A recent diagnosis of the health of Latin American studies in the United States reveals that Bolivia is among the forgotten or ignored countries. U.S. scholarship on Mexico, Brazil, and Peru vastly outranks research on Bolivia. Following the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, U.S. universities turned out a host of dissertations and books on Bolivia, but since that time, the U.S. community of Bolivianists has declined. Yet anthropological and historical research on this southern Andean country seems to be flourishing. Although some political scientists attracted to problems and prospects for reform created by the Revolution have turned their attention elsewhere, Bolivia still fascinates scholars interested in the deeper currents of historical change and the remarkable resilience of rural Andean peoples in their struggle to preserve their cultural integrity.

The Mexican automobile manufacturing industry experienced rapid sociopolitical change in the 1960s and 1970s as workers in several firms overthrew entrenched labor leaders and instituted democratic forms of union governance. These reform movements sought increased participation by the rank and file in union affairs and heightened worker control over different aspects of the production process. For many workers, democratic unionism promised increased leadership responsiveness in resolving workplace conflicts and more effective representation of worker interests in a changing industrial environment. Specific measures of democratic unionism included the election of key union officers and their accountability to members, regularly held general assemblies, an enhanced role for the general assembly in internal decision making, procedural safeguards of workers' union rights, and opportunities for the emergence of identifiable and relatively stable internal opposition factions. By 1975 workers in five of the seven major terminal firms (those manufacturing vehicles) had won control over the selection of union leaders and other phases of internal union decision making.

Immediately after the Sandinista victory of July 1979, the Nicaraguan agrarian reform began with the expropriation of Somoza's agricultural estates and their conversion into state farms. Four years later, the land expropriated under the 1981 Agrarian Reform Law was being distributed to peasant production cooperatives and increasingly to individual peasant farmers. This article will analyze this shift in Sandinista agrarian policy and attempt to explain the factors shaping the course of the Nicaraguan agrarian reform. The focus is on the central policy debate of the first four years: the extent to which the agrarian reform should favor state farms, production cooperatives, or individual holdings. That debate encompassed a series of related issues that will be examined here, including the rhythm of technological modernization, capital-intensive versus labor-intensive investment schemes, the pace and depth of socialist transformation, and the entire question of tactical and strategic alliances within the revolution.

The issue to be addressed in this article is the limited exploration thus far of how rural women in Latin America themselves define and interpret the world around them and what meaning, if any, they attach to key terms employed by researchers concerned with development issues. A review of the literature reveals that despite the great strides made in the last two decades in understanding Latin American women as rural producers, research to date has dealt with the questions of gender ideology and identity in an extremely limited way. Two potential directions for future research will be suggested here: a critical reassessment of some of the analytical categories that have been taken as givens, and a focus on the social-political construction of gender identity and experience from the point of view of rural women. To explore the possibilities of these suggestions, the phrase “division of labor by sex” will be analyzed in light of recent anthropological and feminist contributions to other (primarily non-Latin American) areas of the literature. A second point that will be discussed is how life stories, when collected self-critically, can reveal the potential tension between the active negotiation of meaning by analysts and by the rural women they interview. I will argue that these new directions in research are essential if scholars are to appreciate varying interpretations of development.

Populism is one of those terms (democracy is another) that is frequently employed in the study of politics and varies in meaning from context to context and from author to author. Thus the term has been invoked in studies of such agrarian-based movements as nineteenth-century agrarian unrest in the United States and the narodniki of prerevolutionary Russia as well as being applied to the largely urban-based populism of Latin America. Moreover, most of those who have sought to characterize the populist parties in Latin America have done so in broad terms that encompass any party or political movement that has both a mass base and a cross-class composition. Torcuato DiTella's well-known definition characterized populism (in Latin America or elsewhere) as “a political movement which enjoys the support of the mass of the working class and/or the peasantry, but which does not result from the autonomous organizational power of either of these two sectors. It is also supported by non-working class sectors upholding an anti-status quo ideology.” Other Latin American students of populism such as Francisco Weffort and Ernesto Laclau, along with most others who have studied the phenomenon, have similarly broad conceptions of it.

State corporatist representation of organized labor interests has been an enduring characteristic of modern Latin American politics, transcending differences in national ideologies and political regimes. In recent years, much attention has been devoted to analyzing various corporatist experiments that have emerged in the region and elsewhere. As a result, it is now possible to distinguish among corporatist systems that are state or societal, Ibero-Catholic, traditional, or modern “rationalist,” inclusionary or exclusionary, bifrontal or segmental; and analysts have moved on to “disaggregate” the structure of corporatism in a variety of political contexts.