This article seeks to examine empirically several recent hypotheses on the evolution of Latin American urbanization based on data from five countries in the Caribbean Basin. The hypotheses were advanced by the senior author in an earlier article in this journal (Portes 1989). They concern three major aspects discussed in the literature on Latin American cities: changes in urban primacy, spatial polarization within the largest cities, and the urban informal economy as a countercyclical mechanism. The hypotheses contradict much of the scholarly consensus on the character of Latin American urbanization as summarized in a number of publications (Beyer 1967; Hardoy 1975; Portes and Walton 1976; Roberts 1978; Portes and Johns 1989).

Much of the intense debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has focused on the number and kinds of jobs that Mexico could gain and the United States could lose as a result of more extensive economic integration (Faux and Lee 1992; Hufbauer and Schott 1993; Lustig, Bosworth, and Lawrence 1992; Weintraub 1993). This debate has raised the related issue of the nature of Mexico's industrial capability, a topic that predates NAFTA and will remain central regardless of the final outcome of the treaty. This article will explore that capability by focusing on a key question: Is Mexico a potential site for high-tech production or does its comparative advantage lie in labor-intensive low-tech operations?

Few periods in South American history have so captured the imagination and begged the attention of scholars as the Amazon rubber boom. For fifty years, the extraction of wild rubber from the jungles of the Amazon fueled unprecedented economic expansion in the region: per capita incomes in the Brazilian Amazon climbed by 800 percent; the regional population increased by more than 400 percent; urban centers and secondary towns blossomed along the river banks; and the vast Amazonian forest lands were integrated into national political spheres and the international market economy. But when low-cost rubber from British plantations in Asia flooded world markets in the 1910s, rubber prices plummeted, sharply curtailing financial returns from wild rubber extraction. The price shock drove scores of traders and export houses into bankruptcy when they were unable to collect debts that were based on the future value of rubber. Urban real estate prices crashed, and service industries withered along with their customers' incomes. By the early 1920s, the boom was over, and per capita income levels had shrunk to pre-boom levels. Today, nearly a century later, such incomes (in real terms) have yet to return to boom levels in many areas despite massive state investment in Amazonia.

Violence has permeated the Central American landscape for much of its history. Of the Central American republics, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua have suffered most from violence in recent decades, and they are also the countries that have received the most scholarly attention. Recent analyses of violence have emerged from an array of disciplines ranging from ethnohistory to political economy and have focused on subjects as divergent as cold war politics and the problems of land tenure.

How many Mayas are there? That deceptively simple question has seldom met with an unqualified answer, especially in Guatemala, where both question and answer invariably trigger ideological positions that are not easily reconciled. The Columbus Quincentenary in 1992, the year a Maya woman, Rigoberta Menchú, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, offered a timely juncture for reflecting on the matter. In this research note, we chart from the eve of conquest to the present the collapse and eventual recovery of an Indian population that today numbers more than twice as many as it did at European contact, a trajectory of survival experienced by few other Native American populations. The figures we examine are the best we could find, although none of them should be considered definitive. Moreover, they all indicate an Indian presence without ever being clear or consistent as to whom the definition applies. These figures are displayed in table 1. Any figure contemplated must also be appreciated in relation to the sources and methodology of its calculation. Discussion of this issue, however, we have kept to a minimum. Our aim is to summarize the salient features of a complex demographic situation in the hope of shedding light on an enduring Maya presence, one that increasingly challenges traditional notions of what a Guatemalan nation-state should be and on what terms Maya peoples contained within it should live (Cojtí Cuxil 1991; Smith 1990, 1991).