Several years ago a single voice, representing the frustration of many of us trying to carry out research on women in Latin America, decried the “lack of core bibliography, methodological apparati, or thematic models” (item 182:125) as major problems besetting the study of women in Latin America. As of 1975, these research hurdles had not been completely overcome, but certainly steps have been and continue to be taken.

An annotated bibliography on women in Spanish America will soon be published and other bibliographic guides of a more limited scope have been or are in the process of being compiled. Both in North America and Latin America, conferences, seminars, and workshops have been held to discuss methodological problems as well as recent research efforts. Associations, committees, coalitions, and centers have organized to promote the cause, lend support, gather and distribute information, and generally represent a growing concern with women's issues.

While dependency analysis has a long tradition within Latin America, only recently has it emerged from the relative obscurity of certain Latin American writers to be included among the approaches used by scholars in the United States. The dependency approach was first adopted by a group of “radicals” in the United States, partially as a reaction to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but also as part of a general attack on the capitalist system, the military-industrial complex, and U.S. imperialism. It is now evident that dependency analysis has emerged as a legitimate field of inquiry for Latin Americanists, even if some scholars refuse to acknowledge its existence. In spite of generating considerable analysis of Latin America and the inter-American system, the dependen tistas have not been subjected to the critical scrutiny they deserve, primarily because of the lack of academic respectability of the radicals and the different channels through which their publications appear. Aside from the critiques of Raul Prebisch (Flanders, 1964; Hodgson, 1966; Salera, 1971), an article by David Ray (1973), and the internal bickerings among the dependentistas themselves, systematic criticism of the dependency approach has been lacking. For this reason we felt the need to delineate the broad outlines of the dependency theory of underdevelopment; present a selective critique of the methodologies, content, and conclusions of the major writers; and identify some of the more potentially rewarding areas for subsequent research.

There has been a great deal of interest recently in problems of computation in developing countries. The Jerusalem Conference on Information Technology held in Israel in 1971 (see Bibliography Key, Jerusalem) was dedicated wholly to the topic, and since then the Rio Symposium on Computer Education for Developing Countries (see Rio), and the IBI-ICC Conference on Informatics in Government (see Florence), both held in 1972, have dealt directly with these problems. Latin America has been intent on benefiting from the application of computer technology to development, but the advent of the technology has not always met with the success that was expected. However, the lack of policy that brought about the random introduction of computers into a country, often sacrificing other equipment or services also critical to its development, is now giving way to more rational procedures. A number of countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico) are presently engaged in detailed studies of their systems and those of other developing nations in order to learn from their experiences. This article is an attempt to aid that research effort by providing an annotated bibliography and other sources of information on computation in the region.

Central to research on Latin American politics has been the pursuit of an explanation for both the stability and the instability of its various systems. Two general modes of analysis on Latin America have emerged. One, developed on the foundations of sociology and anthropology, has evolved as structural-functional analysis and its partner, behavioralism. The second mode grew out of an economic perspective and is having a profound effect on contemporary studies. This article will give a brief review of some of the analyses that have their bases in economics and will specifically apply assumptions of human behavior drawn from microeconomic theory to the problem of explaining systems of political competition and their resultant structures.

During the 1960s, social scientists optimistically predicated a significant role for Roman Catholicism in the promotion of social reform throughout Latin America. But political developments during the 1970s, notably in Chile and Brazil, implicitly challenged that view and the theoretical foundations on which it rested. Not surprisingly, one recent and knowledgeable reassessment of the Church's role contends that Catholicism—for reasons that went unaccentuated in earlier scholarship—is both institutionally and ideologically incapable of legitimating and implementing reforms basic to a new egalitarian order.

In the aftermath of the 1959 revolutionary triumph there began a massive impelled migration to the United States, paralleled in Cuban history only by the great exodus during the nineteenth-century wars of independence. Close to 500,000 Cubans had migrated to the United States by 1972.

