Canadian Association of Latin American Studies Annual meeting Mexico City, Mexico May 24-27, 1971

In 1968, I was offered the opportunity to prepare a brief survey of resources and prospects for quantitative research in Latin American history by the ad hoc committee on quantitative data of the American historical association. I was at first charged with treatment of the whole period 1500-1960, but the willingness of John TePaske to undertake a lion's share of the task ended in limiting my responsibility to ‘only’ the 19th and 20th centuries. The results of that survey, as indeed those of professor TePaske's work, are available in the collection of papers edited by Val R. Lorwin and Jacob price, the dimensions of the past. In the notes which follow I will try to avoid repeating any of the presentation in that work and will instead try to build a bridge between that effort of five years ago and developments in this field of research in the past few years.

AFSSAL was created in June 1978 for “the promotion of research in the social sciences on Latin America, the establishment of a link between public and private research organizations and social scientists who work on Latin America, and the representation of those organizations and researchers with regard to national and international institutions.” The creation of AFSSAL responded to the need of many researchers and academics in France who work at centers whose primary focus is not Latin America. Before 1978 there was no permanent structure for discussion and debate; neither was there a medium that would allow for the circulation of interdisciplinary information on research on Latin America undertaken in France. There was an obvious need to be able to examine together the possibilities for promoting interest in Latin America and developing the means available to social science researchers dedicated to the study of that region.

More than ten years have passed since the publication of Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina, thus providing a fitting opportunity to assess the impact of dependency theory after a decade of fiery debates and hopeful explorations. Cardoso and Faletto's book had an immediate and decisive influence, not only on the reading public but—perhaps more importantly—on the collective effort to define the issues and themes around which a new view of Latin America was to be built, based on the recognition of the central role of dependency in the shaping of Latin American realities.

Without exception, all studies of Caribbean industrial relations and the attendant conflicts have either been descriptive historical accounts of the emergence of labor movements and trade union parties or institutional analyses of the systems of collective bargaining developed in the postwar period. While these studies have been important in documenting industrial relations practices and the political dimension of Caribbean trade unionism, they lack both a rigorous comparative frame as well as a commitment to the measuring and testing of explanatory propositions. As a result, relevant behavioral data in this field remain crude, unanalyzed, and largely uncollected. Although the traditional emphases on historical, political, and institutional perspectives are desirable and important, particularly in view of the major social and political changes that both shaped and were influenced by the labor movement in the region, other perspectives are now necessary in coming to grips with the difficult task of comprehending and explaining patterns and variations in the relations between labor and capital in the Caribbean. These perspectives can only evolve through self-conscious attempts at both theory building and comparative analysis of quantitative data. This study represents a modest step in this direction that poses rather than answers some basic conceptual and theoretical questions, in view of the limits of the available data.

In the Last Decade Scholars Have Undertaken a Reappraisal of Brazil's colonial experience conjunctly with Portugal's pioneering endeavors in imperial expansion and persistent occupation. Sequentially these dual facets have encouraged an appreciation of research materials in Portugal for the study of Brazilian history. Portugal's vast archives, excellent museums, and numerous libraries are abundant in historical manuscripts and printed works as are the various town halls, monasteries, private homes, and Misericordias, most of which remain insufficiently utilized by foreign scholars. Increased fellowship funds and more cosmopolitan academic attitudes have facilitated accessibility to geographically widespread collections, the benefits of which are immeasurable.

La Villa de San Felipe de Austria de Oruro, hoy ciudad de Oruro, situada en el altiplano boliviano, fue el segundo centro minero de plata en el Alto Perú. Fundada oficialmente en 1606 tuvo su apogeo en ese mismo siglo XVII, acompanando a Potosí en la crisis minera del siglo siguiente. En 1781 ocurrió en ella una sangrienta rebelión en la cual estuvieron involucrados importantes mineros y comerciantes de la villa. Entonces vivían en ella 8,000 criollos y 50 españoles mientras que en el siglo anterior debe de haber alcanzado la cifra de 40,000 habitantes.

This research proposed to define how property was distributed in the national capital throughout the 1800s, to evaluate the importance of the concentration of property in the hands of a landed elite, and to describe the social groups which benefited from landownership. Also proposed was an analysis of the impact and changes produced by the decline of one landowning group and its replacement by another in the physical, economic, and social structure of the city.

The Programa de Estudios de Historia Económica y Social Americana (PEHESA) was established in 1977 in association with the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración (CISEA) by a group of Argentine historians committed to the study of social history. This field has not had too fortunate a fate in our country; political, academic, and institutional reasons have condemned it to the fringe.

Trapped in the nineteenth-century view of the humanities until the 1950s, our academic world produced traditional history based upon empirical study of political events and of the institutional development of the country. With few exceptions, history was the history of great public figures or at best, of successful enterprises carried out by distinguished members of society. Yet historical works were not produced only in the academic world. Ideologues from different sectors of society looked to the past in search of arguments, models, and stereotypes, and although they did not write an alternative history, in some cases they did raise new issues or question old assumptions.