Latin America, more than other regions of the capitalist world, has been characterized by persistently high concentration of income and wealth and by limited trickling-down of the material gains from output growth. This situation was an enduring characteristic of “modern economic growth” in Latin America during its era of crecimiento hacia afuera, from the mid-nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has remained so, with some modification, during the subsequent half-century, despite industrialization, rapid urbanization, the spread of education, and other conquistas sociales in many of the countries, and despite the faster economic-growth rates since World War II. Indeed, a further rise of income concentration accompanying that postwar growth is statistically detectable in many of the countries. By combining pre-World War II data with plausible inference, one can also deduce a still longer-run rising-concentration trend from the mid-nineteenth century, with oscillations downward in periods of slow growth and upward during fast growth periods. The result in most countries has been a slow improvement at best for the lowest 60 percent of the population in the more measurable and less ethnocentric dimensions of that amorphous concept, the quality of life.

La importancia y el valor de las revistas literarias en el desarrollo de cualquier literatura es algo que no necesita justificación. Son ellas la bitácora y el recuento fidedigno de un momento, de un período y, a veces, la fuente generadora y receptora del fenómeno literario. Sin acudir a ellas, difícilmente podrían medirse y apreciarse en su dimensión más auténtica e inmediata el clima intelectual y la circunstancia históricosocial en que se originan muchas de las obras literarias. Dan prueba fehaciente de ello los diversos estudios al respecto, especialmente los dos libros de Boyd G. Carter acerca del papel desempeñado por las revistas literarias en la historia de la literatura hispanoamericana.

The Peruvian military government of 1968-80 defied the expectations and categorizations derived from academic work on the character and performance of its counterparts, past and present, in other Latin American countries.1 A key anomaly is the fact that labor and the left were not eclipsed, but instead emerged strengthened by the period of military rule in their mobilizing capacity and electoral presence.2 The purpose of this article is to explain the legacy of the military government for labor and the left by elucidating the processes that led to their strengthening, with particular emphasis on the policies of the Velasco regime.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Chile prided herself on a century-old tradition of social studies. Beginning with the so-called generation of 1842 and with the support of the University of Chile (established in 1843), some of the most distinguished Chilean minds devoted themselves to the study of Chilean society and its evolution. Hernán Godoy Urzua (1967) classifies this intellectual production in six groups: social thinking of the nineteenth century, studies belonging to traditional social disciplines, writings on the “social question,” novels with social content, modern social essays, and writings with sociological intent.

In May 1975, Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, noted scholar of the Mayan language and culture, was meeting with a group of graduate students; suddenly he looked at his watch and said: “In a few minutes I must go to the dictionary.”

Only then did I become aware of a project that, after six years of intensive work, would result in one of the most valuable contributions to the field of Mayan linguistics in the twentieth century. Each weekday at four p.m., a group of highly talented specialists met in a small building in Mérida to labor on the dictionary. The team worked with a sense of dedication and purpose, and those of us fortunate enough to visit the project became filled with a feeling of excitement. The resulting publication, issued in January 1980, was the Diccionario Maya Cordemex: Maya-Español, Español-Maya (Mérida, Yucatán: Ediciones Cordemex, 1980). It is not the first dictionary of the Mayan language, but is in many ways the culmination of all previous studies relating to the subject.

The Programa de Estudios de Historia Económica y Social Americana (PEHESA) was established in 1977 in association with the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración (CISEA) by a group of Argentine historians committed to the study of social history. This field has not had too fortunate a fate in our country; political, academic, and institutional reasons have condemned it to the fringe.

Trapped in the nineteenth-century view of the humanities until the 1950s, our academic world produced traditional history based upon empirical study of political events and of the institutional development of the country. With few exceptions, history was the history of great public figures or at best, of successful enterprises carried out by distinguished members of society. Yet historical works were not produced only in the academic world. Ideologues from different sectors of society looked to the past in search of arguments, models, and stereotypes, and although they did not write an alternative history, in some cases they did raise new issues or question old assumptions.

El Instituto Ibero-Americano de Berlín fue fundado en el año 1930 como centro de enlace científico y cultural, con miras a fomentar la continuación de la expansión socioeconómica de Alemania hacia los países latinoamericanos e ibéricos. Incentiva primordial para este propósito fue la adquisición de una vasta biblioteca particular y un archivo de documentos históricos por intermedio del Ministerio Prusiano de Artes, Ciencias, y Educación Popular. Propietario de esta biblioteca y del archivo fue el argentino Ernesto Quesada (1858-1934). Las partes más antiguas del Fondo, recolectadas por su padre Vicente G. Quesada (1830-1913) a partir de mediados del siglo XIX, pudieron ser completadas y ampliadas constantemente por él mismo. La colección, que en total abarcó unos ochenta y dos mil volúmenes y legajos,1 constituye aún hoy en día, a pesar de las pérdidas sufridas a finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, una excelente base documental para investigaciones sobre la historia moderna de la Argentina. Las monografías, revistas y diarios de la antigua Biblioteca Quesada hace muchos años pudieron ser integrados en su totalidad a los fondos bibliotecarios temáticamente clasificados del Instituto Ibero-Americano y, sin haber sufrido mayores pérdidas durante los años de guerra, fue posible conservarlos hasta la fecha. En cambio, aquellas partes del Archivo Quesada que hacia fines de la guerra fueron depositadas en la hacienda Hohenlandin cerca de Angermünde (hoy RDA) fueron presa de la destrucción.2 Para poder precisar más ciertamente la importancia del Fondo Quesada para el historiador, se describirán brevemente en este aporte primero, la biografía de los dos Quesada, y segundo, las existencias que aún se conservan del Archivo Quesada, y las consistentes en diarios de la Argentina y sus países vecinos.