In Brazil, as in Spanish America, poor public libraries and rich private libraries are mutually reinforcing phenomena. The researcher who must rely on public institutions usually spends much of his or her available time scurrying from one library to another in (often fruitless) search of materials. To the extent that one needs theoretical works and foreign publications, rather than works about, and published in, Brazil, the chore becomes more onerous.

As the title indicates, this review of research in latin america covers a wide variety of topics. It can, however, be subdivided into three main divisions : (a) counseling, guidance, and student personnel work, (b) research dealing with disabled and/or handicapped persons, and (c) studies dealing with cultural-attitudinal-value influences within Latin American education as they affect counseling and guidance and special education-rehabilitation.

La violencia in Colombia, from 1946 to 1965, the largest armed conflict in the western hemisphere since the Mexican Revolution, was one of the world's most extensive and complex internal wars of this century. The study of the violencia strains at the limits of all the social sciences.

Recent years have witnessed a massive resurgence of interest in the question of socially determined sex roles. Investigators, both rigorous and popular-essayistic, have inquired into the ways in which society regulates which attitudes and behaviors are appropriate to men and which to women. There have been widespread expressions of dissatisfaction with the excessive constraints inherent in the traditional female role, along with numerous proposals for affording women greater freedom. The consideration of this set of related issues might most accurately be described as the critical questioning of sex roles, but it is generally referred to as feminism.

The thirty-four-year reign of President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) is generally acknowledged to have been the period of Mexico's great economic transformation. In reality, Mexico was unable to avoid the accelerated change that overtook it during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as proliferating patterns of trade, which accompanied the burgeoning industrial development of the United States and Western Europe, tied Mexico ever more closely to the global economy. An international economic division of labor was negotiated between foreign industrialists and entrepreneurs—who urgently needed primary products, markets for goods, and opportunities for investment, and national and regional elites—who welcomed infrastructural improvements, modern machinery, an array of consumer goods, and the increasing availability of foreign capital.

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.