A recurring theme in the study of social stability is the relation of rural conditions to political violence and revolution as well as to subtler and less violent forms of opposition and resistance. El Salvador has served as an example for study because of its recent twelve-year civil war and the participation of its rural population. Given the depth and richness of data concerning rural conditions leading up to the civil war, it is somewhat baffling to find that rural social tensions are explained away in the terms used by Mitchell Seligson in “Thirty Years of Agrarian Transformation in El Salvador.”

This research note examines continuities and changes in the profile of Mexican migration to the United States using data from Mexico's Encuesta Nacional de la Dinámica Demográfica, the U.S. Census, and the Mexican Migration Project. Our analysis generally yields a picture of stability over time. Mexico-U.S. migration continues to be dominated by the states of Western Mexico, particularly Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán, and it remains a movement principally of males of labor-force age. As Mexico has urbanized, however, out-migration has come to embrace urban as well as rural workers; and as migrant networks have expanded, the flow has become less selective with respect to education. Perhaps the most important change detected was an acceleration in the rate of return migration during the early 1990s, reflecting the massive legalization of the late 1980s.

This paper presents a typology of different constitutional conceptions, which are designed to help us classify the constitutional conceptions and debates that appeared in Latin America during the nineteenth century and to compare the opposing ideas that were present at the time. Three broad categories of constitutional projects are defined: (1) conservative models, characterized by the defense of political elitism and moral perfectionism; (2) majoritarian or radical constitutions that sought to reach out to the popular sectors and anchored themselves in a form of moral populism; and (3) the individualist or liberal constitutions. This analysis explores the ideas and principal architects of these various constitutional initiatives for a number of Hispano-Latin American nations for the 1810-60 period, when the basic features of their constitutions were shaped.

The following note on a contributor to LARR volume 29, number 2 was inadvertently omitted from that issue. Christopher H. Lutz and W. George Lovell coauthored “Conquest and Population: Maya Demography in Historical Perspective.”

CHRISTOPHER H. LUTZcofounded the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica in Antigua, Guatemala. He is the author of Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience and coeditor with Robert M. Carmack and John D. Early of Historical Demography of Highland Guatemala.