This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1944.

For millennia friendships have framed the most intimate and public contours of our everyday lives. In this book, Ignacio Martínez tells the multilayered story of how the ideals, logic, rhetoric, and emotions of friendship helped structure an early yet remarkably nuanced, fragile, and sporadic form of civil society (societas civilis) at the furthest edges of the Spanish Empire. Spaniards living in the isolated borderlands region of colonial Sonora were keen to develop an ideologically relevant and socially acceptable form of friendship with Indigenous people that could act as a functional substitute for civil law and governance, thereby regulating Native behavior. But as frontier society grew in complexity and sophistication, Indigenous and mixed-raced people also used the language of friendship and the performance of emotion for their respective purposes, in the process becoming skilled negotiators to meet their own best interests. In northern New Spain, friendships were sincere and authentic when they had to be and cunningly malleable when the circumstances demanded it. The tenuous origins of civil society thus developed within this highly contentious social laboratory in which friendships (authentic and feigned) set the social and ideological parameters for conflict and cooperation. Far from the coffee houses of Restoration London or the lecture halls of the Republic of Letters, the civil society illuminated by Martínez stumbled forward amid the ambiguities and contradictions of colonialism and the obstacles posed by the isolation and violence of the Sonoran Desert.

An ideal resource for researchers and scholars interested in Latin American studies, this unique and valuable guide identifies individuals born between the years 1700 and 1910 who are or were engaged in some activity concerned with Latin America in general or any of its nations or regions. While the majority of Latinamericanists cited here served as university professors, diplomats, and business people, the list of notable experts includes artists, attorneys, authors, bankers, clergy, explorers, economists, geologists, and journalists. For each entry, the author has listed each individual's full name, profession, employer, and two of his publications, thereby indicating his or her Latin American interests. The fascinating array of topics that these pioneers have addressed in their books include subjects that have been studies extensively, as well as those subjects that have barely been reviewed. A valuable feature of the book is the history of Latin American studies, written by pioneer Dr. A. P. Nasatir, Research Professor of History Emeritus at San Diego State University, who began teaching in the United States in 1928. Faculty, students, and researchers interested in Latin American studies will find this book valuable.

In this work W J McGee sheds light on one of the least-studied tribes of North America, The Seri Indians. This is a unique tribe in habits, customs, and language, living in Tiburon Island in Gulf of California and a small adjacent area on the mainland of Sonora (Mexico). McGee covers everything about the tribe from their habitat, history, features, language, characters, and their place in society. Excerpt from the book "The Seri men and women are of splendid physique; they have fine chests, with slender but sinewy limbs, though the hands and especially the feet are large; their heads, while small in relation to stature, approach the average in size; the hair is luxuriant and coarse, ranging from typical black to tawny in color, and is worn long. They are notably vigorous in movement, erect in carriage, and remarkable for fleetness and endurance."