No one with even a passing acquaintance with the literature on Mexican society, not to mention the rest of Spanish America, can fail to be impressed by the frequent use of the term mestizo. Despite its ubiquity in the writings of social scientists, however, the concept of the mestizo is customarily employed in a vague fashion and usually left undefined. This is especially evident in the work of anthropologists, who for many years have been preoccupied with defining the Mexican Indian but have rarely focused their analytical powers on the mestizo. The term itself has been used rather loosely to refer to a certain group of people who presumably comprise a majority of the Mexican population, a cultural pattern shared by these people and other Latin Americans, and even a personality type.

On October 14, 1967, the Consejo Latinoamerican de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), which includes about forty of the most important social science research institutions in Latin America, was constituted in the city of Bogotá, Colombia.

The regulations of the Council provide for the creation of Working Committees devoted to specific tasks in the common interest of member institutions and of social science research in Latin America. Among the first Working Committees to be created was one devoted to the creation, development and modernization of SocialScienceData Archives in the area.

Clearly the winds of change sweep over latin america today. everyhing one observes, reads, and hears about this vast culture area points to vital (often radical) social, cultural, and economic transformations which are resulting in new ways of life for these millions of Americans whose ways of life derive from Spanish, Portuguese, American Indian, and African sources. Changes in customary patterns of thought and behavior are taking place more slowly in some countries than others, and even within a nation some areas respond much more quickly to innovative efforts than do others.

The Publication in 1960 of I. R. Lavretskii's “A Survey of the Hispanic American Historical Review, 1956-1958,” provided U.S. specialists in Latin American history with an abrasive introduction to recent Soviet historical scholarship in the Latin American area. Subsequent reviews by American and European scholars, together with further translations of pertinent Soviet writings, have helped to provide those lacking a knowledge of the Russian language with additional insight into the nature and scope of Latin American studies in the USSR. At the same time, however, the frequently opposing views of history held by Soviet historians and their western critics have greatly complicated the task of scholarly evaluation. On the one hand, Soviet historical scholarship has often been dismissed as “a branch of politics;” on the other, U.S. historians are said to “falsify and distort the historical truth in order to benefit imperialism.” In content and presentation, the Lavretskii article evinces both extremes.

Several years ago, students of Latin American politics discovered with some alarm that the subdiscipline of comparative politics had not only been ignoring their scholarly efforts, but the area altogether. At that time the principal focus of discontent was conceptualization. Classification systems, typologies, checklists, functions and isolated concepts about the politics of transition were being derived and applied without reference to and relevance for Latin America. While the terminological estrangement has by no means ended, some reconciliation has subsequently occurred. Recent theoretical works make occasional references to the area. It has become essential for all readers or collections of essays on political development to contain at least one (often the same) article on Latin American politics. Conversely, new research in Latin America has been increasingly sensitive to approaches prevalent in the general comparative politics literature.

The questions of whether inflation is harmful or helpful or indifferent to economic growth, whether the elimination of inflation should come before or after a high rate of economic growth has been achieved, and the whole issue of what are the roots of the Latin American inflations, have preoccupied at one time or another almost every economist who has worked in the region. More than any other economic problem, inflation has aroused strong passions in otherwise reflective and technocratically inclined economists, and has compelled many to partake in what almost amounted to an ideological controversy. This experience has, on the one hand, had the effect of forcing economists to reexamine some of the basic value judgments that have been implicit in their analytical work, while, on the other hand, it has often obscured the basic analytical strand that each was following.

For eight years I was associated with one of the most quixotic efforts in academic publishing—a journal concerned comprehensively with research about an area of the world. I must admit that when the Latin American Research Review (LARR) was about to move to Chapel Hill, I thought the original idea that had given birth to the journal had lost its vitality. The notion of reviewing research seemed restrictive and either excessively specialized or hopelessly protean. The dramatic increase in the training of Latin Americanists and the resulting explosion of publications about the region by the end of the 1960s seemed to threaten with extinction the rara avis that had been the journal's stock in trade, the review of the literature. In 1974, when John Martz and I assumed control of LARR, it was hard to imagine anyone repeating Richard Morse's feat in the two-part article on urban studies, “Trends and Issues in Latin American Urban Research, 1965-1970” (LARR volume 6, numbers 1 and 2 [1971]). The mere suggestion of surveying the field of colonial history in three articles, as James Lockhart, Karen Spalding, and Frederick Bowser had done in 1972, would have brought an incredulous curl to the nether lip of a student of that field just two years later. The fact that we received virtually no backlog of manuscripts from our predecessors appeared symbolic of the well having run dry.

The information for this lecture was obtained from the Mexican censuses of 1895, 1900, and 1910. This period in Mexican history was marked by the dictatorship of General Porfírio Díaz and by accelerated economic growth.