During the academic year 1974–75, the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies (PCCLAS) is commemorating its twentieth anniversary. A summary of its origins and some of the highlights of its development may give current participants in its affairs that breadth of vision which historians assert is helpful in evaluating such human institutions.

The origin of the Midwest Association for Latin American Studies is found in the decade of the 1950s, at which time the Pan American Union fostered the establishment of five regional councils for Latin American studies. In April 1958, the American Council of Learned Societies suggested the creation of a national organization to coordinate the activities of the numerous separate groups in the United States concerned with Latin America. During November 1958, a symposium on Latin American studies was held in Chicago, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Newberry Library, with the assistance of the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress. A second conference on Latin American Studies in the United States, financed by grants from the Creole Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, followed at Sagamore, New York in August 1959. This conference decided to establish the Association for Latin American Studies (ALAS), and an organizing committee was named at Sagamore. It was agreed that ALAS would also aid and encourage regional conferences for Latin American studies. The organizing committee met in Denver, Colorado, 1 October 1959, at the time of the Seventh UNESCO Conference and set up an interim executive committee for ALAS consisting of Preston E. James (Syracuse University, Geography), chairman; A. Curtis Wilgus (University of Florida, History); Robert Wauchope (Tulane University, Anthropology); and Harvey L. Johnson (Indiana University, Spanish-Portuguese), secretary-treasurer. Council members of ALAS included A. W. Bork (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale).

During the course of this research, a number of nineteenth-century buildings which are still standing in Mexico City were photographed and the following information noted: The number of stories, the number of additions to the original structure, and the use assigned to each addition at the time of the visit. At each building an individual was sought who might provide the following information: (1) The use which the interior parts of the building received; (2) the number of housing units in the building; and (3) the changes introduced in the building to accommodate new business, small stores, or private offices. Those elements of the building which might reveal the use and overall condition of the structure were photographed, and the following criteria were established for describing the general use which might be assigned to a given building:

This study is based on household budget surveys conducted in eighteen major cities of ten South American countries. The project has two major objectives: One is to present a uniform statistical analysis of the principal features of family income and expenditure; the other is to create a body of data suitable for a variety of subsequent analyses. These analyses, described below, concentrate on the relations between income and expenditure, and on the allocation of the household budget as a function of income and a variety of socioeconomic variables. Because information with wide coverage and extensive detail is rare in Latin America, much of the project effort lies in obtaining and cleaning the data.

The renewed religious activity which has been gathering national momentum over the past decade has deeply affected Mexican Americans and other Spanish speakers in the United States. For Catholics one may perhaps date the resurgence as commencing shortly after the Second Vatican Council of 1963; Protestant growth seems to have begun at approximately the same time, somewhat in parallel with the La Raza Movement. It is rewarding to analyze developments among the various denominations because of what is revealed about the diversity of Mexican American outlooks, because of the interesting leadership activities of church groups, and because of the musical trends which are appearing in worship.

Shortly after the coup of 11 September 1973 in Chile, nine people came together in the Los Angeles area to express their outrage on film: Seven were students and teachers who had been in Chile, two were politically committed filmmakers. The product of this union was the fifty-five-minute documentary “Chile with Poems and Guns” which reached several thousand international viewers during the first year after its release. Twice aired on Los Angeles television, the film was selected for distribution by Tricontinental Film Center. It also received scholarly notice, being included on the October 1974 program of the Pacific Coast Council of Latin American Studies at UCLA and the November meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in San Francisco.

A rarely-mentioned resource for historical research is the microfilm collection of the Genealogical Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints located in Salt Lake City. This collection contains nearly one million rolls of microfilm of mostly parish and civil registers from throughout the world. Together with 134,041 volumes of books and manuscripts in the Library of the Genealogical Society, the collection constitutes the largest of its kind in the world—almost aweinspiring in its magnitude. Furthermore, over seventy microfilm camera teams are continually filming all over the world, with thousands of rolls of film processed each month. The purpose of this note is to acquaint Latin American scholars with the collection and its usage.

The present-day boundaries of Guatemala and nearby areas, including the Yucatan, encompass the Maya, whose presence can be traced to 2,500 B.C. (Coe: 1966). The Maya have experienced a great part of general evolution, passing from the hunter and gatherer to agricultural/technological levels; they have organized as bands, tribes, and chiefdoms and now live within a modern nation state. Throughout this progression they have had to contend with forces in the natural environment and still continue to adapt to it with many of the techniques assumed to have been part of their cultural repertoire during the phase of sedentary village life in the area. The lack of settlement pattern studies in the Peten region has produced a situation in which the localized definition of tribal society is not yet complete (Sanders and Price: 1968), and until archaeology unearths the remnants and reflections of their struggle, we will be unable to do more than make broad assumptions about Mayan society and culture in the middle Formative period.

The recent discovery in Lima's National Museum of History of a sixteenth-century inspection of the royal repartimiento of Yanque Collaguas in the district of Arequipa, has stimulated a search for further important documentation about the region. The investigation was made possible by financial support from the Ford Foundation under its Peruvian program for projects in the social sciences (PA73–807). The project is coordinated by Dr. Franklin Pease G. Y., with the active participation of Dr. N. David Cook, Professor Juan Carlos Crespo (Catholic University, Lima), and Dr. Alejandro Malaga Medina (University of San Agustin, Arequipa).