Over the last two hundred years there have been continuous debates over the origins, development, identity and future of Latin America. Indeed, this term is itself a Parisian concoction of the 1860s that sought to bestow a terminological unity upon a region that seemed to lack cultural, political, economic and even geographical coherence, particularly to outsiders and especially to Anglo-Americans. Both at home and abroad the quest for a convincing explanation of the evolution of the American ex-colonies of Spain and Portugal has often descended into interpretations based on race or some 'Iberian tradition' or a ubiquitous economic 'dependency'. Whether optimist or fatalist in vision, such essentializing has usually taken on a providentialist spirit and combative tone, but it has rarely matched the assurance of the self-images and ideologies underpinning the popular culture of the United States from the 'manifest destiny' of the 1840s to the globalizing ambition of the post- Cold War era.

As much of the material in this Companion will show, that margin of comparison with ‘the North’ has provided a rich vein of cultural creativity so that even in conditions of economic inferiority and political disadvantage Latin Americans have retained a distinctive identity. By the end of the twentieth century thiswas also true inside the frontiers of the USA itself, where the expansion of the Hispanic population to over 30 million (roughly equivalent to that of Argentina) and the broader effects of globalization had further weakened the over-stressed notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, based on the ideology of Protestant supremacism, and the formal egalitarianism of the Founding Fathers, many of whom held slaves.

Despite its age and limited attention to historical developments, Richard N. Adams, Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalan Social Structure, 1944–1966 (Austin, Tex., 1970) continues to occupy a central place in the literature on Guatemala in the twentieth century. A more recent narrative account of republican history is Jim Handy, Gift of the Devil: A History of Guatemala (Toronto, 1984), popular in style but with a full scholarly apparatus. The period up to the mid-1930s is covered in the engaging study by Chester Lloyd Jones, Guatemala Past and Present (Minneapolis, Minn., 1940). Providing full statistical material supported by a rather uneven text on the following two decades is Mario Monteforte Toledo, Guatemala: Monografía sociológica (Mexico, D.F., 1959), while Carlos Guzmán-Böckler and Jean-Loup Herbert, Guatemala: Una interpretación histórico-social (Mexico, D.F., 1970) is overwhelmingly analytical in perspective. Alfonso Bauer Paiz, Como opera el capital yanqui en Centroamérica: El caso de Guatemala (Mexico, D.F., 1956), and Thomas and Marjorie Melville, Guatemala: The Politics of Land Ownership (New York, 1971), are both polemical in style and secondary studies but do give cogent overviews of two important factors in twentieth-century society and economy.

Despite a significant increase in the number of studies – largely of a secondary character – since 1980, the scholarly literature on El Salvador in the twentieth century remains thin. Although they were written before the political developments that prompted the ‘new wave’ of books, two English-language texts remain indispensable as general surveys: David Browning, El Salvador: Landscape and Society (Oxford, 1971), which adopts a predominantly geographical approach to socio-economic development, and Alastair White, El Salvador (London, 1973), which devotes more space to history and politics. Mario Flores Macal, Origen, desarrollo y crisis de las formas de dominatión en El Salvador (San José, C.R., 1983), and Rafael Guidos Vejar, Ascenso del militarismo en El Salvador (San José, C.R., 1982) provide general overviews of political history, while the work of Rafael Menjívar links politics more closely to developments in political economy: see Crisis del desarrollismo: Caso El Salvador (San José, C.R., 1977); El Salvador: El eslabón más pequeno (San José, C.R., 1981); and Formation y lucha del proletariado (San José, C.R., 1982). Menjívar also contributes a chapter to Centroamérica hoy (Mexico, D.F., 1976), an important collection of comparative essays that situates the country within a regional framework. W. H. Durham, Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins of the Soccer Wars (Stanford, Calif, 1979) also takes a comparative approach, contrasting the rural subsistence economy of the country with that in Honduras, a counterpoint being given by Eduardo Colindres, Fundamentos económicos de la burguesía salvadorena (San José, C.R., 1977), which was the basis for the author’s many articles on the landlord class and direction of the modern coffee and cotton sectors.