern penal code. Modernization of the police and the penal system was cosmetic rather than substantive / acase@tulane.edu

By 1825 the issue of nationhood became a paramount concern for all the newly independent governments of Latin America. While there might have been agreement on the necessity of independence among Latin American creole elites, the form their countries would take after independence was subject to much debate. In Bolivia, the debate about the country's future was complicated by the presence of a large indigenous population and a growing and militarised mestizo element General Manuel Isidoro Belzu served as President of the Republic of Bolivia from 1848 to 1855. Due to his protectionist economic policies and populist rhetoric, Belzu attracted extensive support from Bolivia's nascent working class and large indigenous population. His ability to forge popular urban and rural support bases enabled him to challenge the political domination of the creole elite. Belzu not only represented the potential power of the masses but a real attempt at nation-building and political modernisation. His vision for an independent Bolivia included the promotion of liberal philosophy founded upon the principles of popular sovereignty. The result was a new form of national discourse between the government and the masses. Belzu and what he seemed to represent were a terrifying prospect for the Bolivian oligarchy. For all their liberal rhetoric about progress, they remained bound by their fear of the masses. Even after his death, opposition to Belzu continued in the form of political manipulation of history by civilista writers who denied the period and the president any role in Bolivia's modernisation This study, drawn from government documents, the popular press and personal papers housed in the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacional in Sucre, Bolivia, and from sources in U.S. libraries and archive collections, challenges the long standing Black Legend of Belzu and argues that he continued the process of national construction begun by Bolivia's first president, Mariscal Sucre: a process later liberal governments would not only build upon but claim as their own. This work seeks to recognize Manuel Isidoro Belzu not as an impediment but as a crucial participant in the construction of the modern Bolivian nation / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines Mexico's water management policies in the Grijalva River Basin between 1951 and 1974. The periodization begins with the formation of the Grijalva River Commission (Comision del Rio Grijalva, CRG) and ends with the completion of the Belisario Dominguez dam in 1974 by the Federal Electric Commission (Comision Federal de Electricidad, CFE). Contrasting the works of the CRG with those of the CFE illustrates the ability of the state to muster unprecedented levels of political and financial capital for the construction of large-scale irrigation works, extensive levee systems and most importantly a series of large dams throughout the river basin. During this period the state relocated almost 30,000 people and submerged approximately 30 population centers. Further, the river management policies of the state re-ordered a diverse and dynamic riparian ecosystem, often with unpredicted results. Studying the relationship between the state, local communities and the environment yields a body of data that further complicates notions of a monolithic state determining developmental and modernization imperatives. Local communities resisted state plans on the local, municipal, state and national level, sometimes successfully at others not. The third actor, the environment, also belied state plans to rapidly develop the impoverished states of Chiapas and Tabasco. By the late 1960's state planners abandoned the multi-purpose development plans that were central to building the dam at Malpaso. Instead, CFE bureaucrats replaced CRG engineers as it concerned dam building on the river. The lofty goals of multi-purpose development, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were discarded in favor of single purpose dams for hydroelectricity. Ultimately, dam building did not necessarily lead to an explosion in electrical or agricultural development. Instead, dams stand as monuments to revolutionary heroes and promises, whose legacy is yet to be determined / acase@tulane.edu

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This dissertation examines social and political tensions in the silver mining city of Potosi during the early decades of the seventeenth century. More specifically, it explores the complex reasons behind a severe outburst of violence among Spaniards of different regional peninsular backgrounds between 1622-25 A slow decline in silver production provides the backdrop to rising tensions during the first several decades of the seventeenth century. The presence of a large, youthful, and restless underclass of young immigrants from Spain exacerbated competition for labor and other resources among silver mining enterprises. The perception that the close-knit, prosperous Basque community of silver miners in Potosi had manipulated the local political scene to their advantage during the early decades of the seventeenth century led to resentment among both the young recent immigrants and those from other regions of Spain who resided in Potosi. Lax oversight and outright venality among royal officials in Potosi exacerbated the hostility and resentment toward the Basques felt by regional groups of Andalusians, Extremadurans, Gallegos, and others. A long-overdue inspection of the royal accounts in Potosi by Contador Alonso Martinez de Pastrana stirred up this already volatile situation and helped precipitate a three-year period of outright violence from 1622-1625 Based on contemporary accounts and archival correspondence, the dissertation provides a detailed overview of this violent period, while focusing on the competing efforts of interested parties to steer events toward a resolution favorable to their faction. Special emphasis is placed on the efforts of the hostile factions to sway both public and official opinion to view the disturbances from their own partisan points-of-view. Such efforts ranged from extensive narrative accounts of the disturbances sent to influential officials to intimidating strong-arm attempts of persuasion. In this same context, the dissertation explores the important connections between the world of theatrical productions in Potosi to the faction hostile to the Basques arguing that theater provided a key persuasive element in convincing some Potosinos to take violent actions against their adversaries / acase@tulane.edu

