The 1930s was a period of slow and painful capitalist formation in the Ecuadorian highlands. Marginalized Indigenous peoples who lived in rural areas particularly felt this economic transition as modernizing elites utilized their control of state structures to extend their power to the remote corners of the republic. It was also a time of gains in social legislation, including new laws which dealt with the “Indian problem.” One of the primary examples of this type of legislation was the 1937 Ley de Comunas which extended legal recognition to Indian communities. In certain parts of the country such as in the central highland province of Chimborazo, Indigenous peoples quickly embraced this comuna structure and formed more comunas than any other area of the country (see Map 1). In similar situations in the neighboring countries of Colombia and Peru, Indian villages also used legal frameworks which the government imposed on their communities to petition for ethnic and economic demands.

For nearly three centuries, the vecinos of colonial Paraguay defended Spanish interests in the Upper Plata. Turbulent as they were, protesting with violent regularity against unpopular governors and official policies, these “hijos del país” have traditionally been portrayed as the bedrock from which the Paraguayan people and identity sprang. Offspring of the Spanish conquerors of the 1500s and their guaraní consorts, the “mancebos de la tierra,” possessed the full rights of Europeans. They guarded their noble status jealously, while dominating the rural society of the province. With the passage of time their numbers increased, providing the manpower for Paraguay's eighteenth century frontier expansion. In the course of Paraguay's colonial development, vecinos bore the brunt of the militia defense of the province, “a su costa y minsión,” in an unrelenting struggle against nomadic Indians and the putative designs of neighboring Lusitanians.

The changing status of the Indian population in postindependence Spanish America has been a major theme of historical research and writing, with primary emphasis for obvious reasons on the cases of Mexico and Peru. Bolivia and Guatemala have received a secondary share of attention, but other countries have been relatively ignored. Certainly the case of Argentina is seldom cited save in connection with the ebb and flow of the frontier between Creole settlements and semiautonomous native peoples of the Pampa and Patagonia. The latter story, of course, has more in common with that of westward expansion in the United States than with the situation of settled Indian communities in Mexico or the central Andes. But there are some exceptions even in Argentina, involving native communities more akin to those of Cuzco or Chiapas than to the original inhabitants of Kansas and Wyoming or of the Argentine Pampa.

How does one write the history of psychoanalysis? Although the question seems too broad it is still pertinent. In countries like Argentina, where psychoanalysis has become a Weltanschauung, traditional approaches from the history of science, the history of ideas or institutional history are insufficient to give a full account of its cultural implantation. There is a level of cultural reception that is unaccounted for by those approximations but which is, nevertheless, a constitutive component of the history of the discipline. Although some authors have identified a common “latin pattern” in the reception of psychoanalysis, national differences sometimes overcome similarities. Whereas psychoanalysis, for instance, started to be discussed in Argentine medical circles as early as in the 1910s, it did not have the influence in avant-garde literature that it had in France or Brazil. However, since the early 1920s psychoanalysis had an impact in popular magazines and publications in Buenos Aires. Only a multilayered analysis can provide a good understanding of the different patterns of reception of psychoanalysis. Elsewhere I dealt with the impact of psychoanalysis in the medical profession and in the teaching of psychology in Buenos Aires. My goal here is to analyze another area of diffusion of psychoanalysis: popular periodical publications. Although the massive diffusion of psychoanalysis in Argentina began in the 1960s, since the late 1920s popular magazines and publications introduced discussions on psychoanalysis and its creator, thus defining a space through which the discipline inserted itself in the culture of the city of Buenos Aires. It seems clear that in Argentina publications aimed at an expanded lower-middle class public, outside and beyond the restricted circle of the “republic of letters,” constituted an earlier path of reception for psychoanalysis than what is usually considered high literature.