Una cuestión sumamente controvertida es la que tiene que ver con las implicaciones del fenómeno bilingüe en torno a cierta esterilidad en la concepción creadora del hablante bilingüe.1 Estas páginas intentan considerar los aspectos creativos y opresivos del bilingüismo del presente en el Paraguay con especial enfásis en el papel de las lenguas en el sistema educativo. Ambos conceptos están íntimamente relacionados y los usaré como dos categorías diferentes para explicar el rol actual que tienen las dos lenguas—español y guaraní—que han estado en contacto por casi cuatrocientos años en una bien delimitada área geográfica en América Latina.

El Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS) es una institución privada, independiente con personería jurídica propia reconocida por el estado boliviano sin fines de lucro, eminentemente apolítica y no discriminatoria. CIS es una institución dedicada al estudio de los factores y condiciones que influencian los modos de vida y la problemática social del país. CIS trabaja, en la orientación, reflexión asistencia técnica, extensión e investigación en las varias areas de las ciencias sociales. La investigación es una actividad vital para el desarrollo, porque el conocimiento sistematizado de la realidad social contribuye al desarrollo armónico entre el individuo, su cultura y los procesos socio-económicos. La preservación de la cultura boliviana como fuente de una ciencia propia, inspirada y sostenida por sus propios valores es el principio axiológico fundamental en las actividades del centro.

In a significant survey article published in the American Economic Review ten years ago, Leopoldo Solís could regret, not without justification, the lack of a serious tradition of empirical economics research in Mexico. There was no lack of well-trained and creative applied economists; but they were often engaged, then as now, in political action or public administration. Meanwhile, academic economists were engaged in the transmission of received theory (usually foreign) without reference to the realidad nacional or else in vague generalizations. However, the recent bibliographical survey by the Colegio de México, as well as the publications discussed in this review, indicate that the 1970s saw a flourishing of empirical and quantitative work among the two main groups identified by Solís: the neoclassical and monetarist economists on the one hand and the structuralists and radicals on the other. Moreover, there has emerged an increasing differentiation within these groups, spreading the scope of the debate outwards from the center, reflecting the polarization of political attitudes in Mexican society as a whole. Further, as the economists gained positions of power previously reserved for professional politicians, both structuralists such as Tello and neoclassicals such as Solís himself were in a position to translate at least some of their ideas into practice. However, although Solís had suggested that the intellectual advance would be made by economists of the neoclassical persuasion, in the event it was the monetarists and radical writers who appear to have been most fertile in the 1970s.

The broad nature of the task of summarizing the state of our knowledge of the agrarian history of Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is counterbalanced by the scarcity of literature on the topic. In many cases it has resulted in generalizations and over simplifications that cannot be avoided at this time. This survey is restricted to the commercial agricultural activities—sugar, coffee, and tobacco—since these industries shaped the economic history of the island in the period under consideration. More questions are raised than are answered. As a result, it is hoped that the topical areas touched upon will become objects of future research.

On 11 September 1973, heavily armed troops attacked the Chilean Presidential Palace in Santiago and toppled the government of Dr. Salvador Allende. The military coup brought an end to Latin America's first democratically-elected Marxist government. Since the September military takeover, the Chilean armed forces have moved with unparalleled harshness to suppress the base of the Allende regime's popular support. The Allende government's efforts toward raising the consumption level of Chile's lower classes had earned his Popular Unity (Unidad Popular—UP) coalition a high degree of political support among the nation's working class and urban migrant population. Because his Socialist-Communist coalition had been actively competing since the 1960s with both the reformist Christian Democratic party (Partido Demócrata Cristiano—PDC) and the ultraradical Leftist Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria—MIR) for the support of the urban poor, Santiago's migrant shantytowns had an unusually high level of political mobilization. The squatter settlements outside of the capital provided some of the strongest support for Chile's various Marxist parties. Not surprisingly, since the military takeover many of Santiago's squatter communities have been subjected to mass arrests and even executions by the rightist government (Slaughterhouse, 1973; Terror, 1974).

Intellectual disciplines, very much like human beings, have life cycles. They are conceived and born, they progress through childhood, adolescence, and youth, they reach maturity, they enter old age, and some even die. Even if in the present case the simile is a grandiose one, and if the field of Mexican rural history can hardly lay claim to the status of being a distinct intellectual discipline, the main point nonetheless holds. After a long period of gestation and a halting but promising infancy, the field is standing firmly on two feet. It has a problemática—a set of questions, something resembling a research strategy, and a conceptual framework (much of it admittedly borrowed); it has an identifiable corpus of literature, and its practitioners recognize one another. Yet how mature is it, and where is it going? The purposes of this article are to review the development of the historiography on rural life in colonial and early national Mexico published during the last thirty years, focusing central attention on the study of the hacienda; to assess some of its findings, problems, and growing pains; and to make some suggestions as to where those working in the field might invest their energies in future. Within the overall topical organization of the essay, the literature on the classic Mexican hacienda is examined from thematic, theoretical, and methodological vantage points. These treatments are complementary rather than redundant because the questions historians ask, the explanatory schemes they use, and the sources and methods they rely upon are intimately interrelated, and such a prismatic analysis of a body of literature helps to point up its strengths as well as its weaknesses.

In recent years, a considerable effort has been made in political science to facilitate cross-national research of a truly comparative nature. One common strategy is to assemble statistical data from as many nations as possible that then can serve as quantitative indicators for a variety of political, social, and economic phenomena. The use of quantitative operationalizations allows for statistical testing of appropriate hypotheses. While the goals of such data collection are most certainly praiseworthy, a variety of questions can and ought to be raised about the quality of much of the data made so readily available to today's researchers. My purpose here is to illustrate the risks involved in the unwary use of one such “quantitative indicator”—trade union electoral statistics. What is true for the election data is also true in varying degrees for other types of statistical information from Latin America.

O Congresso Nacional, em Brasília, dispõe de um dos maiores acervos documentais para o estudo da história brasileira. Entretanto, poucos têm uma idéia precisa do volume e da natureza daquela documentação, bem como de sua possível contribuição para o conhecimento histórico. É meu intento, pois, descrevê-la aos interessados por esse campo de estudo e fornecer indicações, a título de exemplo, sobre uma das modalidades de exploração, modalidade essa que corresponde a meu projeto pessoal de pesquisa: o papel do Parlamento diante das relações exteriores.