Several years ago a single voice, representing the frustration of many of us trying to carry out research on women in Latin America, decried the “lack of core bibliography, methodological apparati, or thematic models” (item 182:125) as major problems besetting the study of women in Latin America. As of 1975, these research hurdles had not been completely overcome, but certainly steps have been and continue to be taken.

An annotated bibliography on women in Spanish America will soon be published and other bibliographic guides of a more limited scope have been or are in the process of being compiled. Both in North America and Latin America, conferences, seminars, and workshops have been held to discuss methodological problems as well as recent research efforts. Associations, committees, coalitions, and centers have organized to promote the cause, lend support, gather and distribute information, and generally represent a growing concern with women's issues.

There has been a great deal of interest recently in problems of computation in developing countries. The Jerusalem Conference on Information Technology held in Israel in 1971 (see Bibliography Key, Jerusalem) was dedicated wholly to the topic, and since then the Rio Symposium on Computer Education for Developing Countries (see Rio), and the IBI-ICC Conference on Informatics in Government (see Florence), both held in 1972, have dealt directly with these problems. Latin America has been intent on benefiting from the application of computer technology to development, but the advent of the technology has not always met with the success that was expected. However, the lack of policy that brought about the random introduction of computers into a country, often sacrificing other equipment or services also critical to its development, is now giving way to more rational procedures. A number of countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico) are presently engaged in detailed studies of their systems and those of other developing nations in order to learn from their experiences. This article is an attempt to aid that research effort by providing an annotated bibliography and other sources of information on computation in the region.

In the aftermath of the 1959 revolutionary triumph there began a massive impelled migration to the United States, paralleled in Cuban history only by the great exodus during the nineteenth-century wars of independence. Close to 500,000 Cubans had migrated to the United States by 1972.

The migration has shifted in size and has occurred intermittently since 1959, a consequence of the turbulent relations between the United States and Cuban governments. From January 1959 to October 1962, regular commercial flights existed between the United States and Cuba. During much of this period, American visas could be obtained in the United States embassy in Havana and in the Santiago de Cuba consulate. However, after diplomatic relations were severed (3 January 1961), the United States government generally waived the visa requirements for Cubans desiring to migrate. During this period, 153,534 Cubans registered with the Miami Cuban Refugee Center arld close to 200,000 had arrived in the United States by the time of the 1962 October missile crisis.

It would be a truism to state that for the Latin American universities, as well as those of the Third World, questions of excellence or equality can be resolved by accepting the idea that equality also means a lack of excellence (quality). In other words, we are dealing with universities that operate in countries where the process of democracy is still precarious and consequently the universities respond in a way that produces or legitimizes dominant classes. With regard to the qualitative level, the first duty is not to create or disseminate knowledge but rather to create functions in the Weberian sense of the word. Universities of the Third World are the germinators of new classes; but in general, in small societies, the possible social participation of those “new” classes is of a limited and elitist nature. The university does not play an intellectual role but rather a social role, in terms of creating and legitimizing its operative functions within a context where professional characterization is foremost instead of knowledge. Thus, in a Third World society, although it is important for an individual to obtain a university degree, it does not necessarily mean that he will also possess the knowledge and skills that this implies. The intellectual knowledge gained through university education may well be effectively divorced from the social function.

“Statistics are the poetry of Latin America” was Frank Tannenbaum's discreet version of “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This is a widespread enough view, even now, when numbers are fashionable, and a fair number of my colleagues suggest any series will do to illustrate their well-conceived articles. A few skeptics refuse to go in for misplaced fashion. A Mexican economist, working in the statistics in the boondocks, said he was told to apply a correction coefficient to his numbers, to make them consistent with his boss's earlier reports. He quit, and became an essayist. An Argentine economist said that when his division head wanted to show growth, the investigators were sent to big firms; slumps were reported by surveying the output of small firms.

Research in social mobility in postcolonial Argentina has not benefitted from the sweeping changes in methodology and content found in histories of other periods and areas. The question of social mobility receives close attention in these studies partly because it offers such a variety of research opportunities and is measurable in several forms. Usually, the laboratory for these recent studies is the city—the place with the greatest opportunities for self-improvement. Since the nineteenth century, the city has become the locus of concentration for countless native and foreign migrants. With the appropriate data, urban social historians have investigated their spatial and economic dimensions of mobility. In addition, one of the bases of social change most often studied is the shifting within the occupational structure. The ties between occupation and social ranking are intimate. “Thus,” writes Michael Katz, “to trace the movements of a man from occupation to occupation is, to a considerable extent, to trace his vertical movement within social space; the sum of those movements determines the patterns and rate of social mobility, the degree of openness, within a society.”

Latin Americanists commonly stress the traditional cultural and philosophical differences between the region they study and the United States. A frequent contention holds that such historical contrasts persist to the present. For example, Howard J. Wiarda asserts, “Latin America … remains paternalistic, hierarchical, authoritarian, Catholic, corporate, personalist, and elitist to its core.” In contrast, the United States is presumably more egalitarian, Protestant, and impersonal than her southern-hemispheric neighbors.