Social scientists generally present the conclusions of their studies without describing how their ideas may have changed in the course of doing research. They also rarely discuss the impact they have on the persons they study or the ethical problems of research. I will address both of these issues, focusing on my experiences doing research on Mexican urban poor. In addition, I will describe how and why my conceptual framework changed during the study and raise some general questions about the relationship between theory and methods and the types of moral dilemmas faced by researchers, who often are neither value-free nor politically neutral.

No one with even a passing acquaintance with the literature on Mexican society, not to mention the rest of Spanish America, can fail to be impressed by the frequent use of the term mestizo. Despite its ubiquity in the writings of social scientists, however, the concept of the mestizo is customarily employed in a vague fashion and usually left undefined. This is especially evident in the work of anthropologists, who for many years have been preoccupied with defining the Mexican Indian but have rarely focused their analytical powers on the mestizo. The term itself has been used rather loosely to refer to a certain group of people who presumably comprise a majority of the Mexican population, a cultural pattern shared by these people and other Latin Americans, and even a personality type.

My experience in teaching reference and research tools in the field of Latin American studies began in 1966, when I was a researcher and bibliographer at the UCLA Latin American Center. I was approached by approximately fifteen doctoral candidates in Latin American history who had completed all of their course work and needed orientation in beginning dissertation research. During the two months that followed, I met this group weekly for a two-hour period. I began by introducing them to the terminology (including definitions of the various types of reference tools) of library science. The second meeting was devoted to library research in general.

A realização deste trabalho correspondeu à necessidade de reunir informações básicas e fundamentais sobre os arquivos privados no Rio de Janeiro. Seu objetivo consiste em elaborar um mapeamento de fontes documentais referentes ao Período Repúblicano da História do Brasil visando focalizar principalmente a etapa contemporânea iniciada com a Revolução de 1930. Este levantamento pretende basicamente fornecer pistas ao pesquisador para a localização de fontes primárias no Rio de Janeiro. A inexistência de critérios rígidos de organização, em muitas instituições, dificultou uma sistematização perfeita dos dados relevantes para descrição dos acervos. Por isso, optou-se por apresentar as informações possíveis, refletindo assim as condições oferecidas ao pesquisador para a consulta de documentos.

The North Central Council of Latin Americanists grew out of the Wisconsin Council of Latin Americanists which was formed during the 1966–67 year by scholars from various colleges and universities in Wisconsin. A group of nine met originally on 25 March 1966 at Stevens Point, Wisconsin to determine whether there was enough interest on their campuses to warrant drafting plans for a statewide association. This group, plus other Latin Americanists from the state, met again at Wisconsin State University—Whitewater on 16 December 1966. They formed an executive committee and charged it with drafting a charter for the new organization; they also set the first general meeting for Spring 1967 at Wisconsin State University—Platteville.

The Library of Congress began to gather contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian literature recorded on magnetic tape, when the Uruguayan poet Emilio Oribe passed through Washington in 1942. He recorded a then recently written poem entitled “Oda al cielo de la nueva Atlántida” dedicated to Archibald MacLeish, the poet who was Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944. A year later Andrés Eloy Blanco of Venezuela recorded “Píntame angelitos negros” and six other compositions. Around 1944 the Library set out to formulate a program to record North American poets reading selections from their own works. The Library's Hispanic Foundation (now called the Hispanic Division) decided to assemble a similar Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape, heeding the words of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: “Poetry hushed and inert in books fades away and dies. The air not the printed word is its natural home. Recordings serve it well.”

Although the history of Latin American studies in New England is long and luminous, from Prescott to Haring, Morison, and numerous more recent lights, the nucleus for the organization of the New England Council was not formed until 1969. The organization of NECLAS was related both to the mushrooming growth of Latin American studies at New England colleges and universities and nationwide during the 1960s, and to the emergence of the larger private and state universities in the region as relatively new and major centers of research and teaching on Latin American affairs.

