The Amazon was, until recently, one of those distant and unknown regions that excited the imagination but was largely irrelevant to the daily lives of scholars, policymakers, and the majority of Latin Americans. This is no longer the case. Developmentalists and disenfranchised people alike look to it as a vast resource area capable of yielding mineral, forestal, animal, and agrarian riches. Ecologists warn against the potential devastation of an environment that is still poorly understood. Agronomists are challenged by the variability encountered at every turn and the diverse responses of crops to standard management practices. Anthropologists and sociologists decry the lack of a social consciousness in the development of the Amazon and try to assess the human costs of this development paid by native and peasant populations. Many other specialists also have found the Amazon an important natural laboratory for their research skills. Yet much of this research remains inaccessible in specialized disciplinary or regional journals and unrelated to the central problems that are, fundamentally, multidisciplinary.

With the publication in 1973 of Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics, Guillermo O'Donnell initiated a new phase in the debate over the relationship between social change and politics in Latin America. In contrast to most of the political development literature of the 1950s and 1960s, O'Donnell argued that social and economic modernization in the context of delayed development is more likely to lead to authoritarianism than democracy. His analysis focused on the emergence of military regimes in Argentina and Brazil in the middle 1960s—regimes that he labeled “bureaucratic-authoritarian” to distinguish them from oligarchical and populist forms of authoritarian rule found in less modernized countries. O'Donnell's suggestion that an “elective affinity” exists between higher levels of modernization and the rise of bureaucratic-authoritarianism in South America anticipated the military takeovers of the 1970s in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. The timeliness of his argument, together with its broad theoretical implications, stimulated considerable discussion, which culminated in the recent publication of a volume devoted to the exploration of themes raised by O'Donnell.

Half of all urban dwellers and eight out of every ten rural inhabitants in developing countries live in inadequate and badly equipped housing, crowded together and subjected to unacceptable environmental conditions. This means that in the countries of the Third World alone more than 2,300 million people live in housing that is without (or has only insufficient) services and that is marked as well by varying degrees of deterioration. The need to construct new units to absorb the natural increase in the population, to overcome gradually the qualitative deficit indicated above, and to renew existing stock makes housing and complementary services the major investment that must be made if one of the basic needs of the population is to be met. “A house is something more than a simple or complex construction, detached or grouped, forming an agglomeration that might have diverse forms and functions. Defined as a dwelling, this construction is converted into an essential aspect of man's existence as a social being and his way of life on earth.”

To think of Nicolás Guillén is to be immediately reminded of two observations. The first by José Martí, who, quite aptly argued:

In the open-air markets of Northeast Brazil, folk poets still sell the stories in verse called folhetos or literatura de cordel, which came to Brazil from Portugal almost five centuries ago. Until only about a hundred years ago, most cordel stories found in the Northeast originated either in Portugal or Rio de Janeiro. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, Northeastern poets began publishing large numbers of booklets with a distinctly regional flavor. These authors would then suspend their verses along strings for display in local marketplaces, chanting one or another story out loud in an effort to attract potential customers. Although the tales were known to rich and poor alike, the great majority of the poet's customers were always associated with subsistence agriculture. These persons, who were often illiterate, might choose a story on the basis of the poet's oral presentation or an appealing cover illustration. They would then take home their purchases to a friend or relative who would read aloud the tale for the group.

There are two principal approaches to understanding social structure. One approach, exemplified by social class analysis, consists of postulating an ideal model of class positions and then mapping social reality onto this model. The result is a set of structural relationships that explain, or seem to explain, the positions taken by various social groups at different times. This approach is therefore also an interpretation of politics, in the sense that actions and positions are judged relevant or irrelevant to the extent that they match or fail to match the expected behavior of social classes according to the ideal model.

