Recent Archeological, Botanical and Geographical Work Has Produced so much information on native agriculture of the New World that it is time to review again what we know about origins and dispersal of agriculture in this hemisphere. Harris, a geographer (1967), summarized ideas on origins of agriculture of both Old and New Worlds. Smith (1968b) gives some brief observations on recent archeological evidence, but his paper was prepared in 1966. Here we will consider the most recent published materials and include some unpublished observations on the more important plants.

The “problem” of U.S. press reporting on Chile during the Allende period is by now well documented. What emerges from articles by journalists, journalism professors, and professors interested in Latin American affairs is a relatively consistent picture of U.S. news media performance: the U.S. press was openly hostile to the Popular Unity government in Chile; maintained its hostile perspective with astonishing homogeneity throughout the United States; and often reduced complex social, economic, and political issues to some of the most disturbing stereotypes found in the cold-war period. The same articles suggest, moreover, that reporting on Chile was not a total aberration but rather related to more general patterns of reporting on Latin America.

Almost without exception, Latin American countries have experienced rapid urbanization during recent decades. The population living in urban areas, mainly that in large cities, has been growing much faster than the rural population. There is, of course, a wide range of variation between different countries. Venezuela's urban population grew during the fifties at a rate ten times that of the rural population while Costa Rica's rates of urban and rural growth were approximately equal. Internal migration accounts for a large part of the increase in the urban population and especially for the difference between urban and rural rates of growth.

Although the first Communist state in the Western Hemisphere was established in Cuba, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the old Cuban Communist party, which for many years was the only significant political organization on the island that claimed to speak in the name of Marxism. An analysis of the old Cuban Communist program, strategy, and tactics is significant for understanding social and political processes not only in Cuba, but elsewhere in the world. The growth of so-called Eurocommunism and the questioning of the revolutionary credentials of traditional Communist parties by others within the Left have led to voluminous polemics, but have failed to clarify the nature and role of traditional Communist parties throughout the world.

Latin America, more than other regions of the capitalist world, has been characterized by persistently high concentration of income and wealth and by limited trickling-down of the material gains from output growth. This situation was an enduring characteristic of “modern economic growth” in Latin America during its era of crecimiento hacia afuera, from the mid-nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has remained so, with some modification, during the subsequent half-century, despite industrialization, rapid urbanization, the spread of education, and other conquistas sociales in many of the countries, and despite the faster economic-growth rates since World War II. Indeed, a further rise of income concentration accompanying that postwar growth is statistically detectable in many of the countries. By combining pre-World War II data with plausible inference, one can also deduce a still longer-run rising-concentration trend from the mid-nineteenth century, with oscillations downward in periods of slow growth and upward during fast growth periods. The result in most countries has been a slow improvement at best for the lowest 60 percent of the population in the more measurable and less ethnocentric dimensions of that amorphous concept, the quality of life.

The Soviet Union has established what has become the largest, and probably the most prolific, research center devoted exclusively to Latin America. Soviet progress has been especially dramatic because the USSR was so weak in this field in 1961, when the Institute of Latin America was established in Moscow. The Institute now has one hundred full-time researchers and supports the activities of many other Latin Americanists there and in other Soviet cities. It also has maintained ties with new Latin Americanist groups in Eastern Europe, particularly in East Germany and Poland.

In 1975 the Trilateral Commission published Crozier, Huntington, and Wantanuki's Crisis of Democracy, which questioned the compatibility of stable capitalist development and traditional democratic freedoms in the advanced capitalist nations, a theme echoed in Lindblom (1977), Lindberg et al. (1975), Nisbet (1975), and Huntington (1981). Living in capitalist societies whose recent experience is strikingly nondemocratic, Latin American scholars have felt most urgently the need to assess critically this contradiction and its implications for general political tendencies within the process of capitalist development. In the 1970s, directly in response to events in the major industrialized Latin American nations (especially Brazil, Argentina, and Chile), theoretical and empirical research has reformulated the terrain of debate regarding the relationship of political, economic, and social relations in peripheral capitalist nations. This new vocabulary and new set of hypotheses about state structure and state intervention suggest explanations for the nondemocratic political structure and the increasingly expansive and intensive role of the state in the process of capital accumulation in Latin America.

My experience in teaching reference and research tools in the field of Latin American studies began in 1966, when I was a researcher and bibliographer at the UCLA Latin American Center. I was approached by approximately fifteen doctoral candidates in Latin American history who had completed all of their course work and needed orientation in beginning dissertation research. During the two months that followed, I met this group weekly for a two-hour period. I began by introducing them to the terminology (including definitions of the various types of reference tools) of library science. The second meeting was devoted to library research in general.

It has for years been accepted that as Latin American countries urbanize and industrialize, the proportion of people employed in tertiary (“services”) categories relative to those in secondary (manufacturing, construction) increases more swiftly than in the nineteenth-century industrial countries. This is usually taken to mean that urbanization here “outruns” industrialization, that people are released from precarious rural occupations faster than stable secondary-sector jobs are created for them. The situation is aggravated by the introduction of advanced technology that allows high worker-output ratios and by the lack of possibilities for migration abroad such as relieved Europe of 55 million “excess” persons in the period 1750-1939. Table 5 shows that although the per cent of Latin Americans working in factories more than doubled in the period 1925-60, thus increasing much more sharply than the per cent of city dwellers, the total share employed in manufacturing barely increased at all—and in fact shaded off in the 1950s—because of a relative drop in artisans.

No history exists of the cartography of the countries that currently comprise Latin America. Nor is there a history of urban cartography, although there are excellent books containing collections of plans of the cities of that part of the world. No one should be surprised therefore to find that historians, geographers, architects, and other specialists interested in the evolution of Latin American cities have made scant use of regional and city plans in their studies. It is possible that the growing interest shown during recent decades in the regional and urban history of Latin America and in the conservation of its historical centers, cities, and towns may occasion increased interest in the kind of information that regional and urban plans offer to the researcher. Sooner or later, specialists involved in studying the process of urbanization and re-gionalization in Latin America will recognize the importance of studying the socio-historical process of structuring space and of analyzing the different cultural groups who occupied that space. Cartography, with its increasing precision through the centuries, its emphasis on distances, on geographical elements and direction, on the representation of some of the most important works of man—for example, the placement of cities, towns, roads, ports, bridges, and irrigation canals—ought to be an essential source of information.