In 1975 the Trilateral Commission published Crozier, Huntington, and Wantanuki's Crisis of Democracy, which questioned the compatibility of stable capitalist development and traditional democratic freedoms in the advanced capitalist nations, a theme echoed in Lindblom (1977), Lindberg et al. (1975), Nisbet (1975), and Huntington (1981). Living in capitalist societies whose recent experience is strikingly nondemocratic, Latin American scholars have felt most urgently the need to assess critically this contradiction and its implications for general political tendencies within the process of capitalist development. In the 1970s, directly in response to events in the major industrialized Latin American nations (especially Brazil, Argentina, and Chile), theoretical and empirical research has reformulated the terrain of debate regarding the relationship of political, economic, and social relations in peripheral capitalist nations. This new vocabulary and new set of hypotheses about state structure and state intervention suggest explanations for the nondemocratic political structure and the increasingly expansive and intensive role of the state in the process of capital accumulation in Latin America.

Agrarian studies in Peru experienced an unusual development in the seventies, when a new generation of scholars emerged whose impact has been considerable. The advances made are the result of their collective contribution. One consequence of recent research has been the displacement of a traditional view consisting of a schematic paradigm of the Peruvian countryside that long dominated the thought of social scientists and laymen. Its origins can be traced to the portrayals by Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre of Peruvian society of the twenties, which at the time were fresh and meaningful. The paradigm can be recognized in works such as Roel (1961) or CIDA (1966) that, despite their merits, failed to place sufficient emphasis upon the new trends that emerged in Peruvian agriculture following the Second World War. The structuralism of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and the reformist agrarian thought of the fifties and sixties reinforced this accepted interpretation that was transformed into an increasingly ideologized vision of reality.

In 1977 concern for the long-range effects of policy-making prompted President Carter to direct the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State to study the “probable changes in the world's population, natural resources, and environment through the end of the century.” The projections of that commission, as detailed in The Global 2000 Report to the President (Barney et al. 1981), foresee a growth in the world's population of as much as 70 percent, combined with staggering increases in demand for the world's resources of water, minerals, soils, and forest products.

Within the last two decades, theories about world systems have played a decisive role in shifting the boundaries of discourse on long-term social change. The triumph of world-system analysis was nearly a “bloodless coup”: few scholars were terribly anxious to defend the theoretical bastion of modernization theory that it supplanted; at best they reinterpreted the old theory within the new framework (for example, Rostow, 1975, 1978; Parsons 1977, 213; Moore 1979).

Charles II named the Duque de la Palata as viceroy of Perú in 1680 with the hope that he would be able to revitalize the production of royal revenue in the realm. The key to accomplishing that goal, the king believed, was to assign more Indians to the mines and silver mills of Potosí because the crown ostensibly received 20 percent of the silver marked in the Villa Imperial. One-seventh of the adult population of male originarios (Indians living in their assigned pueblos) in the obligated provinces could be assigned to Potosí in any one year under Francisco de Toledo's ordinances, and the Duque was authorized to extend this mita obligation to any or all of the fourteen previously exempted altiplano (highland) corregimientos, that is, to increase the base from which the one-seventh ratio was taken. The number of new corregimientos to be added would depend upon the results of a prerequisite census in the thirty corregimientos of Alto Perú (sixteen mita and fourteen exempted).

The most prevalent criticism of U.S. policy toward Latin America is that it takes Latin America for granted or that Latin America would be better off if it did. According to this view, Latin America is either neglected or treated shabbily. The florid rhetoric that U.S. policymakers sometimes use to describe the “special relationship” with Latin America raises expectations that are never fulfilled. Abraham Lowenthal has repeatedly described this policy cycle as “a burst of interest followed by concrete decisions that contradict the very policies just announced.” He continues, “Whether calling its approach a ‘Good Neighbor Policy,’ an ‘Alliance for Progress,’ [or] a ‘Mature Partnership,’ one administration after another has promised to improve U.S.-Latin American relations,” but all have failed.

Padre Cícero Romão Batista, the priest who allegedly worked miracles until his death in 1934, has become a symbol for the vast, poverty-ridden Northeast of Brazil. Every year nearly a million pilgrims come to visit his adopted city, Juazeiro do Norte, in the arid interior of the state of Ceará. The fact that their journeys are not a remnant of the past, but a steadily growing reflection of the present, makes stories about the priest of special interest to social scientists as well as literary scholars. Although the pilgrimage in honor of Padre Cícero is not the largest in the country, it is the biggest in honor of a nonsaint anywhere in the Western world today.

