Given the historic role of cities in Latin America as an instrument for appropriating territory and for ordering society, one may wonder why more attention is not paid to the Latin Americans' own vision of the city. We are sometimes asked to believe that only in the 1940s did the urban phenomenon loom in their world and that our knowledge of it comes from foreign demographers and anthropologists. Colonial sources like Solórzano and the Recopilación, however, demonstrate that the IberoCatholic political tradition gives central importance to the organizational and paradigmatic functions of the urban unit. After independence, to be sure, this tradition was eclipsed by the ‘ruralization’ of Latin American societies as urban, bureaucratic structures decayed and power flowed to the agrarian domain. At this time also, intellectual horizons opened to offer release from scholastic constraints, encouraging the intelligentsia to make eclectic, sometimes euphoric assessments of their new nations' future potential. Of these pensadores Sarmiento almost alone dealt directly with the city's role in nation building. Yet his very plea that the city — whether Buenos Aires or a new ‘Argirópolis’ — assume ‘modernizing’ or ‘developmental‘functions reverts to the old Mediterranean notion that the city (civitas) is one with ‘civilization’. For this Alberdi attacked him, reminding Sarmiento that in Argentina town and country, civilization and barbarism, were not disjoined but fused in a single society and polity.

A series of military dictators came to power in the four nothern republics of Central America during the Great Depression of the 1930s and perpetuated themselves in office through continuismo tactics until roughly the conclusion of the Second World War: General Jorge Ubico, the first and strongest of these caudillos, ruled Guatemala from 1931 to 1944; General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez governed El Salvador from December 1931 to 1944; General Tiburcio Carías Andino dominated Honduras from 1933 to 1946; and General Anastasio Somoza García controlled Nicaragua from 1936 to 1956.

A selection of recent books from and about Mexico is, as ever, likely to be very varied. The works considered here might seem at first sight to have little enough in common. Yet behind them all lies the great debate that has gone on in Mexico since 1968 about the meaning of the past, present and future of the Mexican Revolution.

The empirical validity of traditional perspectives on poverty and under-development has been seriously challenged over the past decade. In contrast to emphasis on what were said to be disfunctional characteristics of the poor themselves, attention has been redirected towards economic and ecological factors which reveal much of the cultural repertoire of peasants and urban and rural poor to be a positive or adaptive response to limits imposed on them by the political economy of capitalism.

The study of United States foreign policy has recently been invigorated by the introduction of Graham Allison's bureaucratic politics model (BPM). The basic unit of analysis of the BPM is governmental action viewed as political resultant. In Allison's words, the actions of governments are ‘resultants in the sense that what happens is not chosen as a solution to a problem but rather results from compromise, conflict, and confusion of officials with diverse interests and unequal influence…’. The BPM assumes that different players will have different perspectives toward similar problems, that is, they will each see different ‘faces’ of the same issue. The basic assumption of the BPM as it is applied to United States foreign policy toward Latin America by scholars such as Abraham Lowenthal is that United States decision-makes, who share power in both the formulation and implementation of policy, have differing points of view because of their differing organizational and personal perspectives.