In the early 1970s, Wayne Cornelius asked, “Are the migrant masses revolutionary? Definitely not, at least in Latin America and many other parts of the developing world.” These words summarized an emerging revisionist view of the political character of Latin America's new urban poor. Careful empirical research had proved wrong previous scholars and observers who had expected the new migrant populations in Latin America's cities to become sources of support for revolutionary political movements. A new picture of the inhabitants of Latin America's burgeoning shantytowns came into focus, showing these populations to be either passive or loyally engaged in the surrounding political system. According to this picture, squatters held considerable hope for individual advancement, forged clientelistic ties with government officials, and showed few signs of joining radicalized, class-conscious social movements.

Late in 1982, elections were held in Brazil for governors, congressional representatives in both houses, state legislators, mayors, and city council members. According to many observers, they were the first truly free elections in twenty years, the first unhampered by the ominous presence of an institutional act that had overridden the Brazilian constitution.

The Fundación John Boulton was established in 1950 as a privately funded institution sponsored by the Casas Boulton of Caracas, Valencia, and Maracaibo. For many years, the Fundación functioned in the Villa Espalmador in El Paraíso, but it has recently moved to new quarters in Torre El Chorro, Avenida Universidad, in the center of Caracas. Founded to facilitate research on the history and culture of Venezuela, the Fundación has assembled a strong collection covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, the collection is constantly being augmented by purchases, exchanges, and donations of additional material. The material available in the Fundación is found in the library, in the various archives, and in two museums.

The majority of the working classes are divided into various factions that display a host of views and attitudes. As E. P. Thompson has portrayed the concept of class, it is at best not a permanent structure or category but something that emerges from time to time when workers band together for one reason or another. The complexity of this phenomenon has been compounded by the growth of various sectors of the working class, adding to its heterogeneity and amorphousness. Marx himself perceived that capitalism had “converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage labourers.”

The outpouring of colonial Mexican social history that marked the 1970s had its origins in the previous decade. As Marcello Carmagnani's article points out, historians had come to appreciate the limits of institutional approaches to this field of inquiry. Contributions in demographic history, economic history, and ethnohistory strongly indicated that the dynamics of colonial life were other than had been identified to date and that even periodization and the eras of transition in the colonial period—let alone the reasons behind the transitions—might be different if measured by other standards.