Historians have long complained that research on the regional and local impact of the Mexican Revolution has been eclipsed by macro-level analysis of national politics, including studies of formal institutions (the army, the Church, political parties) and biographies of “great men.” Very few of the global studies of the Revolution published in English have paid more than token attention to its regional complexity. It is ironic, for example, that until recently the most detailed, if idiosyncratic, treatment of regional politics in the 1920s was provided by Ernest Gruening's Mexico and Its Heritage (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1928). Its devastatingly drawn picture of violence at the local level was richly documented from official archives opened to the author by the Calles government in an effort to discredit its enemies. More recently, Jean Meyer's study of the period 1910–40 has provided historians with an analysis that offers both a general characterization of the revolutionary process and a narrative that is informed throughout by a keen appreciation of the Revolution's regional and local variations. Another particular merit of this and other work by Meyer is its iconoclastic vigor and insistence on viewing the Revolution as an event that deepened Mexico's dependence upon international capitalism, providing revolutionary leaders with abundant opportunities for personal enrichment.

The history of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 has suffered from the emphasis placed upon personalities and, as a result, critical political, economic, and social issues have been incompletely studied. In examining the causes of the 1910 Revolution in the state of Chihuahua, historians have concentrated their efforts on exposing the political oppression and, to some extent, the economic exploitation exercised by the Terrazas-Creel family. Perhaps more than any other figures of the Díaz era, Luis Terrazas and his son-in-law, Enrique C. Creel, have come to represent in Mexican revolutionary historiography the system of economic and social privilege against which the revolutionaries fought.

It is a paradox that historians of the Mexican Revolution have paid so little attention to the complex social phenomenon that has come to be called caciquismo. Caciques—for the moment, let us identify them as local bosses, strongmen, or chiefs—were such a plague on the Mexican rural populace during the porfiriato that “Mueran los caciques!” took its place alongside “Tierra y libertad!” and “México para los mexicanos!” as the central rallying cries of the 1910 Revolution. Moreover, it is difficult to refute John Womack's proposition that to capture the intent of Madero's slogan “Sufragio efectivo y no reelección,” still the first commandment of the Institutionalized Revolution, it should properly be rendered: “A real vote and no boss rule.” Now, though only recently, a steadily increasing number of studies at the regional level by historians and social scientists is beginning to document that the epic Revolution found its energies in the small towns and villages and that the millions who fought, although primarily moved by the promise of land reform, were more immediately preoccupied with the related problem of breaking the political and economic stranglehold of the local power-brokers.

For too many years, women have been missing from or misrepresented in Latin American history. Like women elsewhere, they have not received proper credit for the role they played in their nations' development. Even with the increasingly scholarly attention now focused on women in Latin America, historical research lags far behind that on their counterparts in the United States or Western Europe. Many questions of approach, methodology, and sources, among others, remain to be answered and much labor must be expended before we can know the history of women in Latin America. But if we wish to have the necessary monographs and accumulated data before attempting to write syntheses, we must explore diverse aspects of women's lives, roles, and experiences, often concentrating on women in a single country or time frame.

The dependency theory, under assault from Right and Left, is scarcely sustainable. Impatience with Prebisch's panacea, import-substitution industrialization, gave birth to dependency. A new bogeyman, the multinational corporation, now preoccupies the scholar and polemicist. Paradigms of Corporatism and Structuration supply the ongoing situation for further refinements in Confusionism. But this is the language of economics and political science. Students of chrono-politics (history) may still wish to inquire whether the historical evidence on which the dependency theory was based is more enduring than its currency in modern social science. The issues are very much alive. It was scarcely reassuring to be told, quite recently, that “radical writers on dependency are engaged in much productive and inventive research.”

The concept of dependency, Platt asserts, is “scarcely sustainable” because its historical foundation is unconvincing. “Students of chrono-politics (history),” he implies, find unacceptable the notion that “development and expansion” of Western Europe's economy dominated and conditioned that of Latin America since the conquest. The fact that Dos Santos' definition of dependency denies the presence of autonomous development in Latin America is “critical.” Economic autonomy, according to Platt, is the leitmotif of Latin America's evolution, certainly to the close of the nineteenth century, when there “finally awoke metropolitan interest in the neglected periphery.”

Would I be wrong in detecting a whiff of odium scholasticum? I am clearly not popular for poking fun at the language of modern social science, but I remain utterly unrepentant. It reminds me too forcibly of Section E, Umbugotology and Ditchwateristics, of Dickens' Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything. But worse, in my paper I “ideate” some fanciful notions on autonomy.

Recent years have witnessed a massive resurgence of interest in the question of socially determined sex roles. Investigators, both rigorous and popular-essayistic, have inquired into the ways in which society regulates which attitudes and behaviors are appropriate to men and which to women. There have been widespread expressions of dissatisfaction with the excessive constraints inherent in the traditional female role, along with numerous proposals for affording women greater freedom. The consideration of this set of related issues might most accurately be described as the critical questioning of sex roles, but it is generally referred to as feminism.

During the last decade, there has been a great debate on the social role and political function of the social sciences. This debate has brought into focus certain types of research that had not been considered valid before, each with its respective theoretical framework. As I see them, the most interesting and productive of these new perspectives for the social sciences in Latin America today are (1) modesty in research, (2) primacy of the qualitative, (3) autonomous development of theoretical models, (4) interdisciplinary research, and (5) broader acceptance of individual action and commitment as validating elements for research. None of these is strictly new: on the contrary, some of them (e.g., 5) are cyclical and have quite respectable ancestors; some have been presented by other colleagues, and myself, in many places and at many times. Nevertheless, they are worthy of repetition in view of their considerable implications for research policy and social action.