Writers from Jorge Luis Borges to Alejo Carpentier have celebrated the role of literary journalism in Latin American cultural life. The periodical press mediates between author and public, between the heavy sea of tradition and the rising tide of the new, between the institutions that sustain convention and the spontaneous, vibrant eruptions that give life to the avant-garde. Literary journalism thus traces the struggles of writers against the canon while revealing their engagement in the political and aesthetic events of the day. But as one might expect, literary journalism also unravels the neat boundaries of the finished work or the book in the ongoing dialogue with contemporary publications and multifaceted speculations on culture. In this way, the pastiche of materials found in the modern review exposes the vivid heterogeneity of the intellectual field.

Study of religious phenomena in Latin America and the Caribbean covered by the generic term Protestantism has opened up a fertile field of research for sociologists, anthropologists, and historians in the last thirty years. The exponential growth in new non-Roman Catholic religious movements since the 1950s and the breadth of their organized networks have stimulated research based more often on sensationalism than on a scientific perspective. The complex and pluralistic manifestations of this heterodox religious phenomenon have generally been reduced to a notion of Protestantism rarely found in scholarly usage. The multiplicity of non-Roman Catholic religious movements cannot be reduced to some catchall category of “Protestantism.” Moreover, one must also analyze the connection between usage of the term Protestant and a culture marked by the Spanish Inquisition, which shaped the Ibero-American collective unconscious for more than three centuries, in order to understand why a fair number of Latin American researchers look at religious dissidence rather superficially, reducing it immediately to “Protestantism.”

As interest grows in examining women's lives and writings in colonial Latin America, the autobiographical accounts written by scores of nuns during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been undergoing a reevaluation by historians and literary critics alike. Studies of the literary production and the circumstances surrounding the life of the most famous nun of the period, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695), have long been in vogue, but writings by her contemporaries have only recently caught the attention of many scholars. These colonial documents illustrate a well-established feminine literary tradition and reveal the female experience with religious institutions and spirituality: the appeal of the religious life for many women, the roles they played in the convent, and the relationships among nuns, confessors, and other members of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Less frequently, autobiographical accounts include significant details about the author's life before taking the veil. Although rare, such manuscripts provide information on the makeup of upper-class creole households and the roles of women in the family that helps fill the gaps in knowledge about women's daily lives in Latin America. The focus of this article is the first volume written by an Augustinian Recollect nun describing her secular life on an agricultural farm (hacienda de labor) from 1656 to 1687.

El tema de la vinculación de los productores y la producción agraria con los mercados es hoy un tema bastante bien explorado en la historiografía colonialista americana. De estos estudios surge como una visión más o menos generalizada la progresiva tendencia al control sobre los mercados de productos agropecuarios de parte de las grandes haciendas españolas. Sin embargo, últimamente esto ha sido matizado destacando el alto grado de participación mercantil del campesinado y de las comunidades indígenas, por lo menos en ciertas regiones y períodos, incluso tardíos.

Protestantism has grown strikingly throughout Latin America in the last two decades. Estimating such growth is hazardous in the absence of firm national survey data, but the phenomenon is clearly embracing sizable segments of national populations. In Guatemala, estimates of Protestants in the national population ranged from 20 to 25 percent by the early 1980s, with more recent estimates approaching 30 percent.

Interracial marriage is common in Brazil today despite an overall preference for racial endogamy. Fully one-fifth of all Brazilian unions in 1980 were racially exogenous (Silva 1987), although only a small portion of those marriages involved persons of widely differing colors. Indeed, 93 percent of interracial unions in 1980 were between whites and browns (pardos—persons of mixed race or mulattos) or between browns and blacks; only the remaining 7 percent (1.3 percent of all unions) took place between whites and blacks (Silva 1987, 73). Because intermarriage is the ultimate indicator of social distance or assimilation, these rates suggest little or moderate social distance between persons who are proximate in color but greater social distance between persons at the extremes ends of the color spectrum.