A little more than fifty years ago, French medievalist Marc Bloch (1928) tried to persuade his fellow historians of the importance and usefulness of the “comparative method.” Explanations, he argued, based on “those proverbs of common-sense psychology which have neither more nor less validity than their opposites” had to be replaced by causal explanations arrived at with the help of systematic comparison. In response to these exhortations, most historians, as Bloch himself noted, “express polite approval and then go back to work without changing their habits.” Nevertheless, the last decades have seen a remarkable growth in comparative studies in history as well as in the social sciences in general. Since 1959, the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History has played a crucial role in this regard. Yet the results of comparative historical studies have not been such as to challenge the skepticism of many historians who associate comparative approaches with facile analogies, pseudo-similarities, and questionable generalizations. Comparison too often seems to imply the sacrifice of the unique and differentiating features of each situation in the past for the sake of some broad scheme. Many historians are put off by social scientists, such as sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt (1963), whose ambitious comparative schema seem marked by typologizing with little empirical basis. To quote Bloch once more, the empirical historian will probably never become a philosopher of history or a sociologist although “he may, according to his state of mind, grant them admiration or a skeptical smile.”

The thirty-four-year reign of President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) is generally acknowledged to have been the period of Mexico's great economic transformation. In reality, Mexico was unable to avoid the accelerated change that overtook it during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as proliferating patterns of trade, which accompanied the burgeoning industrial development of the United States and Western Europe, tied Mexico ever more closely to the global economy. An international economic division of labor was negotiated between foreign industrialists and entrepreneurs—who urgently needed primary products, markets for goods, and opportunities for investment, and national and regional elites—who welcomed infrastructural improvements, modern machinery, an array of consumer goods, and the increasing availability of foreign capital.

The social and psychological consequences of economic development have frequently been ignored in social science research in Third World countries, and most comprehensive analyses of the problem do not attach much importance to individual-level characteristics, such as the psychopathological outcomes of modernizing experiences. Migration and cultural change, which are closely related to the broader development process, traditionally have been viewed by social psychiatric research as independent variables associated with mental disorders (Murphy 1976).

The 1970s witnessed an outpouring of research on the Andean cultural tradition sufficient to place Andean studies among the well-established regional subspecialties of anthropology. Among the historic factors converging to produce this abundance was the emergence of a generation of fieldworkers trained by ethnohistorians such as John Murra, John Rowe, Herman Trimborn, and R. T. Zuidema. Their understanding of historical and intellectual activity in past Andean communities made it possible, even in the heyday of development theories, to appreciate the modern Andean tradition as an active and creative rather than merely resistant presence. At the same time, events within the Andean republics called forth new interest in the indigenous tradition. In Peru the Velasco regime (1968–75), with its far-reaching intervention into rural institutions, received both support and criticism from those whose knowledge of the Quechua countryside seemed suddenly valuable. In Ecuador the post-1974 oil boom awakened hope for a more “integrated” national state, thereby provoking debate (as yet inconclusive) between pluralist and assimilationist approaches to the problems of the multiethnic highlands. In all the Andean countries regional and national research institutions with periodicals and monographs of their own took form. Generally outside universities, and sometimes with support from sectors of the Catholic Church increasingly open to the study of local belief, they produced distinctive schools of thought fruitfully different from the academic tradition proper. Regional meetings such as the Congresos del Hombre Andino indicated the coalescence of an Andean field of study across national boundaries. In some places, self-mobilization of Andean communities and experimentation with bilingual media and institutions raised hopes for a definition of the Andean situation from the Andean side, a definition not precast in terms familiar to the Hispanic-oriented outsider.

In 1975, the CLACSO Employment-Unemployment Group held a meeting in La Plata, Argentina, about employment in Latin America. Due to the diversity and specificity of the interests involved, several subgroups were created to permit a flexible and decentralized working scheme. Zulma Recchini de Lattes, from the Centro de Estudios de Población (CENEP), was appointed coordinator of the subgroup on female participation in the labor market. Her first task was the compilation of a bibliography on the subject in Latin America, and a thorough survey of studies in progress by Latin American investigators and institutions. The results of this effort were presented at a meeting of the CLACSO Employment-Unemployment Group in May 1976. In August 1977, the subgroup met in Mexico to discuss future activities.

