This article will attempt to “map” the class structure of Latin American societies on the basis of several recent empirical studies and statistics provided by such organizations as the International Labour Office (ILO), the Regional Employment Program for Latin America (PREALC), and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). This formal exercise should help clarify existing class structures by reducing a large and complex list of designations to a manageable number. On the basis of this classification, changes in class composition and struggles during the last two decades will then be examined. The article is thus divided in two parts, one dealing with class structure and the other with class dynamics.

Spanish colonialism was disastrous for the Indian population of America. By the end of the colonial period, all Indian groups who had come into contact with Europeans were less than half of the size they had been on the eve of Spanish conquest, and some had become extinct. Although the Indian population was reduced in size between 1492 and 1821, the demographic changes experienced by different Indian groups varied considerably. Some groups became extinct at an early date, others experienced a sharp decline followed by a slow recovery, and others continued to decline slowly into the nineteenth century. The uneven distribution of Indians in Latin America today clearly reflects not only their distribution at the time of the Spanish conquest, but also their subsequent demographic histories. It is the aim of this article to identify regional variations in population trends during the colonial period and to suggest factors that may have been responsible for differences in the level of survival of Indian populations.

Immediately after the Sandinista victory of July 1979, the Nicaraguan agrarian reform began with the expropriation of Somoza's agricultural estates and their conversion into state farms. Four years later, the land expropriated under the 1981 Agrarian Reform Law was being distributed to peasant production cooperatives and increasingly to individual peasant farmers. This article will analyze this shift in Sandinista agrarian policy and attempt to explain the factors shaping the course of the Nicaraguan agrarian reform. The focus is on the central policy debate of the first four years: the extent to which the agrarian reform should favor state farms, production cooperatives, or individual holdings. That debate encompassed a series of related issues that will be examined here, including the rhythm of technological modernization, capital-intensive versus labor-intensive investment schemes, the pace and depth of socialist transformation, and the entire question of tactical and strategic alliances within the revolution.

Unlike many developing countries, Colombia has managed since 1958 to avoid both military rule and chronic political instability while being governed by a civilian political regime, a consociational regime. The purpose of this article is to help explain the Colombian political regime's relative longevity by focusing on the behavior of producer groups in Colombia and the associations that represent them. The article asks how important the support of these groups has been to the political regime established in 1958. It also seeks to identify the major patterns of interaction between the groups and different governments and to determine what implications these patterns have had for continued regime support. The article will find significant support for the regime by producer groups, support that is linked to considerable, but not unlimited, capacity for influence. Such regime support has been conditional, rather than consolidated, and derives from favorable access to the state, the regime's overall policy orientation, and its ability to maintain order.

Several aspects of presidential politics in Mexico have become well-established traditions. The president of Mexico is constitutionally limited to a single term of six years. Also, the president is always a member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Although the details of the selection process are not well known, the PRI presidential candidate for the next election is hand-picked by the sitting president. Despite an assured victory for the PRI candidate, the nominee always mounts a barnstorming campaign covering all of Mexico, a procedure that helps to legitimize the domination of the PRI. All of these factors are the “givens” in the equation explaining presidential successions in Mexico. But at least one phenomenon—that of policy changes associated with presidential successions—has been much discussed but never critically tested. Briefly stated, various hypotheses suggest that new presidents significantly alter the policies of their predecessor, that predictable shifts from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other occur as presidents succeed one another, and that even certain patterns in policy innovation are evident within six-year presidential terms in Mexico. All of these hypotheses assume that policy decisions and outcomes are greatly affected by the politics of presidential transitions. The purpose of this article is to initiate a process of examining more rigorously the various propositions relating to policy cycles in Mexican politics.

The last half-dozen years have witnessed an outpouring of Brazilian publications, both rigorous academic studies and popular essays, on women and their roles and activities within Brazilian society. Since the late 1970s, publishers and educated audiences have demonstrated an active interest in works on women that contrasts sharply with the hostile reception accorded Betty Friedan and the Brazilian translation of her Feminine Mystique in 1971. What was once a subject for ridicule has become a timely topic. In 1980 a compendium of the year's nonfiction titles revealed more books listed under the heading of feminism than under biology or botany, and almost as many as under anthropology or cooking.1 The expanding publications on socially determined sex roles have accompanied the development of a small, but active, feminist movement and a general increase in publishing activities in Brazil as the “redemocratization” process gains strength and readers seek more information on previously forbidden topics.

Few studies have focused on the subject of literacy among Mexican Americans in the nineteenth century. Richard Griswold del Castillo's “Literacy in San Antonio, 1850-1860,” stands out as one of the few studies of Mexican American reading and writing skills in nineteenth-century Texas. Its limitations are obvious, however. As a research note, it made no pretense at comprehensiveness. It focused on only one town, and the ten-year span it covered is rather narrow. Griswold del Castillo nevertheless touched upon an often neglected aspect of Tejano history—the immigrant dimension of the Chicano experience.

IESCARIBE (Institutes of Economic and Social Research of the Caribbean Basin) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpolitical, and scientific organization. It is engaged in planning and initiating studies useful to the economic development of the Caribbean Basin. The organization stresses applied research with a policy focus.