Carlos Fonseca's unequivocal bracketing of Augusto Sandino's political project with that of Latin America's premier Marxist revolutionary would have shocked most readers when it was written in 1972. In this and other seminal essays, one of the three founders of Nicaragua's Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) formally integrated Sandino the historical figure into the ideology of their revolutionary struggle. Sandino had fought a six-year guerrilla war against the U.S. forces occupying Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. His assassination in 1934 by Anastasio Somoza's henchmen ushered in a forty-five-year dynastic dictatorship by a succession of Somozas. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until Fonseca died in combat against the Guardia Nacional in 1976, his writings guided the FSLN's resurrecting and reconstructing of the image of Sandino in order to reshape it into the dominant symbol of a powerful revolutionary ideology.

Mexico achieved food self-sufficiency and raised rural living standards in the thirty years prior to the mid-sixties, yet the country is now plagued by a profound agricultural crisis that is manifesting itself in serious natural resource disequilibria, unemployment and underemployment, and inadequate food production. This seemingly contradictory outcome has resulted from an agricultural growth strategy that reoriented production toward agroexports and animal feeds. Understanding the effects of this strategy is essential because these same trends are the most important phenomena in the agricultural sector of many developing countries today (Barr 1981; Winrock International 1981; DeWalt 1983).

One of the most urgent issues in contemporary Latin America is the popular struggle against rural poverty. Because Latin American states have failed to alleviate rural impoverishment, the poor have undertaken to solve their own problems. One fruitful way of improving their conditions has proved to be forming grass-roots peasant organizations outside state auspices. This approach, however, can bear fruit only under a democratic regime or in states that provide some political space in which peasants can act without being crushed.

In recent years, much of the discussion of North-South dependency relations has shifted from the role of capital flows and trade patterns to the importance of technology transfers. As in the earlier debate, two seemingly opposed positions have emerged, contesting in this case the long-range effects of technology transfers on the receiving countries in the developing world.

While universities in several South American nations are experiencing the effects of redemocratization, Chilean universities have entered their second decade under military rule. Exploring Chilean higher education in the first decade reveals much about the fate of a major political, economic, and social institution and also sheds light on theoretical concerns that have attracted substantial scholarly attention.

The three responses to “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse” raise significant questions for studying such discourse but with significant similarities and differences. Hernán Vidal and Walter Mignolo embark on commentaries that endeavor in part to define a new position of engagement for intellectuals, while Rolena Adorno retains traditional academic distance. Yet all three responses provide colonial and postcolonial discourse with a historic trajectory. Showing that a trend has roots in the past, even if accounts of those roots differ, is a grudging way of acknowledging its legitimacy in the present. Although such a process is an interesting phenomenon of academic life, in this instance it leaves me, a historian by training, in the unusual position of arguing for the tangible difference between the contemporary world and our understandings of it. Perhaps that in itself is symptomatic of how the current trend toward interdisciplinary inquiry differs from those of the past. Our traditional disciplinary practices are much more at risk in the present.

The last half-dozen years have witnessed an outpouring of Brazilian publications, both rigorous academic studies and popular essays, on women and their roles and activities within Brazilian society. Since the late 1970s, publishers and educated audiences have demonstrated an active interest in works on women that contrasts sharply with the hostile reception accorded Betty Friedan and the Brazilian translation of her Feminine Mystique in 1971. What was once a subject for ridicule has become a timely topic. In 1980 a compendium of the year's nonfiction titles revealed more books listed under the heading of feminism than under biology or botany, and almost as many as under anthropology or cooking.1 The expanding publications on socially determined sex roles have accompanied the development of a small, but active, feminist movement and a general increase in publishing activities in Brazil as the “redemocratization” process gains strength and readers seek more information on previously forbidden topics.

Hayden White suggests in The Content of the Form that historiography depends upon the existence of a social center that allows the historian to locate events in relation to one another and “to charge them with ethical or moral significance” (White 1987, 11). This center makes it possible for the historical narrative—as opposed to the annals and the chronicle—to achieve closure. White specifies, however, that “in order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence” (White 1987, 20). According to this perspective, the historical narrative is informed by the historian's need to assert his or her authority over other competing accounts of the past. In questioning the privileged position traditionally held by historians and suggesting that historians' discourse is only one of many paths leading to a truthful (re)presentation of the past, White's version of historiography holds particular appeal for those of us who, despite having been trained in fields other than history, consider ourselves to be authoritative interpreters of Brazil.

“If monoculture is an evil, this was not so with coffee. Coffee was autarkic; it demanded for its cultivation the simultaneous production of the most varied crops, even cattle raising. These were subsidiary crops, no doubt, but their total production was voluminous. It was cheap production, because it was an accessory that offered the people abundant and healthy food.” Thus asserted Joaquim Sampaio Vidal, a federal deputy for the Partido Democrático of São Paulo and president of the Sociedade Rural Brasileira in 1940.

Although most government leaders espouse the principle of “health for all,” few pay more than lip service to the ideal by allocating adequate resources for its development. In Cuba, however, health care is a basic human right and the responsibility of the state. Cuban leaders consider health indicators to be measures of government efficacy, and as a result, health care has assumed an inordinately prominent place in Cuban government policies despite the present world economic crisis. Although affected to a lesser extent because of its integration into the Community for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), Cuba has nevertheless been increasing health care expenditures in the face of economic adversity.

Mexican politics has long been regarded as a closed system, with policy-making dominated by the reigning president and his circle and presidential succession (with all its possibilities for change of course) managed by an only slightly larger “Revolutionary Family” of top figures in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). So intertwined are the Mexican state and the dominant party that scholars and opposition leaders alike have begun to speak of the “PRI state.” E. E. Schattschneider observed that in the U.S. system, 90 percent of the population never has access to the “pressure system” that directs policy choice. The percentage of the excluded is undoubtedly even larger in Mexico because the system is more decidedly “closed.” Yet in both countries, policy innovation is not uncommon. Marked changes of course have occurred at times, and opposition forces external to the system have occasionally managed to block presidential decisions and force reevaluation and sometimes painful adjustments. This article will examine the “agrarian question” in Mexico and will argue that its persistence and the ways in which it has been framed have constrained policymakers while encouraging and sustaining the development of an independent peasant movement during the 1970s and 1980s.