Roberto González Echevarría's recent article in LARR, “The Dictatorship of Rhetoric/The Rhetoric of Dictatorship: Carpentier, García Márquez and Roa Bastos,” though elegantly written and full of ideas, seems to me to have confused almost every issue it raises and to have evaded other equally important issues rather than confront them. The persistent, largely unspoken promise of his text is that it will illuminate both history and literature by separating and contrasting them, whereas in fact it surrenders completely to the latest version of the literary critic's traditional means of escape. Where previously it used to be said that history was the realm of mundane reality and literature the realm of the imagination, critics now tell us that the twentieth century has proved that all reality is fictive and that the borders between reality and what used to be called fiction are impossible to draw, all men's actions and reactions forming and being formed from a seamless web of invisibly structured discourse. This is evidently RGE's view, and the influence of French structuralism is apparent in his text.

It has often been observed that “Where power is, women are not.” Noting women's virtual absence from the realm of conventional politics, Jane Jaquette urged scholars in 1980 to look beyond elections in studying female political participation in Latin America. Arguing for an “expanded notion of the political,” she called for research on female participation within different social classes, especially their role in “informal networks, … clientele linkages, … strike activities, urban land seizures and barrio politics”. This article employs a community study method to investigate women's grass-roots participation in politics and labor mobilization following World War II in the region of greater São Paulo known as ABC (named after the municipios of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano).

This study addresses the provincial origins and role of the reactionary party that legislated the reconstruction of the Brazilian monarchy, perhaps Latin America's most stable nineteenth-century political regime. The study locates the party in terms of regional power, taking into account social, economic, and political factors. It analyzes the party's ideology in the historical context of the Regency (1831–1840) and its immediate aftermath, an era of destabilization, social war, and secessionism. The study also demonstrates how the party mobilized partisan support nationally to consolidate party and state power, the unexpected impact of patronage, and the increasingly autonomous quality of state power over time.

This article studies how the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and, more generally, neoliberalism rearticulate the opposition between civilization and barbarism, and the vision of the world that underlies it. During a time in which many intellectuals have embraced a relativistic notion of culture that makes judgment problematic, neoliberals embrace this clear-cut value hierarchy with complete abandonment. In fact, one cannot but be surprised by the ease with which Vargas Llosa makes pronouncements based on the identification of individuals, groups, and political movements with either civilization or barbarism. However, the fact is that his reference to this dichotomy differs substantially from its nineteenth-century version and its colonial precedents. The implicitly racial hierarchization proposed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other nineteenth-century thinkers has been replaced in Vargas Llosa's writings by one based on cultural and social values.

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.