The Situation of Puerto Rico in the First Half of the 20th Century

After 390 years of Spanish colonialism, Puerto Rico was ceded by Spain to the United States, as a result of the Spanish-American War and the Treaty of Paris. At the dawn of the 20th century, the situation on the Island was one of extreme poverty, high unemployment, and widespread illiteracy. Federal programs alleviated the situation on the Island but began to institutionalize a major problem: the evil of passively waiting for economic aid from abroad, instead of seeking to solve the problems by its own initiative.

From church to pyramid

Sometime after coming to Mexico City in the early twentieth century, the Concheros gradually became involved in the growing cultural interest in the Aztec past. By the last decades, however, they found themselves in an antagonistic situation with those dancers who called themselves the Mexica who, although they performed the same dances, espoused mexicanidad a strong neo-nationalistic and neo-indianist ideology. The Mexica reject Spanish colonialism and have discarded the clearly Catholic ritual practices of the Concheros who habitually dance outside Churches: the Mexica’s preference is for pyramids. The article, using historical and fieldwork data, examines the growing use of archaeological sites as they have slowly been refurbished, focusing on two: Teotihuacan and Cholula. Importantly, in the last two decades, a gradual rapprochement between the Concheros and the Mexica has occurred as the overall ethos of the dance has been changing once again.

THE CULTURE OF THE LATIFUNDIA

Researching for socio-educational transformation implies elucidating the hegemonic cultural, political and economic problems of a social formation; in this case, of the Venezuelan social formation. In the field of education, the dominant approaches obfuscate the political stance of teachers by minimising their potential as organic intellectuals capable of transforming their environment. Both naïve empiricism and idealism permeate the sociological and pedagogical reflections that legitimise the colonial and neo-colonial phases established by the culture of the latifundia. This article takes a look at the culture of the latifundia as a structural and cultural remnant of Spanish colonialism as found in the novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Social and educational changes must start with an analysis of the roots; that is, the epistemic-theoretical and cultural foundations that constitute the processes of institutionalisation of Venezuelan education, with the ultimate purpose of discovering the conceptual and methodological devices that hinder the qualitative leap needed in the socio-educational task, which is mainly political-ideological.

The Arsenal of the Mediterranean Revolution

This chapter elaborates the capture of the Yugoslav ship Srbija off the Algerian coast by the French navy on 7 August 1957, which was then escorted to the military port of Mers-el-Kebir. It notes the independence of Morocco and the crowning of Sultan Mohammed as King Mohammed V, who provided strong support to those fighting against French and Spanish colonialism. It also discusses police officers in Casablanca that confiscated war material from the shipment of the Czechoslovak party and secretly distributed it to the Algerian insurgents. The chapter reviews the Warsaw Pact summit that took place in Budapest from 1 to 4 January 1957, wherein the renewed communist unity under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev was demonstrated. It pays attention to Marshal Tito's attendance at the summit, where he gave his public support to the renewed Cominform, hoping to redeem himself for the secret support he had been giving to Imre Nagy.

Indigenous Routes and Resource Materialities in the Early Spanish Colonial World: Comparative Archaeological Approaches

The early colonial period witnessed new scales of connectivity and unprecedented projects of resource extraction across the Spanish Americas. Yet such transformations also drew heavily on preexisting Indigenous landscapes, technologies, and institutions. Drawing together recent discussions in archaeology and geography about mobility and resource materialities, this article takes the early colonial route as a central object of investigation and contributes to new emerging interpretive frameworks that make sense of Spanish colonialism in the Americas as a variable, large-scale, and materially constituted process. Using three case studies—the ruta de Colón on the island of Hispaniola, the routes connecting the southeastern Caribbean islands with mainland South America, and the ruta de la plata in the south-central Andes—we develop a comparative archaeological analysis that reveals divergent trajectories of persistence, appropriation, and erasure in the region's routes and regimes of extraction and mobility during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Colonialismo español: de la visibilidad a la invisibilidad de los guineo-ecuatorianos / Spanish colonialism: from the visibility to the invisibility of the Equatorial Guineans

