Although this paper is a sequel to an earlier review of Latin American urban research (1965b), the volume and sophistication of work in the urban field during the past five years have made it advisable to limit the number of themes addressed, to dwell on complementary or discrepant approaches to certain central issues, and to suggest comparative perspectives. The first section, restricted to Spanish America, attempts to clarify some colonial antecedents of contemporary phenomena and is even less systematic than the other four sections as a research inventory. Attention to nineteenth-century developments is limited to references in Section V. The review of contemporary themes is weighted toward anthropological, sociological, and general institutional matters; the author has no credentials for prowling the arctic realms of economics, political behaviorism, and geographic place theory.

The Central Working Document for the Latin American Bishops' Conference, which met in the summer of 1968, in the industrial city of Medellín, after the Eucharistic Congress in Bogotá, mentioned in its introduction neither pastoral nor theological questions. It began with a matter-of-fact analysis of Latin American reality, discussed the underdevelopment of the subcontinent in sociological terms, and demanded finally a commitment from the Church to the social problems of hunger and misery, which the document stated are the urgent questions upon whose solution the future of Latin America depends. Hesitation on the part of the Church to do its share in creating a more free, more just, and more humane society would be tantamount to being in the state of mortal sin.

“For Long it has Been the Conventional Wisdom—Repeated ad nauseum without ever an attempt at careful empirical demonstration—that the quality of Latin American studies is the lowest of all area scholarship. This judgment is clearly false for anthropology, history, and language and literature. How true is it for political science, one of the most maligned of the disciplines?” Thus, the question posed by a leading political scientist during the disciplinary soul-searching which followed in the wake of the Camelot affair. Perhaps none of the disciplines concerned with Latin American studies have been so subjected to self-conscious evaluations and assessments in recent years. While much has represented professional cocktail-gossip and conventioneering punditry, it has generally reflected the less than edifying overview of Merle Kling in the early 1960's. Countless political science graduate students with Latin American interests have read his assessment:

The Archivo Nacional in Asuncion, Paraguay, is virtually unknown to historians of Latin America in the United States, despite the richness of its holdings on Paraguayan and Platine history. Few North American scholars have used the archive, and there is very little in print, either in English or Spanish, that can acquaint one with what documentation is available. The present writer, despite his efforts to learn as much about the archive as possible before his own extended research visit there in 1968, arrived in Asunción with little idea of what was available, how the archive was organized, or the extent and sheer mass of material awaiting him.

This Study was conducted under the auspices of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, the organization of institutional members of LASA. Needless to say, the conclusions expressed here are those of the authors alone, and not those of the project's sponsors. The study focuses primarily on teaching programs, and specifically on the courses announced in the college catalogues. Clearly, there are other ways of proceeding and there are other types of information about Latin American studies programs that would be of value. It should also be borne in mind that the information given in such catalogues is only an approximate description of reality. However, the subject matter covered was believed to be that of greatest interest in view of the limitations of resources and personnel available.