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.

Study of religious phenomena in Latin America and the Caribbean covered by the generic term Protestantism has opened up a fertile field of research for sociologists, anthropologists, and historians in the last thirty years. The exponential growth in new non-Roman Catholic religious movements since the 1950s and the breadth of their organized networks have stimulated research based more often on sensationalism than on a scientific perspective. The complex and pluralistic manifestations of this heterodox religious phenomenon have generally been reduced to a notion of Protestantism rarely found in scholarly usage. The multiplicity of non-Roman Catholic religious movements cannot be reduced to some catchall category of “Protestantism.” Moreover, one must also analyze the connection between usage of the term Protestant and a culture marked by the Spanish Inquisition, which shaped the Ibero-American collective unconscious for more than three centuries, in order to understand why a fair number of Latin American researchers look at religious dissidence rather superficially, reducing it immediately to “Protestantism.”

In revisiting Latin America to gather impressions for this essay, I soon convinced myself that the most conspicuous characteristic of the region's recent experience is diversity and that the most interesting stories to be told are about specific, often contrasting experiences of individual countries. So, except for the first and last sections, I shall not deal here with Latin America in overall terms. Rather, I shall present a series of loosely connected and necessarily brief “exercises” in comparative political economy. Not surprisingly, primary attention will be given to the four countries I visited this time: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. My endeavor throughout will be to gain some perspective on current or recent issues by tying them into events and discussions of earlier decades.

Since Mexico declared its independence from Spanish rule, the country has experienced two extended periods of political stability that are atypical of Latin American societies. The first, known as the Porfiriato, extended from 1875 to 1910. The second, which was heralded by the Revolution of 1910 and consolidated in the 1920s, still holds sway in the last decade of the twentieth century. The weaknesses of the Porfiriato have been analyzed amply, thanks in great part to the hindsight provided by the revolution that ended the era. Until recently, however, most works on twentieth-century Mexico have focused on the exceptional stability of the postrevolutionary regime. This approach has left largely unresearched (Knight 1989) or merely labeled as “crises” (Needier 1987) the recurrent episodes of union insurgency, popular protest, electoral opposition, and other signs of pressure for political change that have punctuated Mexican history since the Revolution. Consequently, analysts who have recently undertaken the arduous task of diagnosing at what points this imposing edifice might “give” have been unable to benefit from insights of work carried out in previous decades.

The formation of a “united front of all workers” has been a strategic goal for most labor leaders, but in reality, such coalitions have been more the exception than the rule. This kind of alliance requires workers in different sectors of the economy, who usually have dissimilar interests, to merge into a coordinating body, generally a new labor confederation. Therefore, regardless of whether they emerge in the core or on the periphery, confederations that aggregate the interests of the majority of organized workers have necessarily been preceded by fascinating processes of negotiations and mergers among unions. This study focuses on the formation of one such coalition in the Colombian labor movement.