¿Cómo el colonialismo llegó a influir en los Guineo-ecuatorianos al punto de hacerlos invisibles? ¿Cuáles son los métodos a los cuales recurrieron estos últimos para reafirmar su visibilidad? Ante tales preguntas, el objetivo del presente estudio consiste en exponer tanto los elementos que caracterizan la visibilidad de los guineo-ecuatorianos como los que revelan su invisibilidad. La hipótesis que sirve de hilo conductor es que la cultura y las religiones, objetos de su visibilidad, formas de entender el mundo y su vida han sido influenciados por la presencia española. Se utilizan los métodos histórico, explicativo y descriptivo, para descifrar que, tras la conquista y colonización de Guinea Ecuatorial por España, los localestenían sus culturas con características propias, factor de su visibilidad. Pero el colonialismo va a arrinconar estas culturas dando rienda suelta a la cultura española y transformando a los colonizados en objetos de discriminación. Además de negar todas las pautas de vida y del pensamiento del indígena, el colonizador no quiso hacer del colonizado su semejante y portador de valores culturales de su país. Lo que engendró relaciones a veces conflictivas entre ellos. Esto nos conduce a analizar la manera cómo el colonialismo hace invisible al guineo-ecuatoriano y su cultura en su propio territorio, así como los métodos utilizados por las nuevas generaciones para hacerse visibles. How did colonialism come to influence the Equatorial Guineans to the point of making them invisible? What are the methods used by the latter to reaffirm their visibility? Faced with such questions, the objective of this study is to expose both the elements that characterize the visibility of the Equatorial Guineans and those that reveal their invisibility. The hypothesis that serves as a common thread is that culture and religions, objects of its visibility, ways of understanding the world and its life have been influenced by the Spanish presence. The historical, explanatory, and descriptive methods are used to decipher that, after the conquest and colonization of Equatorial Guinea by Spain, the locals had their cultures with their own characteristics, a factor of their visibility. But colonialism is going to corner these cultures giving free rein to Spanish culture and transforming the colonized into objects of discrimination. In addition to denying all the patterns of life and thought of the indigenous, the colonizer did not want to make the colonized his like and bearer of the cultural values of his country. What engendered sometimes conflicting relationships between them. This leads us to analyze the way in which colonialism makes the Ecuadorian-Guinean and their culture invisible in their own territory, as well as the methods used by the new generations to make themselves visible.

A Prohibition on Digging Up the Bones of the Dead (1813)

In 1813, the Bishop of Cebu, Joaquín Encabo de la Virgen de Sopetrán, issued an edict prohibiting the exhumation of the dead, written primarily in the local language of Cebuano Visayan. This document from the archives of the Roman Catholic parish of Patrocinio de Maria in Boljoon, a town in the Philippine province of Cebu, suggests that inhabitants of the diocese were digging up the bones of the dead in order to hold rituals for a secondary burial along traditional, non-Christian lines. Ino Manalo discusses the edict in light of the emphasis placed by Spanish colonialism on urbanism and literacy, and outlines the ways in which it provides evidence of the persistence of traditional beliefs and practices centuries after the introduction of Christianity to the Visayas.

“The Forests Cannot Be Commons”

This article examines the sylvan political ecology of late colonial New Spain and the colonial government's attempt to address deforestation through the Council on Forests, the first body in the kingdom's history dedicated to the conservation of natural resources. Drawing primarily from the corpus of documents produced by and remitted to the council, this article gives a trans-regional perspective on colonial forest use and argues that the Spanish crown's usurpation of indigenous communities’ eminent domain over forests was the first step in a process that over centuries progressively severed the cultural ties that bound communities and forests by converting common-pool resources into open-access commons. The catastrophic mortality of the Spanish invasion was the second step, which rendered conservation measures seemingly unnecessary among both woodcutters and officials. But it was during the eighteenth century that older Habsburg notions of protectionism intersected with economic and political changes associated with Bourbon rule to further compel this cultural severance. While previous works have studied the ecological impacts of mining, ranching, and flood control, this article moves beyond the study of a single industry to suggest some of the larger ecological consequences of Spanish colonialism.

Vivir y pensar la construcción de la sociedad anarquista desde la realidad mesoamericana, ayer y hoy

The communal life of the Mesoamerican communities has been the historical basis of indigenous resistance against Spanish colonialism and then against Mexican colonialism. This way of life and mentality was considered by the magonistas in the 1910s as the powerful historical experience that would be the basis for the free reconstruction of society after the triumph of the anarchist sector in the Mexican revolution that they organized in exile from the United States. But they did not value communality as a form of resistance to achieve the liberation of capitalist colonialism, because they supposed dead a way of life that is still alive today in communities of places like Oaxaca.