Un lector asiduo de ciertos géneros de la literatura sobre el reciente desarrollo económico y social de Latinoamérica podría rematar en la conclusión de que “aquí no ha pasado nada,” Su aserto descansaría en el examen de algunos problemas y expresiones centrales de la temática regional de los últimos lustros. Ejemplo ilustrativo: la infatigable presencia de restricciones externas e internas que militan en conjunto contra el desarrollo: segmentos de ellas mudaron tal vez énfasis e importancia, pero el escenario, los personajes y el guión permanecen en general sin alteración. Continúan, en otras palabras, las oscilaciones caprichosas del comercio exterior, la fragilidad financiera, la debilidad-ingreso del mercado interior, el subempleo y la pobreza crítica, las rigideces institucionales.

In Brazil, as in Spanish America, poor public libraries and rich private libraries are mutually reinforcing phenomena. The researcher who must rely on public institutions usually spends much of his or her available time scurrying from one library to another in (often fruitless) search of materials. To the extent that one needs theoretical works and foreign publications, rather than works about, and published in, Brazil, the chore becomes more onerous.

Desde al año 1971 estamos organizando lo que actualmente se llama el Archivo del Fuero Agrario. Esta institución fue conocida antes con el nombre de Centro de Documentación Agraria y ahora, de manera resumida, se le dice simplemente Archivo Agrario. Desde el año mencionado un grupo de investigadores científicos sociales e historiadores percibieron que con el proceso de Reforma Agraria (Decreto Ley 17716) en las haciendas que iban siendo expropiadas quedaban un conjunto de documentos que debían ser centralizados en un local. Fue de esta manera como se empezó a reunir los documentos de empresas agrícolas o ganaderas. De esto han pasado ya seis años y se puede decir que ya hay un importante archivo que facilita la comprensión del mundo rural peruano desde el interior de las unidades de producción. Esto es algo así como penetrar dentro de un organismo y comprender, desde su interior, el funcionamiento de sus distintos sistemas. El Archivo Agrario es un caso único en América Latina y en el mundo. Hay casos particulares de documentos muy similar a los que tenemos en el archivo que han sido utilizados por investigadores sociales, pero en ninguna parte hay concentrado el volumen del material documental del tipo al que nos estamos refiriendo. Esto es lo que tenemos ya construido. Y no solamente se trata de un repositorio de documentos sino que se trata de algo más que ello. Se está creando un centro donde colaboramos en orientar las investigaciones históricas agrarias y donde los que trabajamos ahí hacemos historia del mundo rural. Estamos creando una institución donde también hay organizados mapoteca, hemeroteca, fototeca, todo ello del ambiente rural peruano.

Se procurará deslindar algunas significaciones que cobija la debatida noción de filosofía latinoamericana; sin ánimo de suponer por ello que se esté frente a un asunto que, al estilo neopositivista, pueda disolverse bajo el mero análisis lingüístico. Por el contrario, se trata de un problema que elude las divisorias tajantes, tal como la naturaleza que avanza y se entremezcla más allá de las marcaciones cartográficas. Al mismo tiempo, se ilustrarán los aspectos acotados, aunque posponiendo el examen de sus tan desiguales grados de importancia reflexiva y pragmática.

This note examines the level and structure of construction costs in Latin America in the late sixties, comparing them with those obtained in the early sixties by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). The cost trends over this period are then examined.

Without exception, all studies of Caribbean industrial relations and the attendant conflicts have either been descriptive historical accounts of the emergence of labor movements and trade union parties or institutional analyses of the systems of collective bargaining developed in the postwar period. While these studies have been important in documenting industrial relations practices and the political dimension of Caribbean trade unionism, they lack both a rigorous comparative frame as well as a commitment to the measuring and testing of explanatory propositions. As a result, relevant behavioral data in this field remain crude, unanalyzed, and largely uncollected. Although the traditional emphases on historical, political, and institutional perspectives are desirable and important, particularly in view of the major social and political changes that both shaped and were influenced by the labor movement in the region, other perspectives are now necessary in coming to grips with the difficult task of comprehending and explaining patterns and variations in the relations between labor and capital in the Caribbean. These perspectives can only evolve through self-conscious attempts at both theory building and comparative analysis of quantitative data. This study represents a modest step in this direction that poses rather than answers some basic conceptual and theoretical questions, in view of the limits of the available data.