The Archivo Nacional in Asuncion, Paraguay, is virtually unknown to historians of Latin America in the United States, despite the richness of its holdings on Paraguayan and Platine history. Few North American scholars have used the archive, and there is very little in print, either in English or Spanish, that can acquaint one with what documentation is available. The present writer, despite his efforts to learn as much about the archive as possible before his own extended research visit there in 1968, arrived in Asunción with little idea of what was available, how the archive was organized, or the extent and sheer mass of material awaiting him.

The study of Latin American labor history is at a crossroads. It is now an established field, with a growing body of scholars and research and opportunities for major advances. At the same time, it is in danger of isolating itself from promising intellectual and methodological currents and confining itself to institutional chronologies and ideological controversies. To avert this danger and take advantage of these opportunities, Latin American labor history must both become more fully the history of labor and transcend the limitations of that definition.

The lively exchange in the Latin American Research Review between D. C. M. Platt and Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein over dependency and autonomy in nineteenth-century Latin America raises a number of significant questions in the field of historical interpretation. It illustrates once more how difficult it is to support sweeping generalizations about so large and complex a region as Latin America, especially in a time period so filled with changes (in at least parts of the region) as the nineteenth century. The controversy over sources of action and their motivation, which characterizes dependency analysis, is unresolved. The argument is flavored with attributions of moral blame for events that may turn out, in a broader historical view, to have been highly fortuitous. The present comment is an attempt to insert and assess the force and direction of a vector usually passed by in the controversy. The case will be confined to Argentina, the country most often cited by Platt, and certainly the Latin American country most affected in its emerging pattern of economic development by marked shifts from Spanish to criollo to British influence over the century.

As in the case of Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the Organization of American States (OAS) are greatly exaggerated. Certainly it is not operating at peak performance. However, neither is it the moribund institution that the mass media would have us believe—although some recent reports of the General Assembly meeting in Santiago have given us glimmerings of hope for a rebirth. It is the purpose of this report to investigate the status of one of the major aspects of the contemporary OAS reform efforts—the peaceful settlement of disputes within the organization's structure. The indefinite postponement of this particular issue cannot belie the fact—amply demonstrated in the debates of the Special Committee to Study the Inter-American System and Propose Measures for Restructuring It, the Conference of Plenipotentiaries to Amend the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, and the Permanent Council—that the resolution of disputes is of fundamental importance to the nations of the hemisphere and that there is some degree of relative satisfaction over past OAS performance in that area. It would thus be appropriate for students of inter-American relations to take a greater scholarly interest in the OAS than is now the case.

Social scientists generally present the conclusions of their studies without describing how their ideas may have changed in the course of doing research. They also rarely discuss the impact they have on the persons they study or the ethical problems of research. I will address both of these issues, focusing on my experiences doing research on Mexican urban poor. In addition, I will describe how and why my conceptual framework changed during the study and raise some general questions about the relationship between theory and methods and the types of moral dilemmas faced by researchers, who often are neither value-free nor politically neutral.

If an observer from outer space had landed his UFO at any meeting of Latin Americanists during the last few years, he would have had to agree with the structural anthropologists. He would have said that at these meetings, versions of the same myth are constantly repeated: dependency and development, exploitation and wealth, backwardness and sophisticated technology, unemployment and extreme concentration of income. Somewhat wearily, our creature from space would have commented: “The brains of these beings appear to limit their images and thoughts to binary opposites.” Returning to the debate on the meaning of analyses of dependency gives one the sensation of entering a discussion in which imagination is bound by preestablished models. Nevertheless, as though I were one of the “founding fathers” of dependency, I endorse the ceremonial consumption of the theme. How to escape from this uncomfortable position?

Carlos Fuentes's preoccupation with history is best expressed in Terra nostra (1975). This novel constitutes a rewriting of Western history from the Roman Empire to the end of the twentieth century for the purpose of tracing the historical and ideological bases of contemporary Latin America. In this work, Fuentes proposes to identify the origin of Latin American structures within the historical and ideological configuration of Hapsburg Spain. To this end, his novel portrays an all-encompassing vision of the conquest and the founding of the New World that situates the reader at the crossroads of Hispanic history. Such a goal simultaneously requires an interpretation of the sociopolitical and conceptual history of the West and an evaluation of the premises that gave rise to the Modern Age.

A vital interest in the affairs of Latin America has grown recently in Australia. There, in that land “in back of the beyond,” professors are offering new programs of Latin American studies while their librarian counterparts have strengthened their holdings through active participation in the Latin American cooperative acquisition program (LACAP) and in the seminars on the acquisition of Latin American library materials (SALALM). The move of claudio Véliz from the universidad de chile to the chair of the department of sociology, La Trobe University (Bundoora, Victoria), will stimulate further the development of Latin American studies in the antipodes, while the resurgence of trans-pacific sailings during the past decade is attracting the interest of the Australians to the nations across the Pacific. It is worth noting that last year Professor Gilbert Butland of the University of New England, Armidale (New South Wales) published a general study entitled The other side of the Pacific: Problems of Latin America (Sydney, 1972).