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.

Since 1976 profound changes have occurred in Brazilian national society, changes that have implications for the tribal populations in Brazil as well as for those conducting anthropological and linguistic research among these populations. Many of these changes can be linked to the government policy of abertura (opening). This policy was begun implicitly under the regime of Ernesto Geisel (1974-79) and has been continued more explicitly by the current President, João Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo, who is scheduled to remain in office until 1985. Perhaps equally as important at the infrastructural level have been the global economic changes that were largely linked to earlier increases in oil prices. These steep increases have severely shaken the Brazilian economy, causing annual inflation rates in 1980, 1981, and 1982 of approximately 100 percent.

This article will attempt to “map” the class structure of Latin American societies on the basis of several recent empirical studies and statistics provided by such organizations as the International Labour Office (ILO), the Regional Employment Program for Latin America (PREALC), and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). This formal exercise should help clarify existing class structures by reducing a large and complex list of designations to a manageable number. On the basis of this classification, changes in class composition and struggles during the last two decades will then be examined. The article is thus divided in two parts, one dealing with class structure and the other with class dynamics.

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.

Spanish colonialism was disastrous for the Indian population of America. By the end of the colonial period, all Indian groups who had come into contact with Europeans were less than half of the size they had been on the eve of Spanish conquest, and some had become extinct. Although the Indian population was reduced in size between 1492 and 1821, the demographic changes experienced by different Indian groups varied considerably. Some groups became extinct at an early date, others experienced a sharp decline followed by a slow recovery, and others continued to decline slowly into the nineteenth century. The uneven distribution of Indians in Latin America today clearly reflects not only their distribution at the time of the Spanish conquest, but also their subsequent demographic histories. It is the aim of this article to identify regional variations in population trends during the colonial period and to suggest factors that may have been responsible for differences in the level of survival of Indian populations.

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.

Todo genuino movimiento literario, todo amanecer, toda ruptura, ha tenido indefectiblemente su primera exteriorización en las hojas provocativas de una revista. La revista descubre, polemiza; el escritor de revistas anticipa, es el guerrillero madrugado, el pionero que zampa terrenos intactos. La revista es vitrina y es cartel. El libro ya es en cierto modo un ataúd, quizás más duradero y más perfecto, pero menos jugoso y vital.

Immediately after the Sandinista victory of July 1979, the Nicaraguan agrarian reform began with the expropriation of Somoza's agricultural estates and their conversion into state farms. Four years later, the land expropriated under the 1981 Agrarian Reform Law was being distributed to peasant production cooperatives and increasingly to individual peasant farmers. This article will analyze this shift in Sandinista agrarian policy and attempt to explain the factors shaping the course of the Nicaraguan agrarian reform. The focus is on the central policy debate of the first four years: the extent to which the agrarian reform should favor state farms, production cooperatives, or individual holdings. That debate encompassed a series of related issues that will be examined here, including the rhythm of technological modernization, capital-intensive versus labor-intensive investment schemes, the pace and depth of socialist transformation, and the entire question of tactical and strategic alliances within the revolution.

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.”

State corporatist representation of organized labor interests has been an enduring characteristic of modern Latin American politics, transcending differences in national ideologies and political regimes. In recent years, much attention has been devoted to analyzing various corporatist experiments that have emerged in the region and elsewhere. As a result, it is now possible to distinguish among corporatist systems that are state or societal, Ibero-Catholic, traditional, or modern “rationalist,” inclusionary or exclusionary, bifrontal or segmental; and analysts have moved on to “disaggregate” the structure of corporatism in a variety of political contexts.

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.

Unlike many developing countries, Colombia has managed since 1958 to avoid both military rule and chronic political instability while being governed by a civilian political regime, a consociational regime. The purpose of this article is to help explain the Colombian political regime's relative longevity by focusing on the behavior of producer groups in Colombia and the associations that represent them. The article asks how important the support of these groups has been to the political regime established in 1958. It also seeks to identify the major patterns of interaction between the groups and different governments and to determine what implications these patterns have had for continued regime support. The article will find significant support for the regime by producer groups, support that is linked to considerable, but not unlimited, capacity for influence. Such regime support has been conditional, rather than consolidated, and derives from favorable access to the state, the regime's overall policy orientation, and its ability to maintain order.

