Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

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The majority of studies on the Jesuit priest Diego Luis de San Vitores (1627-1672) analyze his role as the founder of the mission in the Mariana Islands. Nevertheless, little has been written on his activities in Mexico and the Philippines, especially in terms of the internal conflicts within the Jesuit order in Mexico, which represented obstacles to a mission project in an archipelago of great strategic value in Asia and the Pacific. This article, principally based on primary and archival sources from Rome and Mexico, analyzes the reception of San Vitores’s mission project in the Philippines and New Spain. On the one hand, Father Miguel Solana (1668-1670), provincial superior of Manila, with the support of Archbishop Miguel de Poblete Casasola (1653-1667), supported the evangelization of the Mariana Islands following the Spanish withdrawal from Ternate, Mindanao and Jolo (1663). While the procurators and provincial superiors of New Spain were reluctant to collaborate, the Congregation of Saint Francis Xavier, and particularly its procurator, Father Joseph Vidal de Figueroa (1630-1703), defended San Vitores’s mission project tooth and nail. The mission’s final success should not just be understood as being due to the fervor and spiritual zeal of its founder, but also due to the need of the provincial superiors of the Philippines to defend the role of the Company of Jesus as the vanguard of Tridentine Catholicism on the frontiers of the Spanish Empire.

This article analyzes one episode of financial diplomacy: the negotiations for the restructuring of Mexico’s external debt that occurred from 1836 to 1842. Here, the Mexican government made use of a financial agent, the firm of F. de Lizardi and Company, owned by a family of Mexican origin. The proposal made to bondholders involved the creation of a consolidated fund that would combine the two original loans, with old bonds being exchanged for new ones, half of which would not generate interest and could be exchanged for land in northern Mexico. This strategy allowed the interest to be reduced by half and allowed for the colonization of the country’s north, thus creating a barrier to the expansionist interests of the United States, particularly in Texas. Following the proposals of Gould and Fernández, this article seeks to analyze the role of the financial agent as an intermediary between different interests, arguing that this financial intermediary acted more as a “connection” than a “representative,” and so Mexico’s financial interests were affected by the final settlement. For this purpose, there is extensive analysis of the correspondence between the financial agent, the different representatives of Mexico in London, the bondholders and the Mexican Finance and Foreign Affairs ministers, which are stored in Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Archive, as well as the contemporary press.

Through primary sources found in the Health Secretariat History Archive and the Mexico City History Archive, together with the 19th Century press, this article aims to reconstruct the “intermediate” period of the history of a public welfare institution, the Tecpan de Santiago, which took care of orphans and youth offenders. The period examined herein encompasses the years from 1856 to 1877, a time in which it was partially private, run by Federal District Governor Juan José Baz and his wife Luciana Arrazola. This period has been little explored by the historiography on this institution, on which its Porfirian period is better known. This article aims to emphasize the objectives and gifts of the administration of welfare institutions in the 19th Century and how they sometimes turned to illegal methods.

This article studies one episode in the diplomatic relationship between Mexico and Guatemala: the 1932 immigration conference. It examines the problems that precipitated it, the interests of each government and the political situation in Guatemala, explaining that the conference may have put out a fire, but that its coals remained hot. This article is based on the official correspondence contained in Mexican and Guatemalan archives, which shows discordant concerns regarding the border. Reviewing these perspectives and the contrasts between them allows us to study a dynamic that has been overlooked by many experts: the determination of the postrevolutionary regime to order its southern border without offending its neighbor, and the obsession of the Guatemalan government with fortifying its northern border against communist activities. This situation, combined with the interests of Soconusco landowners and the negligence of immigration agents, paints a complex picture, which it is necessary to study from both sides of the border.