The encounter between Atahualpa and the Spaniards in Cajamarca Plaza on 16 November 1532 provided the dramatic moment that has been highlighted in narratives of the conquest of Peru by generations of historians, from Francisco de Jerez and Titu Cusi Yupanqui to William Prescott. More recently, James Lockhart's highly influential Spanish Peru (1968) and its companion, The Men of Cajamarca (1972), have defined the striking encounter at Cajamarca as the starting point for understanding the conquest history of Peru. Edward Said and Peter Hulme, however, have suggested that within the genre of conquest narrative the conflict among different versions of the same event mainly revolves around the issue of where the story should start. If so, readers are impelled to take the designated beginning of the history of Spanish Peru—the events at Cajamarca—as not merely a dramatic framing device for telling history but as a choice implying an ideological understanding of the Spanish role in Peru. In recent American historiography, this choice of beginning with the events at Cajamarca has become a means of telling a classic tale of upward social mobility for Spaniards, one that starts with the capture of treasure at Cajamarca.

Since the mid-1970s, tens of thousands of persons in three out of the five Central American countries have revolted against their governments or fought to repress such rebellions. These conflicts have cost more than a quarter of a million lives and created more than two million internal and external refugees. In 1979 a bloody insurrection toppled Nicaragua's Somoza regime. El Salvador's crippling civil war has escalated and reescalated but remains stalemated. In Guatemala since 1980, brutal counterinsurgency warfare, pro-regime terror, and political reform have failed to eliminate a resurgent guerrilla rebellion. Yet while these countries have rent themselves with political violence, their neighbors Honduras and Costa Rica have in general remained politically peaceful.

The subject of Central American migration encompasses a broad range of experiences that challenge traditional approaches to migration studies. Past interpretations of migration have tended to be based on mutually exclusive typologies or to focus on certain dimensions of migration while excluding others. Thus migration could be internal or international, cyclical, temporary, or permanent, voluntary or involuntary, economically or politically motivated (the latter issue often treated in a separate literature on refugees and exiles), motivated by “push” factors in the country of origin or “pull” factors in the receiving country, or the result of individual decisions or underlying structural conditions.

One of the most urgent issues in contemporary Latin America is the popular struggle against rural poverty. Because Latin American states have failed to alleviate rural impoverishment, the poor have undertaken to solve their own problems. One fruitful way of improving their conditions has proved to be forming grass-roots peasant organizations outside state auspices. This approach, however, can bear fruit only under a democratic regime or in states that provide some political space in which peasants can act without being crushed.