Agrarismo is the body of thought that is understood to have guided Mexican peasant struggles in this century. It seems reasonable to expect an essay on peasant ideology to open with a clear definition, or at least a list of the doctrines that form the content of this ideology. But agrarismo has often served as an imprecise catchword for a wide variety of goals espoused by peasants and peasant leaders during seven decades of struggle in the Mexican countryside. Even when we consider only the mainstream of agrarianist thinking in twentieth-century Mexico, we find that an agrarista vision of a just order has implied committment to a strikingly diverse series of programs from 1910 to the present day.

Beginning in the early 1960s, manufacturing operations of the larger U.S. corporations became more international in scope with the emergence of the globally integrated production system (Moxon, 1974: 60). Fundamental to the successful functioning of the system was an international division of labor. Generally, workers in less developed countries (LDCs) were utilized for labor-intensive tasks, and capital-intensive, highly skilled phases of production were carried out in the United States. The geographical separation of labor inputs became the hallmark of the internationalization of production directed by multinational corporations (MNCs). More efficient modes of transportation, such as containerization and air freight, and improved communication, information, and production control techniques made possible centralized administration of dispersed production units (Vuskovic, 1980: 10). In addition, the global context of production required a new approach to foreign investment—the offshore installation, which eventually assumed two forms: the export platform and the satellite plant.

After more than a year of intense civil war, Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle resigned from office on July 19, 1979, and fled the country. Accompanying the opposition's Provisional Junta when it entered Managua were the foreign ministers of the five Andean Group nations: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. The presence of the Andean Group representatives during the transfer of power is indicative of the important part played by international governmental organizations (IGOs) during the Nicaraguan revolution. Along with the Andean Group, the Organization of American States (OAS) acted with a degree of independence not usually evident in hemispheric affairs.

The last two decades or so have seen academic interest in urban Latin American history mature to the point where questions of cultural realities have taken on greater complexity and importance. For reasons bound up with the socioeconomic factors usually studied first, the period between 1870 and 1930 seems fated to be especially attractive. That was the period, after all, when the neocolonial order came of age and, with it, the cultural possibilities born of greater wealth, a larger leisure class, an urban way of life in the expanding port and administrative centers, and the greater access to European cultural models through travel and luxury imports.