Although at one time some Latin Americanists may have supposed that “(a) useful historical material from Latin America does not exist in statistical form, and (b) even if it did exist, the mystical qualities of Latin culture defy all efforts at measurement,” today we are aware of such fallacies. Leaving aside useful, relatively reliable data, however, we still face the question of how to handle figures which apparently are unreliable and unusable. This article approaches the latter problem by presenting some debatable hypotheses in order to suggest examples of little-examined descriptive statistics which might be investigated fruitfully to reveal new political, economic, and social aspects of Mexican life.

En el presente trabajo expondremos la formalización de una hipótesis teórica acerca de las causas del voto de izquierda. El propósito es fundamentalmente rebatir el presupuesto de unicausalidad en la explicación del radicalismo político. Además, las hipótesis formuladas han sido de tipo sustantivo y por tanto, intentamos básicamente ilustrarlas más que generalizar los resultados obtenidos.

Within the past few years, the study of Latin American politics has been increasingly influenced by a theoretical perspective that the outcome of World War II temporarily relegated to the “dustbin of history.” This perspective is the corporate one, long associated with the political perversions of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and a handful of postwar continental regimes such as Spain and Portugal which were considered by most observers to be political backwaters.

La importancia y el valor de las revistas literarias en el desarrollo de cualquier literatura es algo que no necesita justificación. Son ellas la bitácora y el recuento fidedigno de un momento, de un período y, a veces, la fuente generadora y receptora del fenómeno literario. Sin acudir a ellas, difícilmente podrían medirse y apreciarse en su dimensión más auténtica e inmediata el clima intelectual y la circunstancia históricosocial en que se originan muchas de las obras literarias. Dan prueba fehaciente de ello los diversos estudios al respecto, especialmente los dos libros de Boyd G. Carter acerca del papel desempeñado por las revistas literarias en la historia de la literatura hispanoamericana.

From 1978 to 1980 the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), using funds granted to the committee by the Tinker Foundation, sponsored a Working Group on Latin American Urbanization and Urban Research. During that period the group held two three-day seminars, the first in London in February 1978, and the second in Carmel, California, 31 March-2 April 1980. Both meetings, as well as the interim activities of the group, were planned and coordinated by Jorge Hardoy (Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales, Buenos Aires) and Alejandro Portes (The Johns Hopkins University), in conjunction with SSRC staff. The intention was to unite established scholars from a variety of countries in a context that would encourage collaborative research projects, sharing both substantive focus and conceptual perspectives. The original group included Henry Coing, Wayne Cornelius, Jorge Hardoy, Larissa Lomnitz, Alejandro Portes, Bryan Roberts, Paul Singer, John Walton, and Oscar Yujnovsky.

Latin Americanists commonly stress the traditional cultural and philosophical differences between the region they study and the United States. A frequent contention holds that such historical contrasts persist to the present. For example, Howard J. Wiarda asserts, “Latin America … remains paternalistic, hierarchical, authoritarian, Catholic, corporate, personalist, and elitist to its core.” In contrast, the United States is presumably more egalitarian, Protestant, and impersonal than her southern-hemispheric neighbors.

From mid-1980 to the present, Uruguay has experienced greater political change than during the previous seven years. This essay examines the salient political event that separates the two periods: the national plebiscite of November 1980. Its relevance, the causal conditions that might account for its unexpected results, and its probable short-range consequences will be explored. The argument assumes a general familiarity with Uruguayan politics of the last two decades, and particularly during the period 1974-80. It is also assumed that the Uruguayan political system of the last two decades fits O'Donnell's bureaucratic-authoritarian model, with the caveat that because of specific economic conditions, a feature of that model known as the “deepening” of the economy is not applicable to Uruguay, as has also been argued with respect to the case of Chile.

This paper presents a tentative explanation of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution using a “micro-political” model of political profit, governmental efficiency, and political stability applied to data on the history of Somoza's fall. The revolution is explained as the outcome of a loss of stability by a government that attempted to control a greater share of the resources of the nation than its capabilities to persuade and coerce the population would allow. The initial results of the model, though preliminary, permit us to raise some important questions about the future of Nicaragua's political economy.

In April 1970, the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress and Yale University, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation, sponsored in Washington an international symposium on Cuban research materials. The Cuban Revolution had attracted the attention of an international scholarly community and, quite suddenly, a new and vast corpus of literature had come into existence. By 1970 this prodigious enterprise showed no sign of coming to an end; on the contrary, it gave every indication of expanding. In 1970 the Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh launched Cuban Studies Newsletter, a publication that the editors described as “designed to provide comprehensive and timely communication among those interested in Cuban studies.” The development of Cuban study centers in Europe and the United States further served to stimulate interest in Cuba. The moment was propitious, then, for an international symposium to review the state of research collections and library holdings on Cuba. Some fifteen participants, mainly scholars with research interests in Cuba and librarians and bibliographers with specializations in the Caribbean and Latin America, presented a variety of papers dealing with various aspects of library and archival collections possessing materials on Cuba.

THE TASK OF DRAWING TOGETHER USEFUL OBSERVATIONS ABOUT RESEARCH on problems of education in Latin America is at once an attractive and a disagreeable task. It is attractive because the kind of effort exemplified by this publication seems to imply increased attention to the need for research. It is disagreeable because of the obvious paucity of research, lack of a dynamic role for research in the educational process, disjointed and unrelated effort in the research that does exist, and misunderstanding of the nature of research and its function in a social field. The views expressed here are critical of research—its goals, its conduct, and the mechanisms for integrating it into educational development; but, hopefully, the observations made can be of use to enhance the research potential in this important sphere of activity.

The Resort to Violence by University Students Has Become A Common occurrence not only in developing countries but also in the more industrialized ones. Voluminous recent literature on the general subject of violence has not greatly expanded our understanding of this important problem. Similarly, literature on student movements is increasing but analyses of student violence per se are still scarce. We know less about the causes of student violence than we do about the scope and intensity of the phenomenon, yet why, when, how, and under what conditions people resort to violence are still unresolved questions. Partial answers are in, although to what effect remains to be seen.