DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24901/rehs.v39i154.603

Presentation

This issue, number 154, which corresponds to spring 2018, presents eight articles, all of which deal, primarily, with historical anthropology. Ana Luz Ramírez Zavala enlightens us as to how Mexico’s federal government adapted its educational policy in the territory of the indigenous Seri from 1920-1957 by establishing a program of rural schools thanks, largely, to the participation of diverse intermediaries who adjusted the study programs to the cultural conditions of this indigenous group’s fishing communities in the state of Sonora. Paulina Ultreras Villagrana and Miguel Ángel Isais Contreras present an engaging historiographic account of ranchero societies and the agrarian world in Western Mexico through a critical evaluation of the achievements and limitations of existing literature on this subject. Libertad Mora Martínez turns to economic anthropology and the new rurality approach in historical perspective to analyze the changes that two indigenous communities in the Huasteca poblana –one Nahua, the other Otomí– experienced as their self-sufficient, peasant economy was displaced by a multiple economy that included artisanal activities, labor mobility, and transnational migration. Raquel Tovar Pulido takes us back to the dawn of the 19^th century and a city in Extremadura on the Iberian Peninsula, where she presents a demographic reconstruction to examine the models of families there and the characteristics of family leadership, whether in the hands of men or women.

Still on the Iberian Peninsula, but in the 17^th century, Antoni Picazo Muntaner opens a window onto the elusive world of the Chuetas, descendants of converted Jews in the kingdoms of Aragon at a time when members of their community were forced by the Inquisition to publicly recant their beliefs (in public acts called autos de fe). Returning to Mexico, María Fernanda Sigüenza Vidal opens the doors to the world of women’s prisons in the mid-19^th century to examine processes of rehabilitation in the context of reforms of the existing prison system, taking two institutions as her analytical laboratory: Ex Acordada and Belén. Víctor Kerber Palma, meanwhile, delves into a kind of story that is especially difficult to trace in analyses of armed conflicts: how, during the Mexican Revolution –and while facing the arms blockade maintained by the United States– fighters on both sides looked to Japan as a possible arms supplier. His inquiry centers on the role of the Mitsui company. This set of interesting articles closes with a thought-provoking reflection on the poetry of Sor Juana de la Cruz, by Herón Pérez Martínez.

In our Documents section, the historian María Pilar Gutiérrez Lorenzo examines the three wills left by Eusebio Sánchez Pareja, a Regent of the Audiencia of Guadalajara; a discovery that led her to reflect on the importance of life histories.

Víctor Gayol