The broad nature of the task of summarizing the state of our knowledge of the agrarian history of Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is counterbalanced by the scarcity of literature on the topic. In many cases it has resulted in generalizations and over simplifications that cannot be avoided at this time. This survey is restricted to the commercial agricultural activities—sugar, coffee, and tobacco—since these industries shaped the economic history of the island in the period under consideration. More questions are raised than are answered. As a result, it is hoped that the topical areas touched upon will become objects of future research.

On 11 September 1973, heavily armed troops attacked the Chilean Presidential Palace in Santiago and toppled the government of Dr. Salvador Allende. The military coup brought an end to Latin America's first democratically-elected Marxist government. Since the September military takeover, the Chilean armed forces have moved with unparalleled harshness to suppress the base of the Allende regime's popular support. The Allende government's efforts toward raising the consumption level of Chile's lower classes had earned his Popular Unity (Unidad Popular—UP) coalition a high degree of political support among the nation's working class and urban migrant population. Because his Socialist-Communist coalition had been actively competing since the 1960s with both the reformist Christian Democratic party (Partido Demócrata Cristiano—PDC) and the ultraradical Leftist Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria—MIR) for the support of the urban poor, Santiago's migrant shantytowns had an unusually high level of political mobilization. The squatter settlements outside of the capital provided some of the strongest support for Chile's various Marxist parties. Not surprisingly, since the military takeover many of Santiago's squatter communities have been subjected to mass arrests and even executions by the rightist government (Slaughterhouse, 1973; Terror, 1974).

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.

In recent years, a considerable effort has been made in political science to facilitate cross-national research of a truly comparative nature. One common strategy is to assemble statistical data from as many nations as possible that then can serve as quantitative indicators for a variety of political, social, and economic phenomena. The use of quantitative operationalizations allows for statistical testing of appropriate hypotheses. While the goals of such data collection are most certainly praiseworthy, a variety of questions can and ought to be raised about the quality of much of the data made so readily available to today's researchers. My purpose here is to illustrate the risks involved in the unwary use of one such “quantitative indicator”—trade union electoral statistics. What is true for the election data is also true in varying degrees for other types of statistical information from Latin America.

O Congresso Nacional, em Brasília, dispõe de um dos maiores acervos documentais para o estudo da história brasileira. Entretanto, poucos têm uma idéia precisa do volume e da natureza daquela documentação, bem como de sua possível contribuição para o conhecimento histórico. É meu intento, pois, descrevê-la aos interessados por esse campo de estudo e fornecer indicações, a título de exemplo, sobre uma das modalidades de exploração, modalidade essa que corresponde a meu projeto pessoal de pesquisa: o papel do Parlamento diante das relações exteriores.

In Recent Years Andean Ethnohistory Has Benefitted From Four new developments:

First, is the greater accessibility of the classical chronicles, particularly since the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles in Madrid decided in 1956 to reprint Bernabé Cobo's Historia del Nuevo Mundo which had gone out of print decades before. The BAE has since reprinted at reasonable prices many other titles, among them the indispensable Relaciones geográficas de Indias. Anyone who had tried to study pre-European Andean institutions in the libraries at Cuzco, Cuenca or Sucre even ten years ago knows how difficult it was then to check any claim or hypothesis at the source. Students were forced to use third-hand and incomplete references; many others in the Andes were discouraged from pursuing such studies because of the unavailability of the eyewitness or other early accounts.

Ideally, the study of the political economy of Afro-Latin America should be part and parcel of that of the political economy of Latin America as a whole. Unfortunately, true to the tendency toward fragmentation and specialization in the human as well as in the physical sciences, that has not generally been the case. The problem has been made worse by the low salience of the nonwhite races in the Americas, due to their low socioeconomic and political status. It is further compounded by the ambiguity and evasiveness of the Latin American racial ideology, especially in its Brazilian form, which leads both local and foreign observers and social scientists to conclude first that there is no racial problem (though such a position is no longer seriously held by scholars) and then that race is irrelevant to the study of the region's political economy.

The creation of the Andean Pact in 1968 was accompanied by a chorus of enthusiastic official pronouncements and renewed scholarly interest in Latin American integration. In ensuing years, each new accomplishment and each new crisis in the Andean Pact has brought waves of official commentary and academic analyses.