Much of the intense debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has focused on the number and kinds of jobs that Mexico could gain and the United States could lose as a result of more extensive economic integration (Faux and Lee 1992; Hufbauer and Schott 1993; Lustig, Bosworth, and Lawrence 1992; Weintraub 1993). This debate has raised the related issue of the nature of Mexico's industrial capability, a topic that predates NAFTA and will remain central regardless of the final outcome of the treaty. This article will explore that capability by focusing on a key question: Is Mexico a potential site for high-tech production or does its comparative advantage lie in labor-intensive low-tech operations?

This essay comments on the “new cultural history” of Mexico and the debate recently conducted between critics and protagonists of the genre in the Hispanic American Historical Review. After a scene-setting preamble, the essay consists of three substantive parts. First, in considering what the new cultural history is and what degree of novelty it might claim, the essay identifies and critiques seven features of the genre: its concern for subalterns, agency, political engagement, the reinsertion of politics, mentalities, texts, and interdisciplinary influences. Second, the essay addresses the style and semantics of the new cultural history, in particular its penchant for buzzwords and jargon. Third, the article turns to the major critic of the genre, Stephen Haber, and considers his preferred alternative (so-called scientific history). The essay argues that while Haber's critique is often persuasive, it is also in places misconceived, perhaps exaggerated, and tending toward a narrow positivism. Historiography, the essay unoriginally concludes, need not be falsely polarized between narrow positivism and fashionable postmodernism.

The principal facts that direct the historic life of a country lie in the rulers who have served during different political eras. One can be sure that they are the protagonists of history because each of them creates with his or her actions chapters that will be recounted in many volumes through the years.

Gilberto Valenzuela González

While many researchers who have worked in Guatemala in the past decade would take issue with the perspective on the past reflected in Gilberto Valenzuela's statement, few would deny the importance of the collection of documents he began. In an era when history was the history of kings and battles, presidents and laws, one family's tradition of collecting any and all documents on Guatemala gave rise to a remarkable collection. The Sección Valenzuela of the Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala offers today the basis for an in-depth reconstruction of Guatemalan history during the last century and a half.

Emiliano Zapata could well be named “man of the decade” for the 1990s in Mexico, despite the fact that he has been dead for more than seventy years. His legacy, along with the revolution he represents, has been writ large in Mexican political culture. But whose version of Zapata has been enshrined? Is he the figure inspiring the agrarian reforms introduced by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to end the government's obligation to redistribute land to the rural poor? Or is he the sacred symbol of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional's armed rebellion calling for elimination of those same reforms? How can Zapata be all these things to all these groups simultaneously? Conversely, how can any single person or group endorse both sets of cultural-political meanings that have attached to Zapata when they appear to contradict one another directly?

These contrasting pronouncements on Christopher Columbus's transatlantic navigation in 1492 crystalize the extreme division of opinion that characterized the recent quincentennial. The five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage inspired among other things a world's fair, several replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, two feature films, and an opera. Commemoration of the event also inspired, in time-honored tradition, the publication of thousands of works dedicated to this major event. Thus although publishing technology is speeding along toward electronic rather than printed images, the fifth centennial of Columbus's voyage has been marked most significantly by the rolling of the presses.

Desde hace más de quince años, el debate sobre la gobernabilidad democrática latinoamericana gira en torno al problema de la “pugna de poderes”, enfatizando el potencial desestabilizador de los conflictos entre el Ejecutivo y el Legislativo. Este ensayo se basa en el análisis histórico de cuarenta y cinco disputas constitucionales en dieciocho países latinoamericanos entre 1950 y 2000. En la primera parte se propone el concepto de crisis presidencial como categoría analítica para estudiar este problema. Las secciones segunda y tercera exploran los efectos de estas crisis sobre la estabilidad del régimen político y su impacto sobre el equilibrio de poderes a lo largo de las últimas cinco décadas. En las conclusiones se sugiere que los efectos desestabilizadores atribuidos al presidencialismo son históricamente contingentes y se exploran los parámetros bajo los cuales ha operado el nuevo presidencialismo latinoamericano a partir de la década de los noventa.