During the 1960s, several academics from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chile became involved in a dispute concerning the aims of both the philosophical discipline and the university as a whole. Because this dispute turned into a conflict of national proportions and brought about the collapse of the administrative structure of the university in May of 1968, it raises a number of questions abut the motivations of these academics and the extent to which the philosophical discipline, as cultivated in Chile, inspired their words and deeds in relation to university affairs.

In literary terms, the new novel did not emerge until 1976 in Guatemala, which represented a ten-to-fifteen-year lag behind most of the other Latin American countries. Since 1976, however, four Guatemalan novels have been published that merit consideration in the same rank with Hijo de hombre (1960), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Gestos (1963), Rayuela (1963), La casa verde (1966), Cien años de soledad (1967), and Tres tristes tigres (1967). The explanation for the earlier paucity of high-quality, structurally and linguistically experimental novels is simple. The blatant violation of human rights by the autocratic governments of Carlos Castillo Armas (1954-57) and his successors has led to the exodus of the best-known authors and the self-censorship or silence of others. In this political climate, the birth of a Guatemalan literary generation of 1954 was almost completely aborted. With the exception of some new works published abroad by Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) and Mario Monteforte Toledo (b. 1911), Guatemala's two most important twentieth-century novelists, the novels published between 1954 and 1975 were generally undistinguished, as is suggested by the annotated bibliography accompanying this essay.

Lima is one of several cities in Latin America that have been the subject of a relatively large number of studies by anthropologists. About thirty years' worth of anthropological research in Lima has accrued, yet little has been done in the way of synthesis, although Millones (1978), Osterling (1980), and Lloyd (1980) have made summary comments toward this end in introductions to their recent books. No ethnography of the entire city has been attempted, and in many ways, the research has been concerned only with relatively smaller units and bounded groups, particularly squatter settlements and highland migrants. Nor have the linkages between studies and groups often been made. I will briefly discuss here, within a typological framework, the ethnographic studies carried out in Lima with an eye to describing and integrating the nature, focus, and methods of these studies.

This essay will focus on Brazil as a Portuguese possession between 1500 and 1800, with all of the problems that Brazil posed for Portugal and Portugal for Brazil within the framework of that larger unity known as the Portuguese Empire. In order to understand historiographical developments during the last ten years, they must be viewed in light of the general development of the science of history. Since 1960 the number of university students has increased considerably, particularly in Latin America and in Europe, and more specifically in Brazil and France. The number of history students has also increased, although the demand for historians has diminished considerably in the last four or five years. Moreover, students in Europe and Brazil tend to continue into doctoral or pos-graduação programs while in the United States, the number of Ph.D. recipients has also increased for reasons that are not strictly demographic. An expected consequence would be an impressive number of dissertations and theses being defended in universities and, perhaps to a lesser degree, actually published. Such a result has been prevented in the field of the history of colonial Brazil, however, by the fact that the current generation is much more interested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in earlier periods. The advantage of this situation is that as long as the production on the colonial age neither decreases nor increases excessively, it remains quality work and, barring exceptions, is not too affected by the pseudo-marxist language that is extremely popular among certain Brazilian intellectuals. It remains a harmonious blend of genuine scholarship in what might be called the traditional style, and of more innovating accounts inspired by the Annales school that draw on the conceptual approaches and the quantitative concerns of other social sciences. The economic and political concerns are equally represented therein, leaving aside cultural history, which falls outside the field under discussion here.

Within a number of disciplines such as anthropology, demography, economics, history, and sociology, renewed interest recently has been manifested in research on family and domestic groups. In contrast to traditional studies that sought universal patterns of family structure and function, contemporary research tends to devote greater attention to the diversity of historically specific patterns (Yanagisako 1979). Many scholars are currently focusing on the relationship between changing forms of production and the domestic group formations through which the immediate material needs of most individuals are met.