Earlier studies of the cabildo (town council) in the Spanish colonial empire emphasized the legislation which governed it, its ceremonial and ideological role in the community, and the day-to-day complexities of local administration. Without denying the importance of these matters, this study of the cabildo of Santiago de Guatemala in the seventeenth centuryy approaches the problem instead from the perspective of the cabildo's role as an institutional redoubt of local interests in a political system otherwise designed to communicate to the periphery policies and decisions arrived at at the center The study is based primarily upon manuscript sources found in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain, and the Archivo General de Centro America, Guatemala City. Particularly valuable were cabildo minute books, natarial registers, official correspondence, and petitions for confirmation of salable offices Chapter I presents the study and the sources upon which it is based Chapter II acquaints the reader with the peculiarities of the institutional evolution of the Guatemalan town council as essential background for the discussion to follow Chapter III is devoted to the sale of municipal offices in Guatemala. Introduced in the late sixteenth century throughout the Indies, this practice had a profound effect on the development of the seventeenth-century town council by determining its size and the nature of its membership Chapters IV and V, which form the core of the discussion, deal with the council members themselves, an aspect of cabildo history until recently neglected in favor of assumptions and generalizations based upon formal legislation and statements in the traditional literature. Chapter IV examines the family background of a group of regidores who served in the second half of the seventeenth century. Chapter V represents an inquiry into members' economic activities and interests Chapter VI turns to the question of the activity of the cabildo in imperial politics and attempts, with reference to several specific issues current in the seventeenth century, to suggest the relationship between dominant economic interests and the cabildo's position on certain questions, as well as the degree of effectiveness of cabildo intervention on imperial policymaking Finally, Chapter VII states conclusions and suggests problems for future research The principal conclusion of the study is that cabildo membership in seventeenth-century Santiago de Guatemala was dominated by, and represented the interests of, the city's peninsula-born merchant community. Landed, creole elements, while not excluded, had less influence than traditionally supposed. In fact, the study indicates, at least for seventeenth-century Guatemala, that there was no necessary relationship between landownership and political and economic power / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation is an attempt to understand Brazilian-Paraguayan relations during the Alfredo Stroessner era. It is the history of that relationship and its economic, political and geopolitical consequences. Argentina is also included, because of its interest in the Plata system This study of recent Brazilian-Paraguayan relations shows us why and how the biggest hydroelectric plant in the world, Itaipu, was built, how Brazil replaced Argentina as Paraguay's trade partner, the struggle of Brazilian diplomacy to cultivate Paraguay as partner and a market for Brazilian goods, and the Paraguayan attempt to gain benefits from Brazil and Argentina. It also shows how Paraguay is tied to Brazil on its eastern border, why Brazilian tourists are important for those Paraguayan border towns, and how Brazil gave political support to Stroessner in Paraguay. A simple analysis of contraband, mainly in wood and grains, is part of this dissertation. Finally, it analyzes the motives behind the massive Brazilian migration to Paraguay and looks at its consequences This dissertation shows us how both sides, Brazil and Paraguay, bargained and compromised on different issues. It was not only the minor partner, Paraguay, which was forced to cede advantages in the economic and diplomatic game; Brazil was also forced to compromise if it wanted to accomplish its goals The conclusion is that in the last twenty-five years, Paraguay has fallen under Brazilian influence, but, in pursuing its interests, Paraguay has the means to force Brazil to compromise / acase@tulane.edu

Among the earliest attempts of converting the Middle American Indians to Christianity was through the use of pictorial catechisms called Testerian manuscripts. The early Spanish Mendicant friars used the pictorial prayer books to teach the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church considered essential for conversion. The Testerian catechisms are named after Fray Jacobo de Testera, the Franciscan friar who is thought to have developed the hieroglyphic catechisms for the conversion process. The manuscripts combined Christian iconography and symbols from the pre-conquest native codices, and were drawn with small mnemonic and rebus figures representing a syllable, word or phrase of the Christian text The research undertaken in this study is the first comprehensive analysis of a group of manuscripts that were based on the pre-Columbian native codices and created for the religious education and conversion of the Indians of New Spain. Thirty-two documents are considered in this study. An analysis of style, content and form allowed us to define eleven types of Testerian catechisms represented by five groups and six individual examples. We have also determined that only nineteen of the extant manuscripts called Testerian catechisms are actual working catechisms, and that these were created over a time period of approximately three hundred years. The survival of the Testerian method into the nineteenth century reveals the prolonged success of the oldest teaching instruments of the New World, long after the native languages were transcribed into European letters, and three centuries following the merging of the two distinct and powerful New World and European cultures / acase@tulane.edu