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).

As Latin America has moved through the second half of the twentieth century, both the public and private sectors have required increasing levels of technological skills and specialized expertise. In the public sector, this necessity has occasioned the rise to prominence of a sector known in Latin America as profesionales y tcnicos. This emergent elite has assumed a significant role in shaping and implementing public policy because its members command skills critical to the functioning of modernizing technological society. As a result, participation by professionals and tcnicos has become central to bureaucratic efficiency, economic development, and the manipulation of symbols that reinforce political legitimacy. Yet the political role of professionals and tcnicos has been little explored, and direct relationships between professional elites and national parties, often central to the democratization of developing nations, have received minimal attention.

Latin Americanists have devoted considerable attention over the past two decades to the relationship between economic growth and social inequality. A bibliography of the articles and books on the consequences of development for income, class, and gender would surely run to many pages. Yet within that impressive literature, much less attention has been given to the ways that structural changes have altered racial inequalities. Scarcer still are empirical analyses that document the manner in which changes over time have affected women and men within different racial groups.

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?

In June of 1990, the mountains of the Ecuadorian Sierra provided the setting for a spectacular display of protest. For an entire week, tens of thousands of Indian peasants stopped delivering farm produce to the towns and blocked the main highways, picketed on the roadsides and marched en masse in regional capitals. In some places, demonstrators seized the offices of government agencies, and in others, localized skirmishes reportedly broke out where landowners and Indian communities had been embroiled in unresolved land disputes.

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.

Jauja, rinconcito de mi valle.

Andean folk song, Juan Bolvar

The military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) coined the phrase, Campesino, el patrn no comer ms de tu pobreza! (Peasant, the patrn will feed no more on your poverty). Clearly a favorite slogan of the self-described Peruvian Revolution, this saying appeared frequently on posters and in newspaper notices. Although linked to Velasco's agrarian reform program and peasant organizations like the Confederacin Nacional Agraria (CNA), which emerged from the plan, this aphorism was said to have originated with Jos Ga-Meja, La reforma agraria en el Per (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1980). I take the agrarian reform process into consideration because of its impact on my generation, which experienced all of its effects intensely.

The Catholic clergy and the military have played crucial roles in Mexican history yet have been largely ignored in recent twentieth-cenury scholarship. The military received some attention in the early post-revolutionary period because it was intertwined with political leadership, but religious elites and the Catholic Church, which were separate from the state and suppressed by it, have not been analyzed. As a rule, cohesive leadership groups in Mexico with values differing from politicians, strong institutional structures, and autonomy from the state have rarely been examined, especially in relationship to the state and politics in general. Conversely, the greater a group's ties to the Mexican political establishment, as measured by exchanges between leadership, the more scholars have learned about that group. Whereas intellectuals, entrepreneurs, military officers, and even opposition politicians share some ties with the state, the Catholic Church has no direct links, and its contemporary leaders, goals, and institutional structures remain relatively unknown and little understood.

Carolina Maria de Jess was a fiercely proud black Brazilian woman who lived in a So Paulo favela with her three illegitimate children (each with a different father). She had learned to read and write by continuing to study on her own after only two years of primary school. In 1958 fragments of her diary came to the attention of an enterprising journalist, Audlio Dantas, who helped her get it published. For a brief period, Carolina Maria de Jess became an international celebrity as the author of the best-selling book in Brazilian publishing history. For many reasons, however, Carolina fell from favor: the rise of a military dictatorship in 1964, which led to an accompanying reaction against social criticism, and especially the ways in which she handled her fame and related to the press and the literary elite. Within a few years, she was forced to move back into the favela and scavenge for a living. A brief flurry of publicity in 1969 about her fallen condition prompted a slight improvement in her circumstances, but she was soon forgotten again. Carolina died in 1977, on the verge of indigence. Her complete life story has never been told, and most Brazilians today are unaware that a black favelada in the 1960s became the symbol (to foreigners, at least) of the struggle to rise above poverty. Most Brazilians neither read her books nor consider them noteworthy. Evidently, the author of what The New York Times called a rarely matched essay on the meaning and the feeling of hunger, degradation, and want touched no nerve in the Brazilian sensibility.

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.

En 1931 un diplomtico alemn destac las razones debido a las cuales su pas estaba interesado en prestar asistencia militar al extranjero en los siguientes trminos:

Del empleo de instructores militares en servicios extranjeros se espera, en general, dos provechos: uno no material y otro material. Aqul reside en la expectativa de alcanzar, mediante las tareas de organizacin y enseanza en base a preceptos alemanes, una cierta influencia entre los militares en favor de Alemania. Una ventaja de esta naturaleza no debe subestimarse, sobre todo en Suramrica, donde la Fuerza Armada suele ser un factor importante en la poltica interna. La utilidad material reside en el supuesto que con instructores alemanes tambin el armamento y equipamiento del ejrcito extranjero se realizar conforme al modelo alemn, y consiguientemente, los pedidos se realizarn en Alemania beneficiando a su industria y comercio.

Las traducciones de citas al castellano en el texto y las notas son del autor. Los nombres de los archivos se han abreviado del siguiente modo: Bundesarchiv-Militrarchiv, Bund.-Militarch; Politisches Archiv des Auswrtigen Amtes, Pol. A. des AA. Las Memorias del Ministerio de Guerra y Colonizacin de Bolivia se han abreviado con Memoria.

These contrasting pronouncements on Christopher Columbus's transatlantic navigation in 1492 crystalize the extreme division of opinion that characterized the recent quincentennial. The five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage inspired among other things a world's fair, several replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, two feature films, and an opera. Commemoration of the event also inspired, in time-honored tradition, the publication of thousands of works dedicated to this major event. Thus although publishing technology is speeding along toward electronic rather than printed images, the fifth centennial of Columbus's voyage has been marked most significantly by the rolling of the presses.

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).

The guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) has been raised and consumed throughout the Andean subregion since before the arrival of Spaniards in America. According to sixteenth-century native chronicler Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, the Incas and the indigenous peoples who preceded them used the guinea pig, or cuy, for ceremonial purposes (Guarnan Poma de Ayala 1980, 55). Hundreds of years later, on the brink of the twenty-first century, mass production of cuys outside their native habitat is turning these animals into an exchange commodity that is generating many economic activities.

Activities commemorating (positively or negatively) the Columbian quincentenary have moved the story of this encounter out of the libraries, off the dusty shelves of nineteenth-century museums, and back into the political arena where it began. In the United States and Canada, as in Latin America, the search for a usable history that would include Native Americans has prompted reassessment and revision of the historiography of Indian-white relations. This research note will review some of the more important ethnohistorical issues raised in North America and comment on possible comparative studies for the Southern Cone.

The principal facts that direct the historic life of a country lie in the rulers who have served during different political eras. One can be sure that they are the protagonists of history because each of them creates with his or her actions chapters that will be recounted in many volumes through the years.

Gilberto Valenzuela González

While many researchers who have worked in Guatemala in the past decade would take issue with the perspective on the past reflected in Gilberto Valenzuela's statement, few would deny the importance of the collection of documents he began. In an era when history was the history of kings and battles, presidents and laws, one family's tradition of collecting any and all documents on Guatemala gave rise to a remarkable collection. The Sección Valenzuela of the Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala offers today the basis for an in-depth reconstruction of Guatemalan history during the last century and a half.