For the better part of the last fifteen years, scholars in the United States researching late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba have worked under severe handicaps. First and foremost, obviously the richest collections of Cuban materials—in Cuba—are beyond easy access. It is not without some irony that the very phenomenon that made Cuba the subject of intense interest also placed the vast corpus of sources vital to the study of the island beyond the reach of the researcher in the United States. The researcher has had to suffer a general paucity of sources, and has been forced to reconstruct the Cuban past from incomplete and fragmentary materials scattered in archives, libraries, and manuscript collections across the country.

Due to the interest in the Latin American short story generated by writers such as Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez, Fuentes, and many others, there is a need for more information on the development of this genre in Latin America and compilations of the information already available. Good sources of material on both authors and stories are often short story anthologies. There are a number of anthologies that deal with various themes, periods, authors, countries, and stories, and offer teacher, student, or aficionado a kaleidoscopic view of the cuento in Latin America.

University Students Have Been a Highly Visible Participant in Latin American politics for many years. To cite a few examples, they played an important role in the overthrow of the regimes in Cuba (1933, 1959), Guatemala (1944), Venezuela (1958), and Bolivia (1964), and have led significant anti-government demonstrations in nearly every Latin American country at one time or another. No government in the region can afford to disregard students as a political group.

A comprehensive survey of recent research on latin american urbanization would be a large task for a team of specialists, particularly if it were to include local as well as comparative studies, the working papers which circulate through government and academic offices, and all the scholarly disciplines which now contribute to the topic. This paper is no more than a sampling of research on selected aspects of urbanization, interlarded with commentary and a bit of opinion. Except for Section 1, emphasis is upon scholarly output of the past five years. Whatever unity the presentation may have springs from the interests of a historian who is less concerned with physical and social engineering than with identifying cultural and institutional imperatives of the past which shape contemporary social process.

Brazil and Mexico occupy distinctive positions in the structure of the capitalist world economy. They bear little resemblance to the classic model of a “peripheral” country: they are too industrialized, having many of the modern industries typically found only at the center of the world economy; they supply themselves with too large a share of the finished goods consumed domestically; their exports are too diversified and include too many manufactured items; and they have developed unusually strong states with sophisticated administrative apparatuses capable of promoting and protecting local interests. But neither do Brazil and Mexico possess the characteristics commonly associated with “developed” or “core” nations. Their gross domestic product per capita is far below that of the United States, Japan, or almost any of the countries of Western Europe; their distributions of income are highly skewed compared to those of the developed countries; they are recipient rather than source countries of foreign investment; they are debtor rather than creditor nations; and they are on the receiving rather than the originating end of product innovation and new production techniques.

I am grateful to Charles Bergquist for his consideration in sending me a draft of his review essay, thus giving me an opportunity to reply in the same issue of LARR. It is in many respects a perceptive commentary that raises some useful questions about the book. Nevertheless, some of the comments suggest an imperfect grasp of my intended message, perhaps because of a failure on my part to make it sufficiently clear. On some important points he reads things into the book that are not there; and other points that are in the book seem to be missed in Bergquist's reading of it. I therefore would like to clarify some of these matters, both for those who may read the book as Bergquist has and for those who may choose to rely upon his commentary for their knowledge of the book's contents. I also will attempt to say something about some of the general issues he raises.