All too frequently, national associations pay scant heed to professional activity below the university level, seeming to forget that schools and colleges are the foundation for their future success. Aware of this, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) appointed its first committee on teaching Latin American studies on all levels in 1973. The committee, working closely with the steering committee of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, (CLASP), sought some means of building bridges of mutual help and understanding between teachers and professors of Latin American studies. In these efforts, two specific needs and one rather obvious fact became apparent. The needs were for some means of updating and improving the quality of teacher training for those teaching Latin American content and for the development of instructional materials that met the high standards of both Latin American scholars and professional educators. The obvious fact was that the average Latin Americanist had little understanding of the current school classroom and the problems confronting and opportunities available to the classroom teacher. To compound these, it was clear that the study of Latin America as a world culture area was diminishing. Such conditions, once recognized, cried out for action on the part of LASA/CLASP.

The dependency perspective has become a major thrust, both in bourgeois and Marxist conceptions of development and underdevelopment in Latin America, but the distinctions between the two interpretations have been blurred. No unified theory of dependency yet exists, but a variety of theoretical tendencies tends to cluster in the literature on dependency. The discussion that follows differentiates between the bourgeois and Marxist interpretations by focusing on some fundamental weaknesses of dependency theory that emanate among those who utilize a Marxist analysis. In particular, there is concern that dependency theories ignore social classes and class conflict or that these theories tend to present mechanical schemes in which external rather than internal aspects are determinant. Further, it is argued that dependency theories are nationalist in ideology and advocate autonomous capitalist development rather than offering solutions or strategies for the transition from capitalism to socialism.

Research in social mobility in postcolonial Argentina has not benefitted from the sweeping changes in methodology and content found in histories of other periods and areas. The question of social mobility receives close attention in these studies partly because it offers such a variety of research opportunities and is measurable in several forms. Usually, the laboratory for these recent studies is the city—the place with the greatest opportunities for self-improvement. Since the nineteenth century, the city has become the locus of concentration for countless native and foreign migrants. With the appropriate data, urban social historians have investigated their spatial and economic dimensions of mobility. In addition, one of the bases of social change most often studied is the shifting within the occupational structure. The ties between occupation and social ranking are intimate. “Thus,” writes Michael Katz, “to trace the movements of a man from occupation to occupation is, to a considerable extent, to trace his vertical movement within social space; the sum of those movements determines the patterns and rate of social mobility, the degree of openness, within a society.”

Latin American historical research in France is limited, although interest is increasing. The evidence of this is readily apparent. For instance, the proposed book, Guide des sources de l'histoire de l'Amérique Latine conservées en France is still in draft and more than ten years behind schedule. An examination of articles on Latin America in French journals indicates the limited use of sources available in France. The National Archives receives only a few requests for archival searches, its files indicating only three such requests on the topic South America (Amérique du Sud). These include inqueries for materials on commerce between France and Latin America in the first half of the nineteenth century, sources for steamship packet-boats to America in the nineteenth century, and Anglo-French diplomatic relations with Latin America, 1836–48. There were no search requests for Brazil or Argentina, but six for Mexico. Yet archival sources of information about Latin America in France are abundant and provide materials not available elsewhere. This is particularly true for material on the former French colonies and on Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.

“Artists are originators who reflect their native land if they know how to understand the joys and sorrows in the soul of its people; if they interpret them in line, color, stone or clay, in music or by word. If they feel and comprehend its landscape. If they eternalize it.”

French efforts to develop latin american studies were noted by three recent conferences: one in Bordeaux, in 1963, on the “History of Latin America in the 20th century”; one in Toulouse, in 1964, on the “Problems of Cities in Latin America”; one in Paris, in October 1965, on the “Agrarian Problems in Latin American Countries.” This last conference, like the preceding ones, was organized by the C. N. R. S. It took place at the Latin American Institute of Higher Studies of the University of Paris, under the chairmanship of Pierre Monbeig, professor at the Sorbonne and director of the Institute, and of Francois Chevalier, professor at the University of Bordeaux and director of the French Institute of Studies of the Andes.

In the aftermath of the 1959 revolutionary triumph there began a massive impelled migration to the United States, paralleled in Cuban history only by the great exodus during the nineteenth-century wars of independence. Close to 500,000 Cubans had migrated to the United States by 1972.

The migration has shifted in size and has occurred intermittently since 1959, a consequence of the turbulent relations between the United States and Cuban governments. From January 1959 to October 1962, regular commercial flights existed between the United States and Cuba. During much of this period, American visas could be obtained in the United States embassy in Havana and in the Santiago de Cuba consulate. However, after diplomatic relations were severed (3 January 1961), the United States government generally waived the visa requirements for Cubans desiring to migrate. During this period, 153,534 Cubans registered with the Miami Cuban Refugee Center arld close to 200,000 had arrived in the United States by the time of the 1962 October missile crisis.

This research inventory was prepared to provide information on current research into quantitative historical studies and to bring up to date and expand the information provided in William G. Tyler's Data Banks and Archives for Social Science Research in Latin America (CLASP Publication No. 6, 1975). Information published in Data Banks is not republished here.

Latin america has suddenly become important to an increasing number of Canada's universities and colleges. Only three years ago the situation was not at all promising as D. B. L. Hamlin and Gilíes Lalande showed in their reports to the Canadian Universities Foundation, but a more favorable climate for developing programs in this area has emerged as the federal government, the Canada Council, university administrators, and individual faculty members have taken an interest in Latin America.