Few studies have focused on the subject of literacy among Mexican Americans in the nineteenth century. Richard Griswold del Castillo's “Literacy in San Antonio, 1850-1860,” stands out as one of the few studies of Mexican American reading and writing skills in nineteenth-century Texas. Its limitations are obvious, however. As a research note, it made no pretense at comprehensiveness. It focused on only one town, and the ten-year span it covered is rather narrow. Griswold del Castillo nevertheless touched upon an often neglected aspect of Tejano history—the immigrant dimension of the Chicano experience.

Political parties in Venezuela have historically played a mediating role between the state and the working class and also between labor and the private sector. Indeed, the political party system has been widely credited in the literature with sustaining the rather remarkable electoral democracy in Venezuela since 1958. Yet structural change in the world oil market and the Venezuelan economy in the early 1970s combined with the dynamics of past state-labor-party relations have produced an expanded role for the state in the economy as well as in the system of industrial relations. New patterns of interest mediation have emerged that have facilitated the adjustment of the democratic regime to changing political and economic conditions, thus helping to ensure its survival.

La Era del Salitre en Chile, cuyas fechas los expertos han fijado convencionalmente entre 1880 y 1930, se identifica con la toma del territorio nortino y el comienzo de la crisis mundial. La última fecha se relaciona con el traspaso de la industria salitrera a capitales norteamericanos. Numerosos estudios, principalmente en Estados Unidos, han abordado la Era del Salitre desde distintos puntos de vista y perspectivas. En lo literario, destaca el trabajo de Yerko Moretic y la investigación llevada a cabo por Mario Bahamonde y un equipo de estudiosos de la Universidad de Chile en Antofagasta.

For scholars writing a history of a “developing” country, access to pertinent unpublished personal and official sources is so limited that some prominent historical figures are inadequately represented. Juan Silvano Godoi of Paraguay is no exception. Because of the inaccessibility of primary sources, publications on Paraguayan history have devoted little coverage to this major figure. To help fill this gap, the Special Collections Department of the University Library at the University of California, Riverside, has compiled an annotated list of Godoi's personal collection. The Godoi collection represents a crucial period of Paraguayan history, and to understand its importance, researchers must become aware of some of his activities between 1870 and 1926.

The political tensions surrounding economic stabilization in revolutionary Nicaragua between 1979 and 1988 will be examined in this article. A review of the Nicaraguan case reveals that the Sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small producer, and state sectors) with multiclass “national unity” created a series of demands that were increasingly difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation. After 1981, access to external finance became more restrictive, the payoff horizon for investment projects began to lengthen, and destabilization intensified. Failure to assess these internal and external tensions realistically contributed to inflationary pressures and de facto shifts in income distribution, which at times undermined the consolidation of revolutionary hegemony and required reconsidering alliance strategies.

Since 1981 the Brazilian economic and political system has passed through a period of crisis and upheaval. The country's foreign debt has been at the center of its economic problems, and the debt crisis has defined many of the contours of the political crisis. This article will examine Brazil's accumulation of the Third World's largest foreign debt and the consequences of both the debt and the debt crisis for the Brazilian pattern of economic and political development. The article will focus on the role of economic interests, specifically the role of different sectors of the Brazilian business community, in the borrowing boom and bust.

This article will examine the efforts made by Argentina and Brazil to attain a measure of technological autonomy in the fields of computers and nuclear energy. Grieco's study of the Indian computer industry and separate studies of the Brazilian computer industry by Evans and Adler have shown the inadequacy of the arguments raised by the dependency literature, namely, that in areas of highly sophisticated technology, owned mainly by multinational corporations, the developing country will fail in any attempt to achieve domestic technological development.

The fight against ecological degradation “has become a generalized policy demand of the whole society,” declared Marcelo Javelly Girard, Mexico's Secretary of Urban Development and Ecology. Addressing the Mexican Cabinet and hundreds of dignitaries attending Mexico's Primera Reunión Nacional de Ecología in June of 1984, Javelly Girard thus placed environmental concerns on President Miguel de la Madrid's official policy agenda. Appropriately convened in Mexico City (the world's fifth-most-polluted city by the Mexican government's own reckoning), the congress climaxed two years of effort by the de la Madrid administration to promote public environmental awareness as part of its national development program.

Cocoliche, that curious dramatic character improvised under the circus tent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, is no longer a vital aspect of Argentine life today. Yet his caricatured presence over a period of fifty years proved critical in the creolization of Italians and natives as well as in the sociocultural redefinition of Argentina's “national character.” Creolization (the cultural redefinition negotiated by two or more diverse groups coming into contact—in this case, Italians and Argentines) yields a new ethic and aesthetic order wherein the presence of each group becomes integral to the national whole. As will be shown, Cocoliche became a key vehicle for this process of creolization.