La Villa de San Felipe de Austria de Oruro, hoy ciudad de Oruro, situada en el altiplano boliviano, fue el segundo centro minero de plata en el Alto Perú. Fundada oficialmente en 1606 tuvo su apogeo en ese mismo siglo XVII, acompanando a Potosí en la crisis minera del siglo siguiente. En 1781 ocurrió en ella una sangrienta rebelión en la cual estuvieron involucrados importantes mineros y comerciantes de la villa. Entonces vivían en ella 8,000 criollos y 50 españoles mientras que en el siglo anterior debe de haber alcanzado la cifra de 40,000 habitantes.

This research proposed to define how property was distributed in the national capital throughout the 1800s, to evaluate the importance of the concentration of property in the hands of a landed elite, and to describe the social groups which benefited from landownership. Also proposed was an analysis of the impact and changes produced by the decline of one landowning group and its replacement by another in the physical, economic, and social structure of the city.

The Programa de Estudios de Historia Económica y Social Americana (PEHESA) was established in 1977 in association with the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración (CISEA) by a group of Argentine historians committed to the study of social history. This field has not had too fortunate a fate in our country; political, academic, and institutional reasons have condemned it to the fringe.

Trapped in the nineteenth-century view of the humanities until the 1950s, our academic world produced traditional history based upon empirical study of political events and of the institutional development of the country. With few exceptions, history was the history of great public figures or at best, of successful enterprises carried out by distinguished members of society. Yet historical works were not produced only in the academic world. Ideologues from different sectors of society looked to the past in search of arguments, models, and stereotypes, and although they did not write an alternative history, in some cases they did raise new issues or question old assumptions.

During a research trip to Ecuador in the summer of 1978, the editor had occasion to visit several centers for training and investigation in the social sciences. The evidence of marked progress over earlier years is unmistakeable, and has been stimulated by both national and international bases of support as well as the influx of intellectuals exiled from other Latin American countries. In a previous issue (volume 13, number 2 [1978]), LARR presented a report from former director Rafael Quintero on the activities and pedagogical orientation of the Escuela de Sociología at the Universidad Central del Ecuador. He also noted the important appearance of the Revista de Ciencias Sociales, four numbers of which had been published by mid-1978, as well as the initiation of national conferences on sociology: the first of these was convened in Quito in November 1976 and the second met at Cuenca in April 1978. While research activities are being undertaken in both Guayaquil and Cuenca, much of the effort nationally is centered in Quito. In keeping with LARR'S effort to improve and extend communication in this area, the following reports on four centers are presented. In conjunction with the earlier contribution by Dr. Quintero, they provide a useful, if less than fully exhaustive, perspective on social science activities in Quito.

Charles II named the Duque de la Palata as viceroy of Perú in 1680 with the hope that he would be able to revitalize the production of royal revenue in the realm. The key to accomplishing that goal, the king believed, was to assign more Indians to the mines and silver mills of Potosí because the crown ostensibly received 20 percent of the silver marked in the Villa Imperial. One-seventh of the adult population of male originarios (Indians living in their assigned pueblos) in the obligated provinces could be assigned to Potosí in any one year under Francisco de Toledo's ordinances, and the Duque was authorized to extend this mita obligation to any or all of the fourteen previously exempted altiplano (highland) corregimientos, that is, to increase the base from which the one-seventh ratio was taken. The number of new corregimientos to be added would depend upon the results of a prerequisite census in the thirty corregimientos of Alto Perú (sixteen mita and fourteen exempted).

Half of all urban dwellers and eight out of every ten rural inhabitants in developing countries live in inadequate and badly equipped housing, crowded together and subjected to unacceptable environmental conditions. This means that in the countries of the Third World alone more than 2,300 million people live in housing that is without (or has only insufficient) services and that is marked as well by varying degrees of deterioration. The need to construct new units to absorb the natural increase in the population, to overcome gradually the qualitative deficit indicated above, and to renew existing stock makes housing and complementary services the major investment that must be made if one of the basic needs of the population is to be met. “A house is something more than a simple or complex construction, detached or grouped, forming an agglomeration that might have diverse forms and functions. Defined as a dwelling, this construction is converted into an essential aspect of man's existence as a social being and his way of life on earth.”

Scholars of developing nations recognize the importance of education in the socialization process that takes place in every culture. While some students have examined the impact of education on the masses, fewer, especially for Latin America, have examined the impact of education on the political leadership. Mexico, one of the most frequently studied countries in Latin America, has never been the subject of a study that examines its university system as an institution for both socialization and recruitment of political leaders. Nevertheless, it is an ideal country for investigation because the majority of its high-level office-holders have university degrees from a single institution, the National University of Mexico.

Within the last two decades, theories about world systems have played a decisive role in shifting the boundaries of discourse on long-term social change. The triumph of world-system analysis was nearly a “bloodless coup”: few scholars were terribly anxious to defend the theoretical bastion of modernization theory that it supplanted; at best they reinterpreted the old theory within the new framework (for example, Rostow, 1975, 1978; Parsons 1977, 213; Moore 1979).

This essay is divided into three parts: a discussion of the pervasive role of Marxism-Leninism in Soviet Latin American studies; an examination of the contents of a collection of translated readings of USSR scholars tentatively entitled The Soviet Image of Latin America, 1945–1965: A Documentary History, and a general survey of certain basic works devoted to the principal Latin American themes prescribed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

La Fundación para el Estudio de los Problemas Argentinos (FEPA) fue creada el 28 de diciembre de 1977 por un grupo de profesores universitarios de la Escuela de Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad Católica Argentina de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, pero su funcionamiento pleno comenzó el 8 de mayo de 1978. El edificio que actualmente ocupa cuenta con tres plantas, con una superficie total de 750 metros cuadrados. En la planta baja funciona la subdirección, los servicios de recepción y administración y algunas jefaturas; en la planta siguiente la dirección y un auditorio con capacidad para sesenta personas. El último piso es el dedicado a tareas de investigación. FEPA cuenta con personal administrativo adecuado y profesionales en ciencias sociales, provenientes de Ciencias Políticas, Economía, Sociología, Historia y Derecho. Desde su iniciación, está dirigida por el Dr. Francisco Arias Pelerano, especialista en Ciencias Políticas; actuando como Subdirector el Dr. Joaquín Rafael Ledesma, especializado en Economía.