Arequipa durante la Colonia se constituyó en uno de los ejes del intercambio de la región sur y alto peruana, la cuál se caracterizó por haber logrado un alto nivel autosustentado de producción agropecuaria. La emergencia de Arequipa se puede relacionar a un número de razones que lindan con la ubicación geográfica y sus características ecológicas, las características demográficas y sociales de su población, los recursos naturales disponibles, el tipo de producción agraria, la capacidad constructora urbana y la habilidad del “chacarero” arequipeño en el manejo del terreno agrícola, la existencia de grupos urbanos dinámicos vinculados a grupos extranjeros y de poder en el país, el tamaño de la ciudad y su desarrollo coherente al de la Campiña aledaña. Evidentemente unas y otras se superponen implícitamente. La ciudad tuvo un papel preponderante en la articulación de una micro-región que incluyó la Campiña, estrechamente interrelacionado a ella, los valles de la costa y otros interandinos para los cuales Arequipa se constituyó en el centro de mercadeo y servicios, de residencia y apoyo, que cubre desde lo financiero y cultural hasta lo relativo a las amenidades de la vida social.

Archives of South America The International Archival Affairs Committee of the Society of American Archivisits will conduct its second Archives Study Tour: Archives of South America, in August 1974. The tour will feature visits to public and private archival agencies, manuscript repositories, and libraries in Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Caracas. Included also are historical orientation tours of museums and historic sites, and visits to attractions such as Iguassu Falls. An optional extension to Cuzco and Machu Picchu has been scheduled. The tour has been arranged through Sanders World Travel and is available to members of the Society, and other persons interested in archives. For further information write: SAA International Archival Affairs Committee, Frank B. Evans, Chairman, National Archives Building-Room 5E, Washington, D.C. 20408.

The origins of the Southeastern Conference on Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) are similar to those of several regional associations whose histories have previously been summarized in this journal. In an attempt to foster more and better academic courses on Latin America in the United States, the Pan American Union convened a national round table in Washington in April 1952 and, during the ensuing decade, sponsored a series of regional conferences to discuss similar problems and to provide for future cooperation and interchange. One such meeting, held on the campus of Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), 12–13 February 1954, was organized by R. L. Predmore of the host institution, and was called the “Southeastern Regional Round Table on Teaching Problems in the Field of Latin American Studies.” Aníbal Sánchez-Reulet represented the PAU and explained the history and purpose of such regional meetings, which, in other forms, had actually preceeded the Washington round table by as much as thirty-five years.

University students have long played an important role in latin american politics. Preceding by several decades the first signs of youthful protest in the United States, student activism in Latin America has been persistent and often decisive. For example, student groups were instrumental in the overthrow of regimes in Cuba (1933, 1959), Guatemala (1944), Venezuela (1958), and Bolivia (1964). At one time or another, virtually every governing strongman in the region has had to contend with varying opposition from student groups. Indeed, as Robert Alexander has noted, “in the past four decades they have constituted one of the most important pressure groups in twenty republics.”

Any scholar who has followed the ongoing debates in the profession over the use and misuse of quantitative data for the study of historical phenomena is well aware of the perils inherent in any attempt to use numbers to help explain the past. The controversy surrounding Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross is only the most visible manifestation of the continuing battle over the limits, usefulness, and standards of quantitative history. Closer to home, in the pages of this journal, we have witnessed the exchange between Wilkie, Smith, and Skidmore over the proper way to analyze and interpret Mexican budgetary accounts.

The Library of Congress began to gather contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian literature recorded on magnetic tape, when the Uruguayan poet Emilio Oribe passed through Washington in 1942. He recorded a then recently written poem entitled “Oda al cielo de la nueva Atlántida” dedicated to Archibald MacLeish, the poet who was Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944. A year later Andrés Eloy Blanco of Venezuela recorded “Píntame angelitos negros” and six other compositions. Around 1944 the Library set out to formulate a program to record North American poets reading selections from their own works. The Library's Hispanic Foundation (now called the Hispanic Division) decided to assemble a similar Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape, heeding the words of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: “Poetry hushed and inert in books fades away and dies. The air not the printed word is its natural home. Recordings serve it well.”

The origin of the Midwest Association for Latin American Studies is found in the decade of the 1950s, at which time the Pan American Union fostered the establishment of five regional councils for Latin American studies. In April 1958, the American Council of Learned Societies suggested the creation of a national organization to coordinate the activities of the numerous separate groups in the United States concerned with Latin America. During November 1958, a symposium on Latin American studies was held in Chicago, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Newberry Library, with the assistance of the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress. A second conference on Latin American Studies in the United States, financed by grants from the Creole Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, followed at Sagamore, New York in August 1959. This conference decided to establish the Association for Latin American Studies (ALAS), and an organizing committee was named at Sagamore. It was agreed that ALAS would also aid and encourage regional conferences for Latin American studies. The organizing committee met in Denver, Colorado, 1 October 1959, at the time of the Seventh UNESCO Conference and set up an interim executive committee for ALAS consisting of Preston E. James (Syracuse University, Geography), chairman; A. Curtis Wilgus (University of Florida, History); Robert Wauchope (Tulane University, Anthropology); and Harvey L. Johnson (Indiana University, Spanish-Portuguese), secretary-treasurer. Council members of ALAS included A. W. Bork (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale).