During the first half of the present century, about one million Mexicans were involved in a singular instance of large scale entry into the United States. Arriving just before the influx of foreigners abated sharply, they provide an example of recent immigration. In contrast to the experience of other groups entering one or more generations before, Mexican settlement occurred during the drastic changes caused by rapid economic growth and depression, by two world wars and the nation's reorganization for modern living. Nor did the newcomers from the South follow the traditional pattern of residence and occupation. Instead of locating in the densely urban and industrial Northeast of the United States, they flowed into rural areas in the Southwest, working in agriculture, railroad construction and related activities. Except for Canadian immigrants, the Mexicans were the only major immigrant group having relatively easy access to the home country by an overland route. Lastly, their distinctively Latin American culture has added novelty to history of immigration to the United States.

The National University of Buenos Aires, the largest and for many years the most prestigious in Latin America, is today more commonly taken as the archetype of the political Latin American university—and the connotations of “political” are wholly pejorative. This notoriety may be due in part, as Kalman Silvert suggests, to the high visibility of the University, especially to touring North American newsmen. Nevertheless, as its numerous critics allege, there seems to be abundant evidence to link politics to the manifest disarray of the educational process: in the well-publicized brawls among contending student factions and confrontations between demonstrators and the police, student strikes in opposition to procedural reforms desirable on grounds of efficiency, the reputed “terrorization” of heterodox professors, several student homicides in recent years, the distressingly high incidence of abandonos (for it is assumed, erroneously, that many withdrawals from the University are motivated by disgust with its politics); student political behavior as in the abusive reception tendered W. W. Rostow by a student group in Economic Sciences in February 1965, may have international repercussions. Such depressing phenomena have led even temperate and knowledgeable observers to speak of the “failure” of the University, and to call for a thoroughgoing structural overhaul, conducive, among other things, to depoliticization.

Ernesto Sábato es una de las figuras más destacadas del ambiente intelectual de la Argentina contemporánea. Ensayista y novelista, es un escritor que se ha lanzado con todas las fibras de su ser a la lucha desesperada con los problemas de nuestro tiempo. Siempre ha habido escritores que se han contentado con el arte “desinteresado”, los que se han ocupado principalmente de mundos fantásticos, los que han preferido observar, en contraste con los que han convertido su obra en instrumento por el bienestar social, los que participan activamente en la creación de una literatura de “servicio”, los que “agonizan”.

In his scholarly paper about the origins and writing of Longfellow's Hiawatha, Professor Moyne includes a whole canto which the poet decided at the last moment to omit from his completed work. Because its theme — the American Indian — is an all- American theme and because Longfellow himself enjoyed such rich relationships, both personal and literary, with peoples of Hispanic cultures, it seems particularly appropriate that the Journal of Inter-American Studies should be the first to present this hitherto unpublished canto to its readers.