During the seventeenth century, Spanish conquerors established Franciscan missions among the native inhabitants of Florida and New Mexico. The missionaries in the northern frontier doctrinas of Spain's New World empire adapted methods tested in Iberia and Central and South America to conditions among the Guales, Timucuas, Apalaches, and the various Pueblo peoples. The mission Indians of Florida and New Mexico responded to conquest and conversion in myriad ways. They incorporated Spaniards in traditional ways, they attempted to repel the interlopers, they joined the newcomers and accepted novel modes of behavior, they discriminated between which foreign concepts to adopt and which to reject, and they avoided entangling relations with the Spaniards as best they could. By the end of the seventeenth century the frontier missions of Florida and New Mexico collapsed under the weight of violent struggles among Indians, Spanish officials, Franciscan missionaries, and outside invaders. This comparative study will reveal patterns in Spanish frontier colonization and Indian responses to Spanish conquest and missions.

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The purpose of this study is to account for regional disintegration in Central America and the Río de la Plata following Independence. It is a comparison of the two regions that once existed as the Kingdom of Guatemala and the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. After independence these regions became nine separate states: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica in Central America; Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina in the Río de la Plata. The methodology used is the study of the late colonial period, the aftermath of the breakup of centralization, and the rise of the political strongman. Through this research I establish that the roots of nationalism never existed in the two regions. The research demonstrates that the states of Central America and the Río de la Plata exhibited signs of regionalism from their beginnings as colonial administrative centers to the formation of their political boundaries in the middle of the nineteenth century.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0199. Adviser: Kathleen A. Myers. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Feb. 8, 2007)."

In the middle of the eighteenth century the Portuguese crown, under the influence of the Marquis of Pombal, sought to reform the political administration of its vast set of imperial holdings. As part of these reforms, in 1751 Pombal sent his brother, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, to the Portuguese Amazon to serve as governor of the state of Grão Pará and Maranhão. This study explores Furtado’s tenure as governor of the Amazon from his perspective, in an attempt to understand how and why he arrived at a set of policies known as the “Directorate,” which overhauled the region’s mission system and attempted to more effectively assimilate native Amazonians into Portuguese colonial society. Chapter One combines a look at Furtado’s initial years as governor with short digressions into the relevant historical background of the region. The analysis in this chapter focuses on Furtado’s influence on his brother, the Marquis of Pombal, as well as the early attempts at reform he pursues out of a growing sense of frustration with the Jesuit missionaries in the region. Chapter Two focuses on a long trip Furtado took upriver to a settlement called Mariuá, in order to negotiate the boundary demarcation with Spain. Over the course of two years away from his home in Belém at the mouth of the Amazon, Furtado’s opinion of the Indians evolves, influencing the implementation of the Directorate policy upon his return. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the legacies of Furtado and the Directorate.