In 1975 the Trilateral Commission published Crozier, Huntington, and Wantanuki's Crisis of Democracy, which questioned the compatibility of stable capitalist development and traditional democratic freedoms in the advanced capitalist nations, a theme echoed in Lindblom (1977), Lindberg et al. (1975), Nisbet (1975), and Huntington (1981). Living in capitalist societies whose recent experience is strikingly nondemocratic, Latin American scholars have felt most urgently the need to assess critically this contradiction and its implications for general political tendencies within the process of capitalist development. In the 1970s, directly in response to events in the major industrialized Latin American nations (especially Brazil, Argentina, and Chile), theoretical and empirical research has reformulated the terrain of debate regarding the relationship of political, economic, and social relations in peripheral capitalist nations. This new vocabulary and new set of hypotheses about state structure and state intervention suggest explanations for the nondemocratic political structure and the increasingly expansive and intensive role of the state in the process of capital accumulation in Latin America.

My experience in teaching reference and research tools in the field of Latin American studies began in 1966, when I was a researcher and bibliographer at the UCLA Latin American Center. I was approached by approximately fifteen doctoral candidates in Latin American history who had completed all of their course work and needed orientation in beginning dissertation research. During the two months that followed, I met this group weekly for a two-hour period. I began by introducing them to the terminology (including definitions of the various types of reference tools) of library science. The second meeting was devoted to library research in general.

It has for years been accepted that as Latin American countries urbanize and industrialize, the proportion of people employed in tertiary (“services”) categories relative to those in secondary (manufacturing, construction) increases more swiftly than in the nineteenth-century industrial countries. This is usually taken to mean that urbanization here “outruns” industrialization, that people are released from precarious rural occupations faster than stable secondary-sector jobs are created for them. The situation is aggravated by the introduction of advanced technology that allows high worker-output ratios and by the lack of possibilities for migration abroad such as relieved Europe of 55 million “excess” persons in the period 1750-1939. Table 5 shows that although the per cent of Latin Americans working in factories more than doubled in the period 1925-60, thus increasing much more sharply than the per cent of city dwellers, the total share employed in manufacturing barely increased at all—and in fact shaded off in the 1950s—because of a relative drop in artisans.

No history exists of the cartography of the countries that currently comprise Latin America. Nor is there a history of urban cartography, although there are excellent books containing collections of plans of the cities of that part of the world. No one should be surprised therefore to find that historians, geographers, architects, and other specialists interested in the evolution of Latin American cities have made scant use of regional and city plans in their studies. It is possible that the growing interest shown during recent decades in the regional and urban history of Latin America and in the conservation of its historical centers, cities, and towns may occasion increased interest in the kind of information that regional and urban plans offer to the researcher. Sooner or later, specialists involved in studying the process of urbanization and re-gionalization in Latin America will recognize the importance of studying the socio-historical process of structuring space and of analyzing the different cultural groups who occupied that space. Cartography, with its increasing precision through the centuries, its emphasis on distances, on geographical elements and direction, on the representation of some of the most important works of man—for example, the placement of cities, towns, roads, ports, bridges, and irrigation canals—ought to be an essential source of information.

Although the volume of research on Latin America has increased markedly in the past decade or so, major topics remain neglected. One of these encompasses the urban working class (wage labor) and worker organizations. This situation, however, is changing. Scholars today are opening new lines of investigation and are applying fresh criteria to existing data in order to formulate working hypotheses and test older theories about organized labor and the working class in Latin America. This article presents a brief, highly selective analysis of new and traditional materials available for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. It treats the urban sectors and labor in modernized enclaves in rural areas almost exclusively; related topics such as peasant unions and rural labor in general fall outside its scope. It outlines areas and problems that future investigators might probe and also presents some hypotheses. Perhaps most important, it attempts to orient future investigators in the field.

Despite certain early efforts to interpret Mexico as a pluralist constitutional democracy, or democracy-in-the-making (Scott 1959; Tucker 1957), scholars today almost universally agree that the political system of Mexico is authoritarian. The trappings of Mexico's liberal constitution and elections notwithstanding, Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) serves to integrate the polity under the highly centralized control of a single institution that dominates access to all public office. At the apex of the PRI is the Mexican president, who not only chooses his own successor but controls access to the PRI's candidate lists for all other public offices and therefore dominates both the party and the congress. In sum, as Coleman and Davis argue, Mexico fits the ideal type of authoritarian political organization because “decisions are made almost exclusively by the ruling elite rather than by democratic, pluralist processes” and because “there are severe restrictions placed upon political mobilization” (1976, 195).

Lima is one of several cities in Latin America that have been the subject of a relatively large number of studies by anthropologists. About thirty years' worth of anthropological research in Lima has accrued, yet little has been done in the way of synthesis, although Millones (1978), Osterling (1980), and Lloyd (1980) have made summary comments toward this end in introductions to their recent books. No ethnography of the entire city has been attempted, and in many ways, the research has been concerned only with relatively smaller units and bounded groups, particularly squatter settlements and highland migrants. Nor have the linkages between studies and groups often been made. I will briefly discuss here, within a typological framework, the ethnographic studies carried out in Lima with an eye to describing and integrating the nature, focus, and methods of these studies.

For two days in December 1969, a group of eleven scholars came together in austin, Texas, for some eight hours of round table discussions on the status and future of research in Latin American literature. Sponsored by the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies (S.S.R.C.-A.C.L.S.), and hosted by the University of Texas' Institute of Latin American Studies, the conference represented an attempt to respond to a need as yet unanswered within any of the major professional organizations—the need to bring together a number of competent scholars in the field of literary research to examine past accomplishments, to exchange ideas about the nature of present problems, and to raise questions about future directions.

The decade of the 1960s ushered in a “New Frontier” for scholarly interest in all aspects of Latin American life. This trend was reflected in the curricula of American and Canadian institutions of higher education as they embarked on expanded programs in Latin American studies. This intensified effort resulted in an unprecedented number of doctoral dissertations on Latin American topics being submitted at 152 U.S. and Canadian universities. This research will be analyzed by drawing primarily on two bibliographic works: Allen Bushong's 1967 work, “Doctoral Dissertations on Pan American Topics Accepted by United States and Canadian Colleges and Universities 1961-1965” (LARR 2, No. 2 Supplement [Spring 1967]), and my Doctoral Dissertations on Latin America and the Caribbean: An Analysis and Bibliography of Dissertations Accepted at American and Canadian Universities, 1966-1970 (Publication No. 10 of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, 1980). A comparison of the decade will also be made with the period 1861-1960.

Padre Cícero Romão Batista, the priest who allegedly worked miracles until his death in 1934, has become a symbol for the vast, poverty-ridden Northeast of Brazil. Every year nearly a million pilgrims come to visit his adopted city, Juazeiro do Norte, in the arid interior of the state of Ceará. The fact that their journeys are not a remnant of the past, but a steadily growing reflection of the present, makes stories about the priest of special interest to social scientists as well as literary scholars. Although the pilgrimage in honor of Padre Cícero is not the largest in the country, it is the biggest in honor of a nonsaint anywhere in the Western world today.