Intellectual disciplines, very much like human beings, have life cycles. They are conceived and born, they progress through childhood, adolescence, and youth, they reach maturity, they enter old age, and some even die. Even if in the present case the simile is a grandiose one, and if the field of Mexican rural history can hardly lay claim to the status of being a distinct intellectual discipline, the main point nonetheless holds. After a long period of gestation and a halting but promising infancy, the field is standing firmly on two feet. It has a problemática—a set of questions, something resembling a research strategy, and a conceptual framework (much of it admittedly borrowed); it has an identifiable corpus of literature, and its practitioners recognize one another. Yet how mature is it, and where is it going? The purposes of this article are to review the development of the historiography on rural life in colonial and early national Mexico published during the last thirty years, focusing central attention on the study of the hacienda; to assess some of its findings, problems, and growing pains; and to make some suggestions as to where those working in the field might invest their energies in future. Within the overall topical organization of the essay, the literature on the classic Mexican hacienda is examined from thematic, theoretical, and methodological vantage points. These treatments are complementary rather than redundant because the questions historians ask, the explanatory schemes they use, and the sources and methods they rely upon are intimately interrelated, and such a prismatic analysis of a body of literature helps to point up its strengths as well as its weaknesses.

From mid-1980 to the present, Uruguay has experienced greater political change than during the previous seven years. This essay examines the salient political event that separates the two periods: the national plebiscite of November 1980. Its relevance, the causal conditions that might account for its unexpected results, and its probable short-range consequences will be explored. The argument assumes a general familiarity with Uruguayan politics of the last two decades, and particularly during the period 1974-80. It is also assumed that the Uruguayan political system of the last two decades fits O'Donnell's bureaucratic-authoritarian model, with the caveat that because of specific economic conditions, a feature of that model known as the “deepening” of the economy is not applicable to Uruguay, as has also been argued with respect to the case of Chile.

The construction of binational hydroelectric plants on the Paraná River at Itaipú by Brazil and Paraguay and at Yacyretá and Corpus by Argentina and Paraguay reflects unprecedented cooperation and integration among these three nations, with far-reaching consequences for the future economic, social, and political development of all the Paraná River hinterland. The Paraná River Basin, or River Plate Basin, is among the five largest water systems in the world, second in size only to the Amazon Basin in the Western Hemisphere. With a length of 2,796 miles, it includes three main rivers, the Paraná, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and their tributaries. It covers an area of 1,980,000 square miles and contains a population estimated in 1980 at more than eighty million people. Brazil takes the largest share of the Basin at 45.9 percent; Argentina has 28.19 percent, and Paraguay has 13.1 percent, with the remainder held by Bolivia and Uruguay. Brazil's share of the basin comprises some of the relatively more progressive and industrialized southwestern, southeastern, and southern states of Mato Grosso, Goiás, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. In Argentina, the provinces adjacent to the Paraná River contain 60 percent of the country's population and support 85 percent of its economic activity. Until the completion of a paved road and the international bridge over the Paraná River in the 1960s that permitted direct access to the Atlantic coast of Brazil, Paraguay's communication with world markets depended exclusively on the Paraguay and Paraná rivers.

Una cuestión sumamente controvertida es la que tiene que ver con las implicaciones del fenómeno bilingüe en torno a cierta esterilidad en la concepción creadora del hablante bilingüe.1 Estas páginas intentan considerar los aspectos creativos y opresivos del bilingüismo del presente en el Paraguay con especial enfásis en el papel de las lenguas en el sistema educativo. Ambos conceptos están íntimamente relacionados y los usaré como dos categorías diferentes para explicar el rol actual que tienen las dos lenguas—español y guaraní—que han estado en contacto por casi cuatrocientos años en una bien delimitada área geográfica en América Latina.

No history exists of the cartography of the countries that currently comprise Latin America. Nor is there a history of urban cartography, although there are excellent books containing collections of plans of the cities of that part of the world. No one should be surprised therefore to find that historians, geographers, architects, and other specialists interested in the evolution of Latin American cities have made scant use of regional and city plans in their studies. It is possible that the growing interest shown during recent decades in the regional and urban history of Latin America and in the conservation of its historical centers, cities, and towns may occasion increased interest in the kind of information that regional and urban plans offer to the researcher. Sooner or later, specialists involved in studying the process of urbanization and re-gionalization in Latin America will recognize the importance of studying the socio-historical process of structuring space and of analyzing the different cultural groups who occupied that space. Cartography, with its increasing precision through the centuries, its emphasis on distances, on geographical elements and direction, on the representation of some of the most important works of man—for example, the placement of cities, towns, roads, ports, bridges, and irrigation canals—ought to be an essential source of information.

