This issue begins the last volume of the twenty years of LARR edited at the University of New Mexico. A new team of editors at the University of Texas at Austin, led by Peter Ward, is already at work selecting and editing the articles and review essays that will appear in next year's Volume 38 (2003). The transition offers an appropriate time to reflect on the broader issues involved in the enterprise of academic publishing of a journal such as LARR.

In the age of corporate empires and free trade, little attention has been paid to those who live and work on the margins of the mainstream capitalist economies. In Ecuador, these workers constitute a vast sector of the national population. Some 60 percent of urban dwellers and probably a much larger proportion of rural families exist below the poverty line, eking their living out of family plots of land or micro-enterprises (World Bank, cited in Larrea and North n.d.). Many of these belong to indigenous ethnic groups and nationalities. What is the effect of capitalist expansion on these workers and the way in which they organize their economy? Are they destined for Marx's “dustbins of history,” or have they been able to adapt to and even take advantage of capitalism without losing their historical specificity as noncapitalist producers?

The Mexican Constitution was revised in 1992 to foster privatization of agrarian reform lands. Legal inheritance protections for spouses were removed, and individual title holders (85 percent male) obtained rights to sell land formerly considered family patrimony. State disinvestment contributed to economic crisis in the land-reform sector. This longitudinal study of four communities in northern and central Mexico explores the counterintuitive effects of agrarian law, customary inheritance norms, and women's changing roles in household economies and community sociopolitics on the material and ideological bases for women's entitlement to land. Quantitative and qualitative data show that women's rights to land under customary inheritance norms were upheld locally and that women's control of family land increased along with growing responsibility for production and community activism. Women's property rights were enhanced rather than eroded as families and communities struggled to meet the economic and social challenges posed by the neoliberal agenda.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, restrictions on archives in Russia have diminished markedly. Some of the repositories have potential interest for Latin Americanists, including the Comintern Archive. This research note discusses the objectives of the archive and the types of material it contains. A list of the major collections relevant to Latin America is followed by comments on how to use the archive and websites that will facilitate research in Russia. Also provided are bibliographic references to academic studies on Latin America based on Comintern materials.

In the liberal tradition, democracy is often defined by the holding of open elections and the preservation of a given set of civil rights and liberties. As neoliberal democratic governments emerge around the world, the relationship between democracy and a citizen's democratic rights is rapidly being redefined. In the ensuing debates, access to information has become an important issue. Many of these new governments, in their efforts to project themselves as “democratic,” have moved quickly to declassify a host of documents. This strategy has resulted in a tidal wave of revisionist research. One of the countries following this trend is Brazil.