The purpose of this article is to review recent trends in the process of urbanization in major Latin American cities. Abundant literature on Third World urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s painted a fairly coherent picture of the process during these decades. That image, which has been generally accepted in both academic and policy circles, serves as the backdrop against which contemporary trends will be evaluated here. The population in Latin America was becoming rapidly urbanized, but the process has been frequently described as “distorted” in a number of ways by the common condition of underdevelopment in which these countries found themselves.

José Carlos Mariátegui devoted the most productive years of his short life (1894–1930) to analyzing contemporary Peru. Because of this emphasis, a substantial portion of the research conducted in the past thirty years has addressed his political and social thought. More recent investigations, however, have sought to document the significance of his aesthetic ideas, an appropriate development in light of Mariátegui's extensive writings on literature and the visual arts. For example, the periodical Amauta, which appeared under his editorship twenty-nine times between September 1926 and March 1930, was primarily a magazine of the arts and intellectual life, notwithstanding its political agenda and indigenista orientation. Also, Mariátegui's detailed essay on Peruvian literature, “El proceso de la literatura,” is the most extensive of the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928). In addition, between 1924 and 1930, the widely read Lima weeklies Variedades and Mundial regularly published his critical articles on national and international topics, including a large number of pieces on literature and the arts. Recent inquiries into Mariátegui's literary thought have addressed such issues as his modern concept of literary realism, the relationship between his artistic concerns and a Marxism that has been repeatedly characterized as “open,” and the role of aesthetic issues in his social agenda for Peru. This research has established Mariátegui's importance in the arts, not as a creative writer (although he did write poetry, plays, and short stories in his youth) but as one of Latin America's first practicing literary critics.

This article will examine the development of labor unrest in Argentina between 1887 and 1907. Because official statistics were not compiled until after 1907, new data on strikes have been generated for the earlier period through a detailed reading of newspapers. These data provide information on the occupational and geographical distribution of strikes, their timing, and the kinds of demands made by strikers. The new data also provide helpful insights into the nature of labor organizations and the causes of labor unrest. Most important, these data indicate that changes in the organization of the workplace were a significant factor in altering the composition of demand for labor and in generating labor unrest. Finally, they show that the organization of the workplace also accounted for significant differences in the forms of action and organization adopted by various sectors of the labor force. Hence insofar as the position of different groups of workers in the labor market was itself shaped by the nature of the labor process and workplace relations, the transformation of these spheres constitutes an important analytical point of departure for explaining the central features of the emerging labor movement.

It has often been observed that “Where power is, women are not.” Noting women's virtual absence from the realm of conventional politics, Jane Jaquette urged scholars in 1980 to look beyond elections in studying female political participation in Latin America. Arguing for an “expanded notion of the political,” she called for research on female participation within different social classes, especially their role in “informal networks, … clientele linkages, … strike activities, urban land seizures and barrio politics”. This article employs a community study method to investigate women's grass-roots participation in politics and labor mobilization following World War II in the region of greater São Paulo known as ABC (named after the municipios of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano).

Mauricio Font's “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil,” raises a number of central issues about the nature of the polity and economy in São Paulo during the critical transition from export-oriented agriculture to domestic-oriented manufacturing. Was the coffee economy fully capitalist? What was the relation between coffee and industrialization? Was there a “sectoral clash” between planters and manufacturers? To what degree did planters control the political parties and the state? In particular, was the state relatively autonomous of the most important economic group?

“If monoculture is an evil, this was not so with coffee. Coffee was autarkic; it demanded for its cultivation the simultaneous production of the most varied crops, even cattle raising. These were subsidiary crops, no doubt, but their total production was voluminous. It was cheap production, because it was an accessory that offered the people abundant and healthy food.” Thus asserted Joaquim Sampaio Vidal, a federal deputy for the Partido Democrático of São Paulo and president of the Sociedade Rural Brasileira in 1940.