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The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1968 as a “living memorial” to the twenty-eighth president of the United States. Its aims are to support advanced research and writing on national and international issues by scholars and practitioners from all over the world, and to bring together the realms of scholarship and of public affairs, which Wilson himself combined.
During the last decade, there has been a great debate on the social role and political function of the social sciences. This debate has brought into focus certain types of research that had not been considered valid before, each with its respective theoretical framework. As I see them, the most interesting and productive of these new perspectives for the social sciences in Latin America today are (1) modesty in research, (2) primacy of the qualitative, (3) autonomous development of theoretical models, (4) interdisciplinary research, and (5) broader acceptance of individual action and commitment as validating elements for research. None of these is strictly new: on the contrary, some of them (e.g., 5) are cyclical and have quite respectable ancestors; some have been presented by other colleagues, and myself, in many places and at many times. Nevertheless, they are worthy of repetition in view of their considerable implications for research policy and social action.
The population “explosion” in latin america during the past 25 years has been followed by a veritable explosion of research into its origins, characteristics, and effects as seen from the points of view of many disciplines. Research on the economic determinants, concomitants, and consequences of population growth in Latin America has not been absent; but it has been notably less abundant than that pertaining, for example, to sociological dimensions of the phenomenon.
While dependency analysis has a long tradition within Latin America, only recently has it emerged from the relative obscurity of certain Latin American writers to be included among the approaches used by scholars in the United States. The dependency approach was first adopted by a group of “radicals” in the United States, partially as a reaction to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but also as part of a general attack on the capitalist system, the military-industrial complex, and U.S. imperialism. It is now evident that dependency analysis has emerged as a legitimate field of inquiry for Latin Americanists, even if some scholars refuse to acknowledge its existence. In spite of generating considerable analysis of Latin America and the inter-American system, the dependen tistas have not been subjected to the critical scrutiny they deserve, primarily because of the lack of academic respectability of the radicals and the different channels through which their publications appear. Aside from the critiques of Raul Prebisch (Flanders, 1964; Hodgson, 1966; Salera, 1971), an article by David Ray (1973), and the internal bickerings among the dependentistas themselves, systematic criticism of the dependency approach has been lacking. For this reason we felt the need to delineate the broad outlines of the dependency theory of underdevelopment; present a selective critique of the methodologies, content, and conclusions of the major writers; and identify some of the more potentially rewarding areas for subsequent research.
Although at one time some Latin Americanists may have supposed that “(a) useful historical material from Latin America does not exist in statistical form, and (b) even if it did exist, the mystical qualities of Latin culture defy all efforts at measurement,” today we are aware of such fallacies. Leaving aside useful, relatively reliable data, however, we still face the question of how to handle figures which apparently are unreliable and unusable. This article approaches the latter problem by presenting some debatable hypotheses in order to suggest examples of little-examined descriptive statistics which might be investigated fruitfully to reveal new political, economic, and social aspects of Mexican life.
En el presente trabajo expondremos la formalización de una hipótesis teórica acerca de las causas del voto de izquierda. El propósito es fundamentalmente rebatir el presupuesto de unicausalidad en la explicación del radicalismo político. Además, las hipótesis formuladas han sido de tipo sustantivo y por tanto, intentamos básicamente ilustrarlas más que generalizar los resultados obtenidos.
Within the past few years, the study of Latin American politics has been increasingly influenced by a theoretical perspective that the outcome of World War II temporarily relegated to the “dustbin of history.” This perspective is the corporate one, long associated with the political perversions of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and a handful of postwar continental regimes such as Spain and Portugal which were considered by most observers to be political backwaters.
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.
From 1978 to 1980 the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), using funds granted to the committee by the Tinker Foundation, sponsored a Working Group on Latin American Urbanization and Urban Research. During that period the group held two three-day seminars, the first in London in February 1978, and the second in Carmel, California, 31 March-2 April 1980. Both meetings, as well as the interim activities of the group, were planned and coordinated by Jorge Hardoy (Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales, Buenos Aires) and Alejandro Portes (The Johns Hopkins University), in conjunction with SSRC staff. The intention was to unite established scholars from a variety of countries in a context that would encourage collaborative research projects, sharing both substantive focus and conceptual perspectives. The original group included Henry Coing, Wayne Cornelius, Jorge Hardoy, Larissa Lomnitz, Alejandro Portes, Bryan Roberts, Paul Singer, John Walton, and Oscar Yujnovsky.