This article draws attention to archival research by Brazilian historians in Portugal and Brazil and the fruits of these labors in monographs, dissertations, and articles. Following a survey of historical writing in the colonial period, this essay discusses the growing movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to preserve documents in libraries, archives, and museums in Brazil. The existence of such institutions spurred divulgation of manuscript collections through journals and published transcriptions of documents. The essay then traces Brazilian historiography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as Brazilian responses to new trends in historical writing in the 1960s. A survey of archives consulted by scholars of colonial Brazil provides the background for the main section, which uses case studies to demonstrate how Brazilian historians have used these depositories. Scholarship published between 1983 and 1999 is emphasized. The intensive use of manuscript collections and the high quality of publications testify to the vitality of studies by Brazilian scholars of colonial Brazil.

Using recent data from southern California and Mexico, we challenge the notion that the demographic profile of Mexican migrants to the United States since 1970 has remained constant. We find that more recent cohorts of migrants are more likely to settle permanently in the United States, to have higher proportions of females, to be younger, to have more education, to be increasingly likely to originate in southern Mexico and the Mexico City metropolitan area, and to be increasingly likely to depart from urban areas within Mexico. Although we find no direct evidence that the legalization programs mandated by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 has led to a stronger propensity to settle permanently in the United States, logistic regression analyses demonstrate the importance of the other three main explanatory factors suggested by Wayne Cornelius in 1992: economic crisis in Mexico, the changing character of U.S. demand for labor, and social networks.

This study examines the political and economic determinants of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America. The analysis focuses on fifteen Latin American and Caribbean countries for the period of 1979 to 1996. Market size, workers' skill levels, and political instability are found to have a statistically significant effect on the investment behavior of U.S. multinational firms. In addition, we find that a poor human rights record and military coups d'etat positively influenced U.S. FDI flows during the time series.

In the early 1990s Cuba initiated a new phase of social transformation, driven forward by an economic reform. Some aspects of that reform resembled orthodox structural adjustment, while others differed from it. In agriculture the reform reshaped state farms into multiple cooperatives, subdivided cooperative production, liberalized produce markets, and ceded land to individual parceleros. Through interviews with policy makers and cooperative leaders, and a survey of small farmers in western and eastern Cuba, I examined the reform's impact on small farmers' production. I found that two important patterns characterized the 1990s:first, repeasantization occurred; and second, income disparities between these two regions were maintained, if not expanded. Yet, even in poorer regions, small farmers are modestly better off than the average salary earner, while in other regions they are substantially better off. In sum, Cuba's economic crisis forced the reshaping of agricultural policy in ways that fortified the position of small farmers.

One of the most significant developments in Latin American politics and political economy in the last two decades has been the increasing decentralization of government. This development has generated a substantial literature on the pros and cons of decentralization and on subnational politics but few attempts to explain differences in the pattern of decentralization across countries. Fiscal decentralization must be understood as a political bargain involving presidents, legislators, and subnational politicians, each having somewhat conflicting preferences. How these bargains are struck will depend heavily on the lines of accountability within political parties. In systems with centralized political parties, the central government has exercised greater control over resources and uses than in countries with decentralized parties, in which subnational politicians exercise strong influence over legislators. The article explores this hypothesis through a comparative analysis of decentralization in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico.

This essay explores the impact of new consumer cultures on rural women in Chile's fruit-export sector during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, 1973–1990. It challenges the longstanding assumption that the “consumerism” associated with Chile's neoliberal makeover was overwhelmingly reactionary in its political consequences and debilitating for working-class communities in particular. It argues that while new consumer cultures emerged within, and sometimes exacerbated, conditions of extraordinary exploitation and want, consumption was also a site through which women fruit workers challenged family patriarchy and created new forms of community with each other. Taking the central valley province of the Aconcagua Valley as its focus, the essay examines women's enthusiasm for the proliferation of imported commodities such as ready-made clothes, makeup, televisions, refrigerators, and electronic music devices, whose availability resulted from employment in the fruit-export sector as well as new sources of consumer debt. It concludes that while such new consumer desires and practices positioned rural women as validating certain aspects of the military's modernization project, it simultaneously encouraged women to resist necessarily linkages between “authoritarian” and “modernity” and to embrace gender ideals that were quite oppositional to those the regime promoted.

The varying colors that distinguish each year's issues of LARR from the preceding year's numbers are a practice inherited from the early years of the journal, as well as a rough guide to the contents (“that article was in one of the yellow issues”) and a source of visual pleasure. The editors were once told by a subscriber that one of her colleagues, on seeing a deep lavender LARR, observed, “Any journal that color must be worth reading!”