Writing of nineteenth-century Peru, historian Jorge Basadre observed, “To discuss the commercial life of the country is to discuss the role of the foreigner.” Historian Francisco Calderón similarly stated that during the late nineteenth century, “it may be affirmed that various foreign houses with great capital generally dominated Mexican overseas commerce.” A visitor to nineteenth-century Brazil remarked of Rio de Janeiro's foreign trading houses, “these large firms are the main prop of Brazilian commerce; almost every shopkeeper in the country is, more or less directly, dependent on them.” Nor were Peru, Mexico, and Brazil atypical. In almost every Latin American nation, foreigners dominated international trade during the nineteenth century. As the above authorities imply, this domination was not only economic but numerical: the majority of overseas traders in most Latin American nations were aliens (only Colombia constituted a clear-cut exception). Foreign numerical domination among overseas traders may have had a profound effect on Latin American development.

Populism is one of those terms (democracy is another) that is frequently employed in the study of politics and varies in meaning from context to context and from author to author. Thus the term has been invoked in studies of such agrarian-based movements as nineteenth-century agrarian unrest in the United States and the narodniki of prerevolutionary Russia as well as being applied to the largely urban-based populism of Latin America. Moreover, most of those who have sought to characterize the populist parties in Latin America have done so in broad terms that encompass any party or political movement that has both a mass base and a cross-class composition. Torcuato DiTella's well-known definition characterized populism (in Latin America or elsewhere) as “a political movement which enjoys the support of the mass of the working class and/or the peasantry, but which does not result from the autonomous organizational power of either of these two sectors. It is also supported by non-working class sectors upholding an anti-status quo ideology.” Other Latin American students of populism such as Francisco Weffort and Ernesto Laclau, along with most others who have studied the phenomenon, have similarly broad conceptions of it.

Interest in the Cristero insurrection against the Mexican Revolution has continued unabated since the 1960s. Until now all the major published studies have viewed the rebellion as the climactic outcome of the long-standing conflict between church and state in Mexico. By adopting this perspective, these works have deepened knowledge of church-state relations and sharply delineated the composition and development of Catholic and revolutionary factions. At the same time, these studies have offered a wide range of interpretations of the Cristero movement, interpretations that are incompatible with one another.

In Mexican colonial history, the night the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán massacred Cortés's troops, 30 June 1520, is known as la noche triste. In Mexican contemporary history, the night of 2 October 1968 is known as la nueva noche triste, a night that saw the deaths of numerous student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Tlatelolco) in Mexico City. It is also referred to as la noche de Tlatelolco or merely as Tlatelolco '68. Some writers contend that the events at Tlatelolco and the emergence of the student movement of 1968 leading to the confrontation are among the most important occurrences in Mexico since the revolution and that Mexico is profoundly different today because of them. It is therefore not surprising that a significant portion of the Mexican literature written since 1968 reflects in various ways the impact of these events on the Mexican national consciousness. A variety of texts, both fictional and nonfictional, appeared immediately after the incident, and others have continued to appear in contemporary Mexican literature in the ensuing years. These texts either address or refer to the dramatic occurences in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and are collectively known as “Tlatelolco literature.”

Second only to the Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes, the Maya of southeastern Mexico and Guatemala constitute the “most impressive surviving American culture in the Western Hemisphere” (Vogt 1969a, 21). In Mexico the main division within the Maya falls between the highland population living in the state of Chiapas and the lowland group residing in the Yucatán Peninsula (Vogt 1969b). People of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry, known locally as ladinos, make up most of the remaining population. Inspired by the well-known series of investigations of Indian and mestizo fertility in the Andean region, the present study seeks to describe within Mexico the fertility differences between the highland and lowland Maya and their ladino neighbors and, within the limits of the data, to account for the observed differentials.

Economists have long recognized the importance of migration between less developed and more developed countries, and they have devoted considerable attention to analyzing it within the framework of traditional economic theory (Thomas 1954; Kindleberger 1967; Tapinos 1974; Greenwood 1979; Chiswick 1980; Wachter 1980; Stark 1983). But international migration entails not only an economic exchange of work for wages, it is also fundamentally a social process. Repeated human contact inevitably produces ties between persons in sending and receiving societies. Social networks are created that connect individuals in disparate cultural settings, and these ties ultimately change the context within which economic processes are played out. Understanding how such ties develop and change over time is therefore crucial to understanding the phenomenon of international migration.

For the period since independence, Jews do not appear in Latin American history as it is written today. That there are Jews in Latin America we know. But what role have they played in their nations' histories? How have they balanced their inherited tradition with the cultures of the Luso-Hispanic world? What has been the quality of their lives as Jews and as immigrants, nonconformists in societies that exact conformity as the price of acceptance? Most important from the perspective of Latin Americanists, how have Jews been perceived by the majority societies, and what do these perceptions reveal about the nature of these societies?

The following survey assesses the major periodical publications originating in Central America that contain data and information on the economic and social conditions of the countries of the region. The publications are categorized as statistics, newsletters, economic and political reports, journals, and bibliography. The number following each title refers to the publishing organization listed at the end of the text.