Despite certain early efforts to interpret Mexico as a pluralist constitutional democracy, or democracy-in-the-making (Scott 1959; Tucker 1957), scholars today almost universally agree that the political system of Mexico is authoritarian. The trappings of Mexico's liberal constitution and elections notwithstanding, Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) serves to integrate the polity under the highly centralized control of a single institution that dominates access to all public office. At the apex of the PRI is the Mexican president, who not only chooses his own successor but controls access to the PRI's candidate lists for all other public offices and therefore dominates both the party and the congress. In sum, as Coleman and Davis argue, Mexico fits the ideal type of authoritarian political organization because “decisions are made almost exclusively by the ruling elite rather than by democratic, pluralist processes” and because “there are severe restrictions placed upon political mobilization” (1976, 195).

While Haiti's economic dependency and poverty are shared by other Caribbean nations, its history of underdevelopment serves as a prototype for them. Haiti's political independence, achieved in 1804, set the stage for an increasingly difficult struggle to survive among imperialist states. Haiti prefigured the modern Latin American experience and thus provides a classic example of how national aspirations in the hemisphere were derailed. Equally significant, it illustrates the manner in which commerce, rather than plantation enterprise or extensive capital investment, could foster socioeconomic decline.

Carlos Fuentes's preoccupation with history is best expressed in Terra nostra (1975). This novel constitutes a rewriting of Western history from the Roman Empire to the end of the twentieth century for the purpose of tracing the historical and ideological bases of contemporary Latin America. In this work, Fuentes proposes to identify the origin of Latin American structures within the historical and ideological configuration of Hapsburg Spain. To this end, his novel portrays an all-encompassing vision of the conquest and the founding of the New World that situates the reader at the crossroads of Hispanic history. Such a goal simultaneously requires an interpretation of the sociopolitical and conceptual history of the West and an evaluation of the premises that gave rise to the Modern Age.

Although they represent a principal source of data for demographers, population censuses have not usually been undertaken for the benefit of population analysts. In ancient times, population enumerations were usually linked to the collection of taxes or to military conscription. Although in modern censuses such motivations are not entirely absent, other important considerations have emerged, such as equitable apportionment of representation in legislative bodies, the compilation of voting lists, and the necessity of having an accurate basis for the distribution of governmental funds, programs, and social intervention efforts. Nevertheless, one basic fact has never changed: population censuses are undertaken by political entities with politico-administrative goals.

Barring the outbreak of internecine conflict in Central America, the greatest challenge to the Nicaraguan Revolution lies in rural Nicaragua. As in most developing countries, the severest poverty in Nicaragua has always been found in the rural areas. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the rural areas of the country are also the source of the nation's wealth: 90 percent of the foreign exchange, so necessary to a small state like Nicaragua, is derived from agriculture. Moreover, around 70 percent of the population earn their living from the land. Consequently, meeting the promises of the revolution depends crucially on the performance of the agricultural sector.

In April 1970, the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress and Yale University, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation, sponsored in Washington an international symposium on Cuban research materials. The Cuban Revolution had attracted the attention of an international scholarly community and, quite suddenly, a new and vast corpus of literature had come into existence. By 1970 this prodigious enterprise showed no sign of coming to an end; on the contrary, it gave every indication of expanding. In 1970 the Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh launched Cuban Studies Newsletter, a publication that the editors described as “designed to provide comprehensive and timely communication among those interested in Cuban studies.” The development of Cuban study centers in Europe and the United States further served to stimulate interest in Cuba. The moment was propitious, then, for an international symposium to review the state of research collections and library holdings on Cuba. Some fifteen participants, mainly scholars with research interests in Cuba and librarians and bibliographers with specializations in the Caribbean and Latin America, presented a variety of papers dealing with various aspects of library and archival collections possessing materials on Cuba.

Mucho se ha escrito y especulado sobre las culturas negras de América. Y cuando pensamos en ellas en abstracto, casi siempre acuden a la mente las mismas imágenes: dioses africanos, sistemas esotéricos de adivinación, collares de colores, medicina mágica, fieles en estado de trance. Esto se debe, en primer lugar, a que éstos han sido y siguen siendo elementos importantes del patrimonio cultural de numerosos grupos negros de nuestro continente. Se debe también a que, gracias a la paciente labor de investigadores tales como Roger Bastide, Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Alfred Metraux y otros, hoy poseemos una riquísima—aunque no exhaustiva—información acerca de la cultura de muchos de esos grupos. Existe, sin embargo, otro mundo negro casi totalmente inexplorado. En éste, el recuerdo del Africa no se advierte a flor de piel y las raíces de su tradición oral y de sus prácticas religiosas son, al menos en ciertos aspectos formales, más europeas que africanas.