This study offers a definition of preemptive reform, applies the concept to Mexico in the 1970s, describes the reaction of one target group of the Mexican reform effort, and develops a preliminary explanatory model of reactions to preemptive reform. Because preemptive reform has been an important element in Mexican politics, it is especially appropriate to examine the concept as it applies to the Mexican case. However, preemptive reform has been attempted elsewhere and these results may interest others who would seek to understand the phenomenon in a variety of settings.

Intellectual disciplines, very much like human beings, have life cycles. They are conceived and born, they progress through childhood, adolescence, and youth, they reach maturity, they enter old age, and some even die. Even if in the present case the simile is a grandiose one, and if the field of Mexican rural history can hardly lay claim to the status of being a distinct intellectual discipline, the main point nonetheless holds. After a long period of gestation and a halting but promising infancy, the field is standing firmly on two feet. It has a problemática—a set of questions, something resembling a research strategy, and a conceptual framework (much of it admittedly borrowed); it has an identifiable corpus of literature, and its practitioners recognize one another. Yet how mature is it, and where is it going? The purposes of this article are to review the development of the historiography on rural life in colonial and early national Mexico published during the last thirty years, focusing central attention on the study of the hacienda; to assess some of its findings, problems, and growing pains; and to make some suggestions as to where those working in the field might invest their energies in future. Within the overall topical organization of the essay, the literature on the classic Mexican hacienda is examined from thematic, theoretical, and methodological vantage points. These treatments are complementary rather than redundant because the questions historians ask, the explanatory schemes they use, and the sources and methods they rely upon are intimately interrelated, and such a prismatic analysis of a body of literature helps to point up its strengths as well as its weaknesses.

Latin America, more than other regions of the capitalist world, has been characterized by persistently high concentration of income and wealth and by limited trickling-down of the material gains from output growth. This situation was an enduring characteristic of “modern economic growth” in Latin America during its era of crecimiento hacia afuera, from the mid-nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has remained so, with some modification, during the subsequent half-century, despite industrialization, rapid urbanization, the spread of education, and other conquistas sociales in many of the countries, and despite the faster economic-growth rates since World War II. Indeed, a further rise of income concentration accompanying that postwar growth is statistically detectable in many of the countries. By combining pre-World War II data with plausible inference, one can also deduce a still longer-run rising-concentration trend from the mid-nineteenth century, with oscillations downward in periods of slow growth and upward during fast growth periods. The result in most countries has been a slow improvement at best for the lowest 60 percent of the population in the more measurable and less ethnocentric dimensions of that amorphous concept, the quality of life.

La importancia y el valor de las revistas literarias en el desarrollo de cualquier literatura es algo que no necesita justificación. Son ellas la bitácora y el recuento fidedigno de un momento, de un período y, a veces, la fuente generadora y receptora del fenómeno literario. Sin acudir a ellas, difícilmente podrían medirse y apreciarse en su dimensión más auténtica e inmediata el clima intelectual y la circunstancia históricosocial en que se originan muchas de las obras literarias. Dan prueba fehaciente de ello los diversos estudios al respecto, especialmente los dos libros de Boyd G. Carter acerca del papel desempeñado por las revistas literarias en la historia de la literatura hispanoamericana.

The Brazilian government's plans to build the Transamazon Highway from the Atlantic coast to the Peruvian border and to settle thousands of landless peasants along it created intense debate before the project's precipitous beginning. Critics of the road “that went from nowhere to no place” denounced it as economic folly, while champions of “national integration” saw it as a crucial step toward the economic and geopolitical unification essential to Brazil's realization of its “great nation” potential and toward alleviating some of its land-tenure concentration (Tamer 1970, Pereira 1971).

From mid-1980 to the present, Uruguay has experienced greater political change than during the previous seven years. This essay examines the salient political event that separates the two periods: the national plebiscite of November 1980. Its relevance, the causal conditions that might account for its unexpected results, and its probable short-range consequences will be explored. The argument assumes a general familiarity with Uruguayan politics of the last two decades, and particularly during the period 1974-80. It is also assumed that the Uruguayan political system of the last two decades fits O'Donnell's bureaucratic-authoritarian model, with the caveat that because of specific economic conditions, a feature of that model known as the “deepening” of the economy is not applicable to Uruguay, as has also been argued with respect to the case of Chile.