Japan has maintained rather intense contact with various parts of Latin America, previously through migration and recently through economic relations. Japanese scholarly production about Latin America, however, has never matched that contact. Although thousands of technical reports, travelogues, and general books on Latin America have been produced in Japan, scholarly works of value have been scarce. There are, however, a few works researched and written by Japanese, both in Japan and in overseas Japanese communities, that could contribute to, or at least add new source materials to, the study of Latin America; they are relatively unknown to foreign scholars, mainly because of the barrier presented by the Japanese language.

The “energy crisis” has often been advanced as the most important explanation of many Latin American nations' economic and political behavior during the 1960s and 1970s. Low oil prices led Venezuela to join in founding OPEC in 1960 and to take an active role in reaching its decisions. The fear of an oil embargo in 1973–74 forced Brazil to shift to a pro-Arab foreign policy. The increased oil prices of the past decade permitted, but did not ensure, rapid growth of Latin American oil producers, and are associated with massive increases in foreign borrowing and the search for new energy sources by both oil consuming and producing nations. The expenditure of increasing shares of national income on energy production and distribution influences life styles by leaving fewer resources for other activities, and will continue to do so at least until substitutes for current energy sources become available at attractive prices.

In Brazil, perhaps more than in any other Latin American nation, popular music has traditionally been a potent cultural force. It is probable, as P. M. Bardi, director of São Paulo's Museum of Art, has suggested, that “of all the arts, [music] is closest to the Brazilians' modes of feeling and expression.” Even such erudite composers as Carlos Gomes (1836–96), Alberto Nepomuceno (1864–1920), Camargo Guarnieri (1907–), Gilberto Mendes (1922–) and, above all, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), often found their inspiration in Brazilian folklore and the everyday lives of common people.

Economic historians are accustomed to treating 1930 as a landmark date in the development of Latin America. The onset of the Great Depression was an abrupt external shock to every country in the region, cutting off traditional export markets and making it exceedingly difficult to secure consumer goods, replacement parts, and new capital equipment in return. Many countries began experiments in national self-sufficiency, turning to policies that came to be identified, especially after World War II, as import substitution industrialization (ISI). Although these experiments were sometimes disappointing, they represented a watershed in the evolution of national economic systems.

Government agencies in many countries are prolific publishers of information in a surprising variety of fields, reflecting their myriad activities, their economic and political interests, and the needs and interests of their constituents. Reports of agencies, transcriptions of congressional hearings, and agricultural extension bulletins are well-known examples, but government agencies as sources of reference materials—publications in a format designed to be consulted for specific pieces of information, rather than to be read from start to finish—are often overlooked.

More than ten years have passed since the publication of Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina, thus providing a fitting opportunity to assess the impact of dependency theory after a decade of fiery debates and hopeful explorations. Cardoso and Faletto's book had an immediate and decisive influence, not only on the reading public but—perhaps more importantly—on the collective effort to define the issues and themes around which a new view of Latin America was to be built, based on the recognition of the central role of dependency in the shaping of Latin American realities.

The publication of the English edition of Cardoso and Faletto (1979) is a “happening,” an “event.” Consider the following:

Of all the approaches to development, particularly Latin American development, of the last fifteen years, none has had deeper or more pervasive influence, especially in the United States, than the dependency perspective.

Present conditions in the international energy market and the problems they pose for Latin America hardly need emphasis, especially the uncertainty with respect to the availability and price of specific forms like oil. These concerns are, of course, aggravated by the need to respond to the short-term severe dislocations in the energy market, while at the same time taking coherent steps toward long-term solutions of national energy problems. Indeed, how should oil importing countries offset price increases, which exacerbate national deficits and debt service; deal with inflation, which raises the cost of developing indigenous resources; and successfully increase exports, when a number of other countries around the world are pursuing similar export expansion policies? While in broad terms the international energy market imposes a set of constraints upon all Latin America, there is a wide variety of responses among the countries themselves. The oil importing countries (Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Brazil) face a set of problems different from that of more-or-less self sufficient nations (Argentina, Colombia), which is in turn quite different from the major oil exporter (Venezuela). The needs of each country are, therefore, a combination of the international context and the specific situation within a country, and this is reflected in the nature of their energy planning and policy institutions.