This article analyzes the persistence of an official discourse of mestizo nationalism in Nicaragua in spite of the adoption of multicultural citizenship rights for black and indigenous costeños in 1986. These reforms appeared to directly contradict key premises of previously dominant nationalist ideologies, particularly the idea that Nicaragua was a uniformly mestizo nation. Instead of a radical break with the past, however, what we find in contemporary Nicaragua is a continuous process of negotiation and contestation among three variants of official mestizo nationalism: vanguardismo, Sandinismo, and “mestizo multiculturalism” that emerged in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s respectively. This article traces the continuities among these disparate but intimately related accounts of national history and identity and the way they all operate to limit the political inclusion of black and indigenous costeños as such.

This article explores the sources of Ecuador's boom in flower exports since the late 1980s. In that boom, fresh cut flower exports rose from almost nothing to 9 percent of the country's nonpetroleum export earnings. This research addresses whether trade liberalization and macroeconomic reforms played a decisive role in stimulating the export boom or whether changes in the global flower market created Ecuador's comparative advantage in flower exports independent of the policy regime. The article surveys the many changes in economic policy toward agriculture in general, flower cultivation, nontraditional exports, international trade, and macroeconomic stability. Growth rates in traditional and non-traditional exports are examined to see if they correlate with changes in key policies. The article also examines how the restructuring of the global flower market affected Ecuador's floriculture industry.

Gabriela Mistral's uncharacteristic short stories, which she began writing at the age of fourteen, demonstrate the Chilean poet's need to express violence through the brief narrative genre. Mistral wrote six short stories and in all of them she blurs the boundaries between gender and violence. For the sexes to be defined, Mistral seems to use violence as a means to distinguish them. When women suffer through men's actions, both gender performances become more pronounced and defined: women and men exist precisely because of men's harmful actions. A shift of perspective and agency occurs when men fail to recognize their own behavior and blame women for their fate. Both sexes lose their subjectivity (or sexuality) and become so intertwined that their differences are no longer perceptible. The two stories analyzed in this essay are the first story Mistral wrote, “El perdón de una víctima” and her last, “El rival.” In both, Mistral demonstrates her wariness to define a norm for heterosexual relationships, while at the same time, she attempts to discern female difference.

The following three articles, together with this brief introduction, review the consequences of the paradigm shift in Latin American economic historiography from structuralism to the New Institutional Economics (NIE). Joseph Love analyzes the basic tenets of structuralism, their connection to dependency, the influence of CEPAL on policymaking, and how a generation of historians utilized the methodologies of structuralism to research historical problems in Latin American development. John H. Coatsworth's contribution correlates the decline of the structuralist model to the rise of research interests in the role of institutions in economic history and examines the latest long-range comparisons of productivity between the Latin American and U.S. economies. Commenting on the recent research utilizing the NIE, Coatsworth agrees with Love that the relative economic stagnation of the past quarter century may not render structuralism entirely irrelevant. Sandra Kuntz Ficker summarizes the basic positions held by the structuralist and dependentista schools with respect to commercial policy and concludes with a discussion of how the NIE contributes to innovative research on Latin American foreign trade. These articles resulted from the authors' participation in a LARR- sponsored panel at the 2004 Latin American Studies Association Congress.

More than half a century has passed since structuralism appeared as an “indigenous” program of economic development in Latin America. Given the poor performance of the region's economies largely under the guidance of neoliberal doctrines since 1980, the question of whether structuralism—associated with the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL—still has any relevance is a legitimate one. In any event, structuralism's influence during the third quarter of the last century is admitted by friend and foe alike. My intent is not to determine whether structural analysis was “correct,” but to examine some of the forms it took and show why they were important. These were structuralist approaches to import substitution, informality, and economic historiography. I further consider structuralism as a movement, and the reasons for its success and subsequent decline. The essay closes with a brief consideration of how structuralism survives today, given the vast changes in economic development theory over the last half century.

The economic history of Latin America has become more voluminous, complex, and fascinating in the past decade. The new work has already provoked noteworthy commentaries; one could even write an historiography of the historiography. The purpose of this essay is to comment on (and applaud) the re-emergence of political economy in the economic history of the region. By this I mean the renewal of interest in the Big Questions that inspired the structuralists, “cepalinos,” Marxists, dependentistas, and modernizationists of the post-World War II generations. Economic historians are again worrying about the long, long run, about the connections between social stratification, political power, and economic strategy, and about the relative impact of structures, endowments, and institutions on economic growth and development.

This paper originated with Jonathan Brown's invitation to participate in a LARR-sponsored panel at the 2004 LASA Congress, commenting on the lectures offered by John Coatsworth and Joseph Love. The discussants' task was to relate the general ideas presented by these scholars to our own field of specialization, which in my case happens to be the history of foreign trade. Therefore, this article summarizes the evolution of economic ideas with respect to Latin America, with special emphasis on foreign trade and commercial policy. It explains the basic positions held by the structuralist and dependentista schools, the shift brought about by the return of neoclassical economics, and the partial departure from orthodoxy made by the New Institutional Economics (NIE). This article concludes with a discussion of how these changes in paradigms were generated and how the evolution in ideas contributes fresh approaches to the historical interpretation of the role of foreign trade in Latin America.