This study offers a definition of preemptive reform, applies the concept to Mexico in the 1970s, describes the reaction of one target group of the Mexican reform effort, and develops a preliminary explanatory model of reactions to preemptive reform. Because preemptive reform has been an important element in Mexican politics, it is especially appropriate to examine the concept as it applies to the Mexican case. However, preemptive reform has been attempted elsewhere and these results may interest others who would seek to understand the phenomenon in a variety of settings.

The Brazilian government's plans to build the Transamazon Highway from the Atlantic coast to the Peruvian border and to settle thousands of landless peasants along it created intense debate before the project's precipitous beginning. Critics of the road “that went from nowhere to no place” denounced it as economic folly, while champions of “national integration” saw it as a crucial step toward the economic and geopolitical unification essential to Brazil's realization of its “great nation” potential and toward alleviating some of its land-tenure concentration (Tamer 1970, Pereira 1971).

Although the first Communist state in the Western Hemisphere was established in Cuba, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the old Cuban Communist party, which for many years was the only significant political organization on the island that claimed to speak in the name of Marxism. An analysis of the old Cuban Communist program, strategy, and tactics is significant for understanding social and political processes not only in Cuba, but elsewhere in the world. The growth of so-called Eurocommunism and the questioning of the revolutionary credentials of traditional Communist parties by others within the Left have led to voluminous polemics, but have failed to clarify the nature and role of traditional Communist parties throughout the world.

For eight years I was associated with one of the most quixotic efforts in academic publishing—a journal concerned comprehensively with research about an area of the world. I must admit that when the Latin American Research Review (LARR) was about to move to Chapel Hill, I thought the original idea that had given birth to the journal had lost its vitality. The notion of reviewing research seemed restrictive and either excessively specialized or hopelessly protean. The dramatic increase in the training of Latin Americanists and the resulting explosion of publications about the region by the end of the 1960s seemed to threaten with extinction the rara avis that had been the journal's stock in trade, the review of the literature. In 1974, when John Martz and I assumed control of LARR, it was hard to imagine anyone repeating Richard Morse's feat in the two-part article on urban studies, “Trends and Issues in Latin American Urban Research, 1965-1970” (LARR volume 6, numbers 1 and 2 [1971]). The mere suggestion of surveying the field of colonial history in three articles, as James Lockhart, Karen Spalding, and Frederick Bowser had done in 1972, would have brought an incredulous curl to the nether lip of a student of that field just two years later. The fact that we received virtually no backlog of manuscripts from our predecessors appeared symbolic of the well having run dry.

One of the greatest servile rebellions and the sole successful slave revolt in world history, the insurrection that destroyed France's richest colony and led to the creation of Haiti has been the subject of a great deal of writing and controversy, but relatively little basic research. The destruction of Saint Domingue and the career of the black leader Toussaint Louverture have inspired innumerable popular and partisan works, but at the level of primary research, we have not progressed far beyond Ardouin's Études of 1853 and Pauléus Sannon's Histoire of the 1920s.

Interest in Paraguay has increased greatly in the United States over the last twenty years. For a long time, the only serious North American specialist in the history of that ignored nation was Harris Gaylord Warren. In recent years, however, the dean of North American Paraguayanists has been joined by an enthusiastic group of historians who have focused on such topics as the Comunero Revolt, the Intendencia and Independence eras, the Francia and López periods, the War of the Triple Alliance, and the Chaco War. At the same time, this group of scholars has moved away from the traditional political, military, and diplomatic considerations of Paraguayan history into such realms as social and economic development, and demography. Although the number of Paraguayanists in this country remains small, significant progress has been made.

In recent years, considerable scholarly and popular attention has been extended to the Jewish populations of regions beyond those traditionally discussed—the United States, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Particular attempts have been made to record and analyze the experience of Jews residing in Latin America. The dramatic deterioration in the situation of the Argentine Jewish community over the past five years has given special visibility to this group, both because of widespread concern over the human rights issues involved and because of the appearance of Jewish-Argentine exiles in the United States and other areas heavily covered by the media. The difficulties experienced by Jewish citizens of Latin American countries certainly are deserving of attention, but one would hope that the interest aroused by these circumstances would lead to a more general curiosity about the many aspects of Jewish culture in this region.

Historiographical advances in recent decades have emphasized increasingly the twentieth-century sources of American hegemony in Cuba. Two specific periods have served as the focus of these arguments: the years of the military occupation (1899-1902) and the decades of the Plattist republic, namely those years when Cuba was linked to the United States by virtue of the Permanent and Reciprocity treaties (1903-34). During these years, Cuban dependency certainly deepened and the character of the island acquired its definitive features as a client state. These twentieth-century developments, however, originated in nineteenth-century antecedents that contributed decisively to shaping events after 1895.

While information regarding Latin American studies programs in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union is becoming widely available to North American scholars, Latin Americanists in the United States may be surprised to know that a small, but growing, number of scholars, teachers, and researchers are studying Latin America in the People's Republic of China. This report describes the state of Latin American studies in China, its principal universities, research centers, scholarly organizations, and periodicals devoted to research on Latin America, as well as the research topics that interest Chinese scholars and the professional problems confronting Latin American studies in China. The interviews and research were conducted, usually in Chinese, in Peking and Shanghai.

This note reports on research in Latin America and the Caribbean concerning international relations and foreign policy. It lists persons in the region who are working on these subjects, comments on changing priorities in research by Latin Americans, broadly evaluates the quality of their research, considers the institutional loci and contexts for Latin American work in this field, and discusses the relevance of work in Latin America and the Caribbean to scholars in the United States and other Northern countries, and to those in developing countries beyond Latin America. The report draws on a considerable number of books, journal articles, and unpublished memoranda made available by colleagues, on correspondence with a number of Latin American social scientists, and on several interviews. These notes are surely not complete, and inadvertent inaccuracies may be included, but this version is presented with the hope that it will be helpful to others in its present form and that it may stimulate the submission to LARR of additional pertinent material.