Every five years a survey of this sort is attempted with the goal of reflecting the “democratic weathervane” of Latin American politics. Since Russell Fitzgibbon launched the experiment in 1945, regular attempts have been made to tap the minds of expert panelists in a reputational evaluation of which countries are the most and least democratic. Many Latin American nations claim that political democracy is their goal (my understanding of democracy in theory and practice is alluded to in the notes below), although they choose to reach it via contrasting routes. Blatant dictatorships often use the plebiscite as a means of demonstrating that they enjoy popular approval and acclaim, and single-party “democracies” regularly give the appearance of popular support via controlled elections. Latin Americans may feel that North Americans have an excess baggage of ego and ethnocentricity in pretending to evaluate democracy to the south according to our criteria; that is probably a just reaction. But the Latin Americans do boast constitutional structures and theoretic pronouncements patterned after ours. They have also accepted considerable North American assistance and financial largesse in the alleged quest for the democratic “good life.” And Latin American scholars frequently evaluate the status of political democracy in the so-called Anglo-American parliamentary states. Evaluating democracy is thus a two-way street, and the enterprise may yield mutual rewards and pitfalls.

“We went to visit neighbors and found brothers.” So began the text of the Rockefeller report on United States-Latin American relations in 1969. The phrase captures not only a part of the governor's personal style, but also some themes of inter-American relations. Many scholars and public officials in the United States start their analyses and their policies from the following premises: there is a special relationship between the United States and Latin America, a positive, cooperative, warm, quasi-familial bond quite beyond the ordinary interstate bond; and there is a mutuality of interests among these countries of the Western Hemisphere that resembles family ties in the best sense. In case these premises are not self-evident, it is appropriate to use a rhetorical style more positively effusive than perhaps the facts may warrant.

Two recent events originating outside Latin America have had powerful negative effects on the growth process under way in most countries of the region. These were the OPEC oil crisis of October 1973 and the ensuing economic decline in the industrial world in 1974 and 1975—the worst international recession since World War II. If the trends represented by these events continue, they threaten to render unmanageable the acute short-term problems they have imposed on countries that were already in difficulty, such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Moreover, emergency measures undertaken by several governments have tended to distract attention from long-term pressures that are inexorably building up in the region and may even aggravate these pressures before they are recognized as requiring a concerted regional response.

When I first undertook the task of compiling information on ecological research in Middle America it seemed best to concentrate on one facet of this many-faceted science. After some time and reflection, however, I concluded that a greater service would be performed for the reader by an overview of most of the subject area encompassed by ecology. I have attempted to present this overview in the pages that follow.

The reader is warned that depth has been sacrificed for breadth and that no attempt to review all the literature has been made. To do so would require far more space than is available. Therefore it is certain that some readers will find missing what they may consider to be a specially important or interesting paper. To them I offer apology.

Historical research on Chilean population has been thwarted for some time by intractable sources and rudimentary methods. Nevertheless, within the past two decades researchers have begun to achieve some successes. Attention has turned from simply ascertaining gross population totals and growth rates to a much wider range of topics. Significant examples include: the relationship between population growth, illegitimacy, vagrancy, and labor supply; the social context of marriage, family formation, and kin ties; the nature, frequency, and intensity of mortality crises; demographic responses to population pressure; the social and economic repercussions of European immigration; and the determinants and consequences of rapid growth and redistribution of population in the twentieth century (Góngora, 1965; Bauer, 1975; Hurtado, 1966; Solberg, 1969; Young, 1974; Sadie, 1969). To study these topics satisfactorily we must both maintain the healthy skepticism of our distant precursors (e.g., Barros Arana, 1880–1900; Palacios, 1904; and Vergara L., 1900) and integrate the demographer's analytical tools with the historian's skill in finding, selecting, and interpreting a whole range of quantitative and qualitative documents. Demographers have demonstrated that even post-1920 data collected by the Chilean Statistical Bureau have substantial and varying degrees of error, notwithstanding the considerable advances in data collection techniques, improvements in the educational levels of the population, and economic inducements to insure the public's cooperation (Somoza and Tacla, 1969; Gutiérrez, 1969). In the not too distant past, civil administrators and priests received crude, if any, instructions, administered several hundred square kilometers of poorly defined territory, and faced an almost insurmountable task of enticing information from a widely dispersed, highly mobile, poor, and uneducated populus. Consequently, historical studies with exclusively demographic ends, using narrowly defined data bases and relying principally on arithmetical or statistical techniques, may prove to be extremely frustrating to carry out and somewhat barren in their findings. Attempts to replicate European studies with Chilean materials, whether simple aggregations of annual totals or tediously reconstructed family life histories, will run a high risk of failure unless researchers incorporate broader questions of social history, exploit an extensive range of documentation, and integrate historical, demographic, and statistical reasoning. While little mathematical sophistication may be necessary—elementary measures may prove the most powerful—a mature, sensitive understanding of the logic of these disciplines, which comes only with considerable study and experience, is essential. The slavish application of demographic formulae and the invention of ill-considered measures are direct pathways to embarrassing nonsense.

This bibliography is offered as a preliminary guide for students and professionals interested in the texts of the indigenous Nahuatl cultures of Mexico. It is the bibliography I would wish to have were I to begin again my own investigations, which were undertaken with only a general knowledge of Nahuatl culture of the kind available to any curious aficionado of antiquities. While many excellent bibliographies of Nahuatl materials are available (see Note), none have indicated clearly for the uninitiated the primary manuscript sources of the literature or what editions of facsimile, paleography, and translation have been prepared from each. And since much of the critical editing has been piecemeal, locating facsimile or paleography of any specific manuscript may require as many as three different references published over a span of perhaps fifty years. Chasing these references from one book to another in pursuit of sources is time consuming and frustrating for students unfamiliar with the literature, especially for those North Americans whose only chance to work in Mexico is through an inadequate travel grant giving them precious little time. This bibliography offers a convenient organization of references which will facilitate location of any source in whatever form the investigator may desire.

“Social History” should be readily definable as the study of historical phenomena which transcend the individual and manifest themselves in human groups. But such a definition includes almost all meaningful history; it seems to fit precisely those political and institutional studies to which social history is ordinarily contrasted. Since our main concern here is with practical historiography rather than with questions of genre, I will simply indicate through description and elimination the kind of history I mean.