In January 1875, the Buenos Aires municipal council legalized female sexual commerce within authorized bordellos. A decade of rapid urbanization and population growth, characterized by a high proportion of unmarried males, had created problems of social control and public health that had to be addressed by city authorities. Assisted in their task by doctors specializing in public health who were aware of European legislation on the issue, councilmen enacted a law purportedly intended to improve public health. Instead, the desire to create revenues from exorbitant license fees meant that municipally regulated prostitution served principally to keep prostitutes off the streets and enlarge city coffers. It was not until 1888 that the Dispensario de Salubridad (or Prostitutes' Registry) was established along with the Sifilicomio (the venereal disease hospital) to periodically examine and treat women in licensed houses of prostitution.

It has been almost two decades since trends in research on Latin American politics were measured in any systematic way. The early profile of the state of Latin American research in political science developed by Peter Ranis showed that Mexico, Brazil, and Chile “receive about one-third of all political science research attention.” Less than 1 percent of political science research was devoted to Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, and Nicaragua. The subjects that received the most attention in the 1960s were interest groups (the military, students, and the church), the history of political institutions, and the nature of political, economic, and social change.

Although the history of Latin American women has emerged only recently as a dynamic field of research, it is already shedding light on a range of social and cultural issues. Thirteen years ago, Ann Pescatello edited the first anthology of Latin American articles on gender issues, Female and Male in Latin America. One of her greatest contributions was a hefty interdisciplinary bibliography listing not only secondary sources but primary documents as well. In 1975 and 1976, Meri Knaster's excellent bibliographies appeared. “Women in Latin America: The State of Research, 1975” surveyed the research centers in Latin America with active publishing programs and assessed the state of the art. Women in Spanish America: An Annotated Bibliography from Pre-Conquest to Contemporary Times (1977) is an interdisciplinary bibliography that has become a standard reference on women in Spanish-speaking America. Asunción Lavrin's historiographic essay in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives charted the course taken by subsequent historical researchers and indicated new directions and resources (Lavrin 1978a). Marysa Navarro's “Research on Latin American Women” discussed the effects of economic development on gender roles in less-developed countries, pointing out that Marxist and radical feminist perspectives do not adequately analyze female society. June Hahner's article, “Researching the History of Latin American Women: Past and Future Directions,” briefly reviewed scholarly trends (Hahner 1983). Her most recent report in this journal identified research centers and important interdisciplinary studies on women in Brazil (Hahner 1985).

Mexico as a nation has endowed education with magical meaning. From the moment when twelve Franciscans set foot in the New World in 1524 to evangelize, education assumed a transforming mission in Mexico. If schooling during the colonial period slumped into the less grandiose task of transmitting relatively fixed values and knowledge to new generations, it resumed its transforming role with the Enlightenment. Under the Bourbon kings, the first steps were taken toward introducing free primary education as a means of modernizing society. With independence, liberals and conservatives alike came to perceive primary schooling as critical to citizen formation, political stability, and economic progress. But the obstacles to realizing mass literacy have been multiple and prolonged. In 1910 an estimated 68 percent of all Mexican adults could not read. Yet even this limited proportion of literate adults were active and contributed significantly to the Revolution of 1910.