The migration has shifted in size and has occurred intermittently since 1959, a consequence of the turbulent relations between the United States and Cuban governments. From January 1959 to October 1962, regular commercial flights existed between the United States and Cuba. During much of this period, American visas could be obtained in the United States embassy in Havana and in the Santiago de Cuba consulate. However, after diplomatic relations were severed (3 January 1961), the United States government generally waived the visa requirements for Cubans desiring to migrate. During this period, 153,534 Cubans registered with the Miami Cuban Refugee Center arld close to 200,000 had arrived in the United States by the time of the 1962 October missile crisis.

On 7 December 1897, on the outskirts of Havana in San Pedro, a small party of Cuban rebels led by Lieutenant General Antonio Maceo y Grajales was ambushed by a Spanish patrol. General Maceo was killed; at his side, Panchito Gómez Toro, son of the Cuban Commander-in-Chief Máximo Gómez, also died. The surviving Cuban soldiers buried the two bodies in a secret grave to protect them from desecration by the Spanish forces. Several days later in Havana, the Spanish commander-in-chief, General Valeriano Weyler, learned of Maceo's death and celebrated. Weyler, whose cruelties had earned him the enduring title of “the butcher,” gathered his officers and supporters around him; they feasted, drank, and prematurely toasted Spanish victory. They could not imagine that the rebels would continue to fight once they had lost the superhuman figure of Maceo.

In this paper I present the views of a Latin American sociologist, partly trained in the United States, on Latin American Studies in this country. This is not a research paper but a frank and open presentation of my impressions, however opinionated. The aim is to stimulate reflection and debate, not to appease or to compromise. Implicit in all this are the following beliefs: (a) The training of Latin Americanists in the United States today is generally poor; (b) much of the research on Latin America carried out in the United States today is second-rate; (c) this situation can be improved; and, most important, (d) it is to Latin America's advantage, and not to its disadvantage, that such improvement take place.

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The study of the distribution of income summarizes a nation's social organization and the outcome of the forces of social change. The measurement of income distribution itself yields a type of social scorecard, the resolution of claims by competing groups for the economy's output. As an indication of social justice, income distribution measures as well the extent to which different groups share in a nation's economic progress.

The study of political participation in Latin America has, until very recently, been too narrowly conceived by social scientists, focusing largely on elites and violence. The former is illustrated by studies of the military (Lieuwen, 1961, 1966; Johnson, 1964; Horowitz, 1967; Fagen and Cornelius, 1970; Schmitter, 1973), the Church (Dillon Soares, 1967; Solari, 1967; Petersen, 1970; Suchlicki, 1972), industrialists (Cardoso, 1967; Polit, 1968; Petras and Cook, 1973), and large landholders (Whetten, 1948; Carroll, 1966; Feder, 1971; Cockroft, 1972). Attention to violent forms of political participation is found in studies of revolution and the military coup d'état (Payne, 1965; Needler, 1968; Von Lazar and Kaufman, 1969; Moreno and Mitrani, 1971; Kohl and Litt, 1974). Those studies that have centered on nonviolent mass participation (Horowitz, 1970) have generally been limited to elections (for example, Martz, 1967; Petras, 1970), political parties (Fitzgibbon, 1957; Ciria, 1974), and labor unions (Payne, 1965; Angell, 1972; Erickson et al., 1974). As a result of the narrowness of these approaches, we have only a partial image of the faces of the Latin American citizen political activity; we have underestimated the scope of such activity and have failed to investigate its many forms.

It would be a truism to state that for the Latin American universities, as well as those of the Third World, questions of excellence or equality can be resolved by accepting the idea that equality also means a lack of excellence (quality). In other words, we are dealing with universities that operate in countries where the process of democracy is still precarious and consequently the universities respond in a way that produces or legitimizes dominant classes. With regard to the qualitative level, the first duty is not to create or disseminate knowledge but rather to create functions in the Weberian sense of the word. Universities of the Third World are the germinators of new classes; but in general, in small societies, the possible social participation of those “new” classes is of a limited and elitist nature. The university does not play an intellectual role but rather a social role, in terms of creating and legitimizing its operative functions within a context where professional characterization is foremost instead of knowledge. Thus, in a Third World society, although it is important for an individual to obtain a university degree, it does not necessarily mean that he will also possess the knowledge and skills that this implies. The intellectual knowledge gained through university education may well be effectively divorced from the social function.