No issue in Mexican politics received more attention in selecting the 1982 presidential candidate than the role of the technocrat. The technocrat's influence on the Mexican state has had widespread consequences, such as changing political recruitment patterns, altering the socialization of political leaders, shifting career channels essential to advancement within the political system, and most significantly, causing adjustments in the stability of the political system. Crucial to any discussion of the changing role played by the technocrat in Mexican politics is a clear understanding of the term technocrat. This essay therefore will discuss conceptualizations of the technocrat, attempt a working definition of the term in the Mexican context, provide empirical evidence as to the presence of technocrats in Mexican politics, and suggest possible consequences for the political system.

Una de las cuestiones interesantes de las guerras de liberación y las revoluciones sociales del Tercer Mundo es que las luchas por profundas transformaciones sociales e, incluso, por un horizonte socialista, no tienen como fuerza principal a un partido proletario ni a organizaciones donde la clase obrera constituye el componente principal. El protagonista fundamental de estos movimientos es, antes bien, un complejo conjunto de clases y grupos populares—artesanos, campesinos, semiproletarios, jóvenes, pobres de la ciudad y del campo—donde la clase obrera no es un componente mayoritario. Este perfil social propio de las revoluciones y guerras de liberación del Tercer Mundo obedece en definitiva al modo en que el capitalismo se desarrolló en estos países, articulándose a formas no capitalistas de producción y circulación, subordinándolas pero sin eliminarlas plenamente.

Several aspects of presidential politics in Mexico have become well-established traditions. The president of Mexico is constitutionally limited to a single term of six years. Also, the president is always a member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Although the details of the selection process are not well known, the PRI presidential candidate for the next election is hand-picked by the sitting president. Despite an assured victory for the PRI candidate, the nominee always mounts a barnstorming campaign covering all of Mexico, a procedure that helps to legitimize the domination of the PRI. All of these factors are the “givens” in the equation explaining presidential successions in Mexico. But at least one phenomenon—that of policy changes associated with presidential successions—has been much discussed but never critically tested. Briefly stated, various hypotheses suggest that new presidents significantly alter the policies of their predecessor, that predictable shifts from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other occur as presidents succeed one another, and that even certain patterns in policy innovation are evident within six-year presidential terms in Mexico. All of these hypotheses assume that policy decisions and outcomes are greatly affected by the politics of presidential transitions. The purpose of this article is to initiate a process of examining more rigorously the various propositions relating to policy cycles in Mexican politics.

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.

The last half-dozen years have witnessed an outpouring of Brazilian publications, both rigorous academic studies and popular essays, on women and their roles and activities within Brazilian society. Since the late 1970s, publishers and educated audiences have demonstrated an active interest in works on women that contrasts sharply with the hostile reception accorded Betty Friedan and the Brazilian translation of her Feminine Mystique in 1971. What was once a subject for ridicule has become a timely topic. In 1980 a compendium of the year's nonfiction titles revealed more books listed under the heading of feminism than under biology or botany, and almost as many as under anthropology or cooking.1 The expanding publications on socially determined sex roles have accompanied the development of a small, but active, feminist movement and a general increase in publishing activities in Brazil as the “redemocratization” process gains strength and readers seek more information on previously forbidden topics.

This article represents an attempt to understand the changes that have taken place in the traditional vision of colonial society in New Spain as shaped by past historiography, drawing on works published between 1970 and 1981. This essay was not conceived as a bibliographic summary that would examine themes, review hypotheses, and evaluate the sources used by different authors. Instead, my analysis will give greater importance to the topics that have captured the attention of scholars than to their published works, it will emphasize the scientific community rather than particular scholars, and it will focus more on those themes that in my view characterize the social processes of New Spain than on the central themes of current historiography.