De la revisión crítica de los componentes que integran el fenómeno folklórico, tal como ha sido formulado por autores hispanoamericanos, surgen similitudes y discordancias en los planteos teóricos. Procuraré sintetizar estos distintos enfoques, contrastándolos con la posición prevaleciente en la Argentina.

El denominado folk, o sector del pueblo portador del hecho folklórico, ha sido uno de los puntos cruciales de discrepancias entre los estudiosos. Dejo de lado quienes sustentan que el folklore es producto del “pueblo” sin especificar el significado que le atribuyen a este vocablo. Queda, en ese caso, como un término indefinido pues como se sabe esta voz no es unívoca. Mientras no se precise la acepción con que se la emplea, no contribuye a esclarecer conceptos en esta ciencia.

In 1877 Miguel Luis Amunátegui, noted historian and Chile's Minister of Education, observed aptly that while the Chinese bound their daughters' feet, his countrymen bound their daughters' minds. Amunátegui's dictum reveals an official concern for women's education that was unique in nineteenth-century Latin America. Chile's efforts to remove the “bindings” from the minds of its young women are important in several respects. Education was in fact the linchpin of an ambitious strategy to revamp and modernize every aspect of Chilean society. Because of the centrality of formal education in this experiment and the intensity of thinking on the subject, when women's education was addressed in official circles, female roles were being defined as part of a coherent national ideology. The Chilean experiments in education thus provide a rare opportunity to observe explicit, detailed reflection on women's roles. Unequivocal official commitment to public education in Chile also resulted in the creation of a large bureaucracy that in turn collected immense quantities of data on household size, family income, occupation, and related subjects. Much of this data concerns women and insofar as it documents the “social bedrock” so often obscured to scholars, it is immensely useful for women's history.

The decade of the 1960s ushered in a “New Frontier” for scholarly interest in all aspects of Latin American life. This trend was reflected in the curricula of American and Canadian institutions of higher education as they embarked on expanded programs in Latin American studies. This intensified effort resulted in an unprecedented number of doctoral dissertations on Latin American topics being submitted at 152 U.S. and Canadian universities. This research will be analyzed by drawing primarily on two bibliographic works: Allen Bushong's 1967 work, “Doctoral Dissertations on Pan American Topics Accepted by United States and Canadian Colleges and Universities 1961-1965” (LARR 2, No. 2 Supplement [Spring 1967]), and my Doctoral Dissertations on Latin America and the Caribbean: An Analysis and Bibliography of Dissertations Accepted at American and Canadian Universities, 1966-1970 (Publication No. 10 of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, 1980). A comparison of the decade will also be made with the period 1861-1960.

As in other European socialist countries, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), research on Latin America has increased steadily since the 1960s. After the reopening in 1946 of the high schools and universities in what was then the Soviet Occupied Zone, research and teaching on problems of Latin America developed initially in a sporadic way according to the personal interests of scholars within various scientific disciplines. From the beginning, however, these efforts were founded upon the democratic and humanistic traditions of German research on Latin America. The scholars tried consciously to uphold the heritage of Alexander von Humboldt, above all his idea of mutual give-and-take and his sympathy for the fight for independence against the Spanish colonial regime.1 By eschewing nationalistic, racist, and eurocentrist biases, Latin American studies in the German Democratic Republic aim, in the von Humboldt tradition, to avoid patronizing the Latin American people.

Educated classes in India have long been accustomed to talk of the “common problems” of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the past, they have been content to rely almost exclusively on popular books in the English language published in Britain and the United States for information concerning those regions. Of the three continents with a sense of common identity, Latin America is physically the farthest from India and also the area that has afforded least direct contact. While these factors contributed to an attitude towards Latin America that was friendly and devoid of negative sentiments, they also resulted in a much slower awakening among the educated and elite groups of the desirability of initiating rigorous programs of study and research on contemporary Latin American institutions and developments. It was only a decade ago that a modest effort in this direction was begun in the School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. The program is now attracting somewhat greater interest from students, researchers, and agencies than was anticipated by the few enthusiasts who launched it ten years ago without any prospect of financial support from educational authorities and funding agencies.

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.