“Statistics are the poetry of Latin America” was Frank Tannenbaum's discreet version of “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This is a widespread enough view, even now, when numbers are fashionable, and a fair number of my colleagues suggest any series will do to illustrate their well-conceived articles. A few skeptics refuse to go in for misplaced fashion. A Mexican economist, working in the statistics in the boondocks, said he was told to apply a correction coefficient to his numbers, to make them consistent with his boss's earlier reports. He quit, and became an essayist. An Argentine economist said that when his division head wanted to show growth, the investigators were sent to big firms; slumps were reported by surveying the output of small firms.

It has been traditional to treat the life and art of Julián del Casal and José Martí as antithetical statements.

Research in social mobility in postcolonial Argentina has not benefitted from the sweeping changes in methodology and content found in histories of other periods and areas. The question of social mobility receives close attention in these studies partly because it offers such a variety of research opportunities and is measurable in several forms. Usually, the laboratory for these recent studies is the city—the place with the greatest opportunities for self-improvement. Since the nineteenth century, the city has become the locus of concentration for countless native and foreign migrants. With the appropriate data, urban social historians have investigated their spatial and economic dimensions of mobility. In addition, one of the bases of social change most often studied is the shifting within the occupational structure. The ties between occupation and social ranking are intimate. “Thus,” writes Michael Katz, “to trace the movements of a man from occupation to occupation is, to a considerable extent, to trace his vertical movement within social space; the sum of those movements determines the patterns and rate of social mobility, the degree of openness, within a society.”

As practiced contemporaneously in most of Latin America, political democracy is more accurately elite governance, with many of the thornier authoritarian trappings cloaked behind an often transparent facade of “popular suffrage” and “parliamentary government.” Democracy, as a normative basis for the “good life,” is difficult to describe and conceptualize, especially when one assumes that the democratic prototype is to be discovered somewhere within that caldron of slippery political variables known as the Anglo-American model. I do not assume in this report that the nations of Latin America should be trying to move in the direction of the Anglo-American model (assuming we can describe, more or less generically, the constituent parts of that model). Nevertheless, I would be remiss in not stating the general outlines of what I understand political democracy to mean as related to the quinquennial survey of scholarly images to be reported herein.

All too frequently, national associations pay scant heed to professional activity below the university level, seeming to forget that schools and colleges are the foundation for their future success. Aware of this, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) appointed its first committee on teaching Latin American studies on all levels in 1973. The committee, working closely with the steering committee of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, (CLASP), sought some means of building bridges of mutual help and understanding between teachers and professors of Latin American studies. In these efforts, two specific needs and one rather obvious fact became apparent. The needs were for some means of updating and improving the quality of teacher training for those teaching Latin American content and for the development of instructional materials that met the high standards of both Latin American scholars and professional educators. The obvious fact was that the average Latin Americanist had little understanding of the current school classroom and the problems confronting and opportunities available to the classroom teacher. To compound these, it was clear that the study of Latin America as a world culture area was diminishing. Such conditions, once recognized, cried out for action on the part of LASA/CLASP.

Latin Americanists commonly stress the traditional cultural and philosophical differences between the region they study and the United States. A frequent contention holds that such historical contrasts persist to the present. For example, Howard J. Wiarda asserts, “Latin America … remains paternalistic, hierarchical, authoritarian, Catholic, corporate, personalist, and elitist to its core.” In contrast, the United States is presumably more egalitarian, Protestant, and impersonal than her southern-hemispheric neighbors.