The field of international relations and foreign policy in Latin America is presently experiencing tremendous institutional and intellectual growth. These developments are increasingly emphasizing economic and political determinants at the national and international levels over the traditional focus on diplomacy and international law. This article will address one of the major theoretical issues in the study of international relations: can structural theories provide anything more than very general predictions of international politics? In addition, because most work using this perspective focuses on great powers, I ask whether structural theories can explain the behavior of lesser powers.

A review of the literature on migrant regional and village associations in Latin American cities reveals an emphasis on the forms and functions of such groups (Doughty 1970; Orellana 1973; Jongkind 1974; Skeldon 1976, 1977; Altamirano 1984a). Far less has been written about why such associations are formed (Kerri 1976, 34). The paucity of explanations appears to be the result of two analytic extremes.

The problem of squatter settlements in Latin American cities has received far greater attention than any other theme in Latin American urban studies in the last fifteen years. The issues and debates at the heart of the field—the definition of the culture of poverty, the question of the marginality of the poor, and the concept of the urban informal sector—all have evolved out of and centered on discussing the plight of urban squatters. The sheer magnitude of the phenomenon of squatting in urban Latin America no doubt justifies this degree of attention. In addition, pursuit of the topic has provided a rich source of data for theorists interested in reinterpreting Latin American urban development from a Marxist perspective. The emphasis on squatting has also had some negative consequences, however. One result is that other important themes and other areas outside the urban periphery have received only superficial treatment; another is that the general applicability of the insights derived from the analysis of squatting has remained in doubt.

Economists have long recognized the importance of migration between less developed and more developed countries, and they have devoted considerable attention to analyzing it within the framework of traditional economic theory (Thomas 1954; Kindleberger 1967; Tapinos 1974; Greenwood 1979; Chiswick 1980; Wachter 1980; Stark 1983). But international migration entails not only an economic exchange of work for wages, it is also fundamentally a social process. Repeated human contact inevitably produces ties between persons in sending and receiving societies. Social networks are created that connect individuals in disparate cultural settings, and these ties ultimately change the context within which economic processes are played out. Understanding how such ties develop and change over time is therefore crucial to understanding the phenomenon of international migration.

For eighteen months, between March 1982 and August 1983, Guatemala was ruled by a born-again Christian, General Efrain Ríos Montt. He drew world attention to Guatemala because of his brutally effective suppression of the nation's guerrilla movement and his idiosyncratic style of rule but above all, because of his religion. The idea that a Protestant could serve as the chief of state in a country as staunchly Catholic as Guatemala struck many observers as an anomaly. Closer examination reveals, however, that it was not anomalous for a Protestant to be president of Guatemala. By 1982 nearly 30 percent of the Guatemalan population were Protestants, the result of a quiet wave of conversion that started during the nineteenth century and has accelerated dramatically in the last three decades. The idea that President Ríos Montt's religion would influence his entire administration was even less surprising, for Protestantism has been wed to politics in Guatemala ever since it first arrived in the country. The purpose of this research report is to examine the development of patterns in the relationship between the Guatemalan state and Protestantism as they evolved during the formative years between 1872 and 1954 and to explore the effects of this relationship on Protestant conversion.

The encounter between Atahualpa and the Spaniards in Cajamarca Plaza on 16 November 1532 provided the dramatic moment that has been highlighted in narratives of the conquest of Peru by generations of historians, from Francisco de Jerez and Titu Cusi Yupanqui to William Prescott. More recently, James Lockhart's highly influential Spanish Peru (1968) and its companion, The Men of Cajamarca (1972), have defined the striking encounter at Cajamarca as the starting point for understanding the conquest history of Peru. Edward Said and Peter Hulme, however, have suggested that within the genre of conquest narrative the conflict among different versions of the same event mainly revolves around the issue of where the story should start. If so, readers are impelled to take the designated beginning of the history of Spanish Peru—the events at Cajamarca—as not merely a dramatic framing device for telling history but as a choice implying an ideological understanding of the Spanish role in Peru. In recent American historiography, this choice of beginning with the events at Cajamarca has become a means of telling a classic tale of upward social mobility for Spaniards, one that starts with the capture of treasure at Cajamarca.