With this ringing affirmation, Julien Bryan concluded Americans All, his first documentary about Latin America produced under the auspices of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CI-AA) as part of the U.S. government's effort to foster hemispheric solidarity. By 1945 he had completed twenty-two more, including four on Latin America as a region; five on Chile; three each about Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay; and one each concerning Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Paraguay. The CI-AA distributed the films to thousands of U.S. schools, clubs, and organizations during the war. After the conflict was over, they continued to be the standard educational films about Latin America until, by the 1960s, damage or obsolescence forced most prints out of circulation. For the historian, however, “obsolescence” is not an undesirable quality, and a careful screening suggests that these thirty-year old documentaries contain an extraordinary visual record of Spanish South America and provide insight into inter-American relations. The purpose here is to assess the value of Bryan's twenty-three films as historical evidence, based on an analysis of the narration and photography and taking into account the special nature of film as a source material.

The renewed religious activity which has been gathering national momentum over the past decade has deeply affected Mexican Americans and other Spanish speakers in the United States. For Catholics one may perhaps date the resurgence as commencing shortly after the Second Vatican Council of 1963; Protestant growth seems to have begun at approximately the same time, somewhat in parallel with the La Raza Movement. It is rewarding to analyze developments among the various denominations because of what is revealed about the diversity of Mexican American outlooks, because of the interesting leadership activities of church groups, and because of the musical trends which are appearing in worship.

Historiographical advances in recent decades have emphasized increasingly the twentieth-century sources of American hegemony in Cuba. Two specific periods have served as the focus of these arguments: the years of the military occupation (1899-1902) and the decades of the Plattist republic, namely those years when Cuba was linked to the United States by virtue of the Permanent and Reciprocity treaties (1903-34). During these years, Cuban dependency certainly deepened and the character of the island acquired its definitive features as a client state. These twentieth-century developments, however, originated in nineteenth-century antecedents that contributed decisively to shaping events after 1895.

A general assumption of the modernization literature is that urbanized nations constitute more socially mobilized and therefore potentially demanding political environments (Thompson, p. 477; Deutsch, p. 498). The expansion of urban centers indicates the breakdown of traditional peasant society and the natural static political order that it represents. Consequently, Huntington (pp. 53–55) and others argue that nations undergoing the process of urbanization will tend to become more violent and politically unstable unless the new demands ultimately created by rural to urban migration are satisfied in the socioeconomic sphere or managed by capable political institutions.

Scholars working in the area of contemporary Cuban literature are frequently asked about the current state of literary affairs on the island. The novel in particular, with the exception of a handful of resounding yet politically controversial successes, is rarely mentioned. Only one novelist of merit, Edmundo Desnoes, has fully embraced the revolution and achieved some measure of success in serving it without greatly compromising his aesthetic standards. How he has achieved this and why he is unique are questions that deserve exploration.

This note examines the level and structure of construction costs in Latin America in the late sixties, comparing them with those obtained in the early sixties by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). The cost trends over this period are then examined.

While Haiti's economic dependency and poverty are shared by other Caribbean nations, its history of underdevelopment serves as a prototype for them. Haiti's political independence, achieved in 1804, set the stage for an increasingly difficult struggle to survive among imperialist states. Haiti prefigured the modern Latin American experience and thus provides a classic example of how national aspirations in the hemisphere were derailed. Equally significant, it illustrates the manner in which commerce, rather than plantation enterprise or extensive capital investment, could foster socioeconomic decline.