In recent years, considerable scholarly and popular attention has been extended to the Jewish populations of regions beyond those traditionally discussed—the United States, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Particular attempts have been made to record and analyze the experience of Jews residing in Latin America. The dramatic deterioration in the situation of the Argentine Jewish community over the past five years has given special visibility to this group, both because of widespread concern over the human rights issues involved and because of the appearance of Jewish-Argentine exiles in the United States and other areas heavily covered by the media. The difficulties experienced by Jewish citizens of Latin American countries certainly are deserving of attention, but one would hope that the interest aroused by these circumstances would lead to a more general curiosity about the many aspects of Jewish culture in this region.

SECONDARY EDUCATION IN LATIN AMERICA HAS NOT RECEIVED A GREAT DEAL of attention by researchers and English language journals. Most of the research readily available in the U.S. is of a descriptive nature; that which is more specifically focused is reported in a wide variety of national and organizational journals difficult to collect. This review attempts to suggest representative studies from a variety of sources in order to give the broadest coverage possible in a short paper.

In 1975, the CLACSO Employment-Unemployment Group held a meeting in La Plata, Argentina, about employment in Latin America. Due to the diversity and specificity of the interests involved, several subgroups were created to permit a flexible and decentralized working scheme. Zulma Recchini de Lattes, from the Centro de Estudios de Población (CENEP), was appointed coordinator of the subgroup on female participation in the labor market. Her first task was the compilation of a bibliography on the subject in Latin America, and a thorough survey of studies in progress by Latin American investigators and institutions. The results of this effort were presented at a meeting of the CLACSO Employment-Unemployment Group in May 1976. In August 1977, the subgroup met in Mexico to discuss future activities.

My task in critiquing James Street's recent article, “The Internal Frontier and Technological Progress in Latin America (LARR 12 no. 3, [1977]), is made doubly difficult because I am in agreement with so much of what he has to say and because he has qualified and strengthened his argument by incorporating in the final version of the essay most of the criticisms I offered on an earlier draft. Our already similar views were brought more into alignment, for instance, by the addition of such statements as the following: ”There is thus an enormous field developing for systematic research in what have been called ‘appropriate’ or ‘intermediate’ technologies“ (p. 50); ”In view of the gravity of the short-term crisis and the distorting pressures of long-term forces that have been described, it is entirely possible, if not probable, that no global strategy will emerge that will alleviate these trends“ (p. 50); ”By its nature an educational process takes time, and the trends described earlier may be moving with such speed that the development problems of Latin America will become increasingly intractable“ (p. 53).

What causes a country that has experienced exceptionally high growth rates and living standards to stagnate with only poor and uneven economic advance, especially after it has achieved one of the lowest rates of population growth among the American republics? What forces lead to the intensification of civil violence and conflict among social and occupational groups, encouraging a pattern of military intervention in politics? What impact do patriotism, popular perceptions of leaders' decisions, and a sense of political legitimacy have upon these processes of economic growth and group conflict, and what kinds of leadership can best utilize appeals to constructive nationalism and self-sacrifice in order to promote growth and reduce conflict? Do long periods of frustrated expectations and economic stagnation tend to give citizens patterns of attitudes and behavior that make conflict more likely and growth more difficult?

CLAH Activities in Progress—According to the Conference on Latin American History Newsletter of October 1966, several CLAH publications projects are still in progress. The first CLAH publication, Latin American History. Essays on its Study and Teaching, 1898–1965, a two-volume anthology of writings edited by Howard Cline, is in press at the University of Texas Press with an expected publication date of early spring 1967.

A book of this kind is eloquent testimony to the continuing power of the self-serving dogma on development constructed in the North Atlantic over the course of the last three centuries. Whether under the rubric of the Black Legend, the White Man's Burden, Manifest Destiny, or the pseudoscientific abstractions of post-World War II “modernization theory,” the assumptions of that dogma have been the same. Development in what is today called the Third World has been thwarted by a premodern cultural and institutional legacy that impedes receptiveness to, acquisition of, and propagation of the modern values that would foster a process of change recapitulating the developmental success story of the capitalist nations of the North Atlantic Basin. Safford confronts this dogma on what would seem to be its strongest ground. His case study focuses on Colombia—that most traditional and Catholic of the major Latin American nations—during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period of economic malaise and political chaos. The result is an important and richly detailed study that largely succeeds in demonstrating, in Safford's cautious words, that “value attachments in Latin American society have been more ambiguous than they are generally represented to be” (p. 11). Put more forcefully and positively, Safford makes a strong case for the proposition that economic, geographic, and social structures themselves help to mold the values often attributed solely to institutional and cultural legacies in Latin America, and that it is these structural conditions that exercise the strongest influence on the success or failure of elite efforts to foster technological progress.

Economic historians are accustomed to treating 1930 as a landmark date in the development of Latin America. The onset of the Great Depression was an abrupt external shock to every country in the region, cutting off traditional export markets and making it exceedingly difficult to secure consumer goods, replacement parts, and new capital equipment in return. Many countries began experiments in national self-sufficiency, turning to policies that came to be identified, especially after World War II, as import substitution industrialization (ISI). Although these experiments were sometimes disappointing, they represented a watershed in the evolution of national economic systems.