The Peruvian military government of 1968-80 defied the expectations and categorizations derived from academic work on the character and performance of its counterparts, past and present, in other Latin American countries.1 A key anomaly is the fact that labor and the left were not eclipsed, but instead emerged strengthened by the period of military rule in their mobilizing capacity and electoral presence.2 The purpose of this article is to explain the legacy of the military government for labor and the left by elucidating the processes that led to their strengthening, with particular emphasis on the policies of the Velasco regime.

Although the first Communist state in the Western Hemisphere was established in Cuba, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the old Cuban Communist party, which for many years was the only significant political organization on the island that claimed to speak in the name of Marxism. An analysis of the old Cuban Communist program, strategy, and tactics is significant for understanding social and political processes not only in Cuba, but elsewhere in the world. The growth of so-called Eurocommunism and the questioning of the revolutionary credentials of traditional Communist parties by others within the Left have led to voluminous polemics, but have failed to clarify the nature and role of traditional Communist parties throughout the world.

The construction of binational hydroelectric plants on the Paraná River at Itaipú by Brazil and Paraguay and at Yacyretá and Corpus by Argentina and Paraguay reflects unprecedented cooperation and integration among these three nations, with far-reaching consequences for the future economic, social, and political development of all the Paraná River hinterland. The Paraná River Basin, or River Plate Basin, is among the five largest water systems in the world, second in size only to the Amazon Basin in the Western Hemisphere. With a length of 2,796 miles, it includes three main rivers, the Paraná, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and their tributaries. It covers an area of 1,980,000 square miles and contains a population estimated in 1980 at more than eighty million people. Brazil takes the largest share of the Basin at 45.9 percent; Argentina has 28.19 percent, and Paraguay has 13.1 percent, with the remainder held by Bolivia and Uruguay. Brazil's share of the basin comprises some of the relatively more progressive and industrialized southwestern, southeastern, and southern states of Mato Grosso, Goiás, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. In Argentina, the provinces adjacent to the Paraná River contain 60 percent of the country's population and support 85 percent of its economic activity. Until the completion of a paved road and the international bridge over the Paraná River in the 1960s that permitted direct access to the Atlantic coast of Brazil, Paraguay's communication with world markets depended exclusively on the Paraguay and Paraná rivers.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Chile prided herself on a century-old tradition of social studies. Beginning with the so-called generation of 1842 and with the support of the University of Chile (established in 1843), some of the most distinguished Chilean minds devoted themselves to the study of Chilean society and its evolution. Hernán Godoy Urzua (1967) classifies this intellectual production in six groups: social thinking of the nineteenth century, studies belonging to traditional social disciplines, writings on the “social question,” novels with social content, modern social essays, and writings with sociological intent.

Una cuestión sumamente controvertida es la que tiene que ver con las implicaciones del fenómeno bilingüe en torno a cierta esterilidad en la concepción creadora del hablante bilingüe.1 Estas páginas intentan considerar los aspectos creativos y opresivos del bilingüismo del presente en el Paraguay con especial enfásis en el papel de las lenguas en el sistema educativo. Ambos conceptos están íntimamente relacionados y los usaré como dos categorías diferentes para explicar el rol actual que tienen las dos lenguas—español y guaraní—que han estado en contacto por casi cuatrocientos años en una bien delimitada área geográfica en América Latina.

For eight years I was associated with one of the most quixotic efforts in academic publishing—a journal concerned comprehensively with research about an area of the world. I must admit that when the Latin American Research Review (LARR) was about to move to Chapel Hill, I thought the original idea that had given birth to the journal had lost its vitality. The notion of reviewing research seemed restrictive and either excessively specialized or hopelessly protean. The dramatic increase in the training of Latin Americanists and the resulting explosion of publications about the region by the end of the 1960s seemed to threaten with extinction the rara avis that had been the journal's stock in trade, the review of the literature. In 1974, when John Martz and I assumed control of LARR, it was hard to imagine anyone repeating Richard Morse's feat in the two-part article on urban studies, “Trends and Issues in Latin American Urban Research, 1965-1970” (LARR volume 6, numbers 1 and 2 [1971]). The mere suggestion of surveying the field of colonial history in three articles, as James Lockhart, Karen Spalding, and Frederick Bowser had done in 1972, would have brought an incredulous curl to the nether lip of a student of that field just two years later. The fact that we received virtually no backlog of manuscripts from our predecessors appeared symbolic of the well having run dry.

One of the greatest servile rebellions and the sole successful slave revolt in world history, the insurrection that destroyed France's richest colony and led to the creation of Haiti has been the subject of a great deal of writing and controversy, but relatively little basic research. The destruction of Saint Domingue and the career of the black leader Toussaint Louverture have inspired innumerable popular and partisan works, but at the level of primary research, we have not progressed far beyond Ardouin's Études of 1853 and Pauléus Sannon's Histoire of the 1920s.

No history exists of the cartography of the countries that currently comprise Latin America. Nor is there a history of urban cartography, although there are excellent books containing collections of plans of the cities of that part of the world. No one should be surprised therefore to find that historians, geographers, architects, and other specialists interested in the evolution of Latin American cities have made scant use of regional and city plans in their studies. It is possible that the growing interest shown during recent decades in the regional and urban history of Latin America and in the conservation of its historical centers, cities, and towns may occasion increased interest in the kind of information that regional and urban plans offer to the researcher. Sooner or later, specialists involved in studying the process of urbanization and re-gionalization in Latin America will recognize the importance of studying the socio-historical process of structuring space and of analyzing the different cultural groups who occupied that space. Cartography, with its increasing precision through the centuries, its emphasis on distances, on geographical elements and direction, on the representation of some of the most important works of man—for example, the placement of cities, towns, roads, ports, bridges, and irrigation canals—ought to be an essential source of information.

In May 1975, Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, noted scholar of the Mayan language and culture, was meeting with a group of graduate students; suddenly he looked at his watch and said: “In a few minutes I must go to the dictionary.”

Only then did I become aware of a project that, after six years of intensive work, would result in one of the most valuable contributions to the field of Mayan linguistics in the twentieth century. Each weekday at four p.m., a group of highly talented specialists met in a small building in Mérida to labor on the dictionary. The team worked with a sense of dedication and purpose, and those of us fortunate enough to visit the project became filled with a feeling of excitement. The resulting publication, issued in January 1980, was the Diccionario Maya Cordemex: Maya-Español, Español-Maya (Mérida, Yucatán: Ediciones Cordemex, 1980). It is not the first dictionary of the Mayan language, but is in many ways the culmination of all previous studies relating to the subject.

Interest in Paraguay has increased greatly in the United States over the last twenty years. For a long time, the only serious North American specialist in the history of that ignored nation was Harris Gaylord Warren. In recent years, however, the dean of North American Paraguayanists has been joined by an enthusiastic group of historians who have focused on such topics as the Comunero Revolt, the Intendencia and Independence eras, the Francia and López periods, the War of the Triple Alliance, and the Chaco War. At the same time, this group of scholars has moved away from the traditional political, military, and diplomatic considerations of Paraguayan history into such realms as social and economic development, and demography. Although the number of Paraguayanists in this country remains small, significant progress has been made.

De la revisión crítica de los componentes que integran el fenómeno folklórico, tal como ha sido formulado por autores hispanoamericanos, surgen similitudes y discordancias en los planteos teóricos. Procuraré sintetizar estos distintos enfoques, contrastándolos con la posición prevaleciente en la Argentina.

El denominado folk, o sector del pueblo portador del hecho folklórico, ha sido uno de los puntos cruciales de discrepancias entre los estudiosos. Dejo de lado quienes sustentan que el folklore es producto del “pueblo” sin especificar el significado que le atribuyen a este vocablo. Queda, en ese caso, como un término indefinido pues como se sabe esta voz no es unívoca. Mientras no se precise la acepción con que se la emplea, no contribuye a esclarecer conceptos en esta ciencia.