Carlos Fonseca's unequivocal bracketing of Augusto Sandino's political project with that of Latin America's premier Marxist revolutionary would have shocked most readers when it was written in 1972. In this and other seminal essays, one of the three founders of Nicaragua's Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) formally integrated Sandino the historical figure into the ideology of their revolutionary struggle. Sandino had fought a six-year guerrilla war against the U.S. forces occupying Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. His assassination in 1934 by Anastasio Somoza's henchmen ushered in a forty-five-year dynastic dictatorship by a succession of Somozas. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until Fonseca died in combat against the Guardia Nacional in 1976, his writings guided the FSLN's resurrecting and reconstructing of the image of Sandino in order to reshape it into the dominant symbol of a powerful revolutionary ideology.

Mexico achieved food self-sufficiency and raised rural living standards in the thirty years prior to the mid-sixties, yet the country is now plagued by a profound agricultural crisis that is manifesting itself in serious natural resource disequilibria, unemployment and underemployment, and inadequate food production. This seemingly contradictory outcome has resulted from an agricultural growth strategy that reoriented production toward agroexports and animal feeds. Understanding the effects of this strategy is essential because these same trends are the most important phenomena in the agricultural sector of many developing countries today (Barr 1981; Winrock International 1981; DeWalt 1983).

One of the most urgent issues in contemporary Latin America is the popular struggle against rural poverty. Because Latin American states have failed to alleviate rural impoverishment, the poor have undertaken to solve their own problems. One fruitful way of improving their conditions has proved to be forming grass-roots peasant organizations outside state auspices. This approach, however, can bear fruit only under a democratic regime or in states that provide some political space in which peasants can act without being crushed.

In recent years, much of the discussion of North-South dependency relations has shifted from the role of capital flows and trade patterns to the importance of technology transfers. As in the earlier debate, two seemingly opposed positions have emerged, contesting in this case the long-range effects of technology transfers on the receiving countries in the developing world.

While universities in several South American nations are experiencing the effects of redemocratization, Chilean universities have entered their second decade under military rule. Exploring Chilean higher education in the first decade reveals much about the fate of a major political, economic, and social institution and also sheds light on theoretical concerns that have attracted substantial scholarly attention.

The three responses to “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse” raise significant questions for studying such discourse but with significant similarities and differences. Hernán Vidal and Walter Mignolo embark on commentaries that endeavor in part to define a new position of engagement for intellectuals, while Rolena Adorno retains traditional academic distance. Yet all three responses provide colonial and postcolonial discourse with a historic trajectory. Showing that a trend has roots in the past, even if accounts of those roots differ, is a grudging way of acknowledging its legitimacy in the present. Although such a process is an interesting phenomenon of academic life, in this instance it leaves me, a historian by training, in the unusual position of arguing for the tangible difference between the contemporary world and our understandings of it. Perhaps that in itself is symptomatic of how the current trend toward interdisciplinary inquiry differs from those of the past. Our traditional disciplinary practices are much more at risk in the present.