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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.