Some twenty-five kilometers from Huancayo, Peru, nestled in the Jauja Valley, in unbelievable tranquillity, there exists a center of learning: the library of more than twenty thousand volumes in the Convent of Ocopa. This Franciscan monastery now opens the doors of its wealth of printed resources to scholars and researchers, both men and women, from far and near. During a visit of only two days, the author consulted with the librarian, Father Julián Heras, O.F.M., took photographs of the library, examined briefly certain volumes, and photographed title pages, colophons, engravings, and any particular items of interest in the more valuable works. What follows is an attempt to describe the printed resources for research in a library that has been called by Raúl Porras Barrenechea “una biblioteca de insigne sabiduría.”

La utilización de fuentes documentales de carácter demográfico es tardía en la historiografía chilena, los historiadores tradicionales utilizaron referencias indirectas y sin evaluación crítica ofreciendo sólo estimaciones globales de la población y de su distribución étnica. En 1934 se publicó una Contribución demográfica para la historia de Valparaíso por Luis Thayer Ojeda estudiándose en ella algunos problemas demográficos locales a la luz de los datos contenidos en los Registros Parroquiales y en los libros del Cementerio General e incluyéndose de paso las series de ambas fuentes hasta 1856. Este primer interés sin embargo no fructificó en una ampliación del uso de técnicas adecuadas a estas nuevas fuentes, excepto ocasionales intentos por dar a conocer otras series documentales como el Censo de la Capitanía General de Chile de 1777 publicado en 1940. A partir de 1950 en cambio se advierte un interés creciente por estudiar la historia de la población chilena con un método mas riguroso y con fuentes mas adecuadas como queda de manifiesto en el capítulo titulado “El desenvolvimiento histórico étnico de la Población de Chile” de la Geografía Económica de Chile y en la introducción con que se publicó el XII Censo General de la Población levantado en 1952. Por otra parte, se edita también una de las fuentes mas valiosas para el estudio de la demografía histórica chilena a fines del siglo XVIII y comienzos del XIX: El Censo de 1813.

The “problem” of U.S. press reporting on Chile during the Allende period is by now well documented. What emerges from articles by journalists, journalism professors, and professors interested in Latin American affairs is a relatively consistent picture of U.S. news media performance: the U.S. press was openly hostile to the Popular Unity government in Chile; maintained its hostile perspective with astonishing homogeneity throughout the United States; and often reduced complex social, economic, and political issues to some of the most disturbing stereotypes found in the cold-war period. The same articles suggest, moreover, that reporting on Chile was not a total aberration but rather related to more general patterns of reporting on Latin America.

This series of fifty-two bilingual radio programs in Spanish and English was developed for the Flagstaff Centennial and the Arizona Bicentennial celebrations. The programs, which were broadcast over KCLS, Flagstaff, during 1976, present and discuss the music of Latin America in terms of history, musical variety, growth and development, cultural meaning, comparisons with the North American experience, and pure enjoyment. They are about three parts music to one part discussion; explore folk, popular, concert, and religious music; and also include programs on children's songs and Christmas music.

The silver anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (RMCLAS) provides a good opportunity for an assessment of that organization. Much of the following analysis focuses upon annual meetings since they are the major activity of the organizational membership. Programs and minutes of past meetings as well as organizational newsletters and correspondence were examined for patterns in the areas of program participation (numbers, institutional affiliation, academic discipline, and sex of participants), topics favored (as concerns discipline and theme), the general political orientation of the organization, openness to participation from the outside, and organizational publications; an attempt is also made to provide some appreciation for the subjective side of the organization's life.

Historical research on Chilean population has been thwarted for some time by intractable sources and rudimentary methods. Nevertheless, within the past two decades researchers have begun to achieve some successes. Attention has turned from simply ascertaining gross population totals and growth rates to a much wider range of topics. Significant examples include: the relationship between population growth, illegitimacy, vagrancy, and labor supply; the social context of marriage, family formation, and kin ties; the nature, frequency, and intensity of mortality crises; demographic responses to population pressure; the social and economic repercussions of European immigration; and the determinants and consequences of rapid growth and redistribution of population in the twentieth century (Góngora, 1965; Bauer, 1975; Hurtado, 1966; Solberg, 1969; Young, 1974; Sadie, 1969). To study these topics satisfactorily we must both maintain the healthy skepticism of our distant precursors (e.g., Barros Arana, 1880–1900; Palacios, 1904; and Vergara L., 1900) and integrate the demographer's analytical tools with the historian's skill in finding, selecting, and interpreting a whole range of quantitative and qualitative documents. Demographers have demonstrated that even post-1920 data collected by the Chilean Statistical Bureau have substantial and varying degrees of error, notwithstanding the considerable advances in data collection techniques, improvements in the educational levels of the population, and economic inducements to insure the public's cooperation (Somoza and Tacla, 1969; Gutiérrez, 1969). In the not too distant past, civil administrators and priests received crude, if any, instructions, administered several hundred square kilometers of poorly defined territory, and faced an almost insurmountable task of enticing information from a widely dispersed, highly mobile, poor, and uneducated populus. Consequently, historical studies with exclusively demographic ends, using narrowly defined data bases and relying principally on arithmetical or statistical techniques, may prove to be extremely frustrating to carry out and somewhat barren in their findings. Attempts to replicate European studies with Chilean materials, whether simple aggregations of annual totals or tediously reconstructed family life histories, will run a high risk of failure unless researchers incorporate broader questions of social history, exploit an extensive range of documentation, and integrate historical, demographic, and statistical reasoning. While little mathematical sophistication may be necessary—elementary measures may prove the most powerful—a mature, sensitive understanding of the logic of these disciplines, which comes only with considerable study and experience, is essential. The slavish application of demographic formulae and the invention of ill-considered measures are direct pathways to embarrassing nonsense.

Nettie Lee Benson can be said to be without an equal and truly in a class by herself. She and the collection which today bears her name are widely known. Admired and respected as a builder and administrator of a collection that has become a standard by which others are judged, she is known not only as a librarian but as a teacher, an unfailing source of information about Latin American library materials, and a scholar of the history of Mexico.

A great deal has been written about José Martí as poet, patriot, and essayist. Much of his life and work has, however, remained almost completely ignored; by some, denied. Relatively little is known about his personal life except that he was Cuban, which for most has been sufficient. But recent research casts fascinating light on his little-known fondness for baccarat, his secret dream of acquiring a Caribbean monopoly of Thom McAn shoe franchises, and his tendency to walk into closed doors. Though all this information is useful and interesting, there has persisted yet another oversight in Martí scholarship, one which has led to an altogether unwarranted and almost totally inaccurate image of him as an inspired but rather inept artist of verse.

The origins of the Southeastern Conference on Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) are similar to those of several regional associations whose histories have previously been summarized in this journal. In an attempt to foster more and better academic courses on Latin America in the United States, the Pan American Union convened a national round table in Washington in April 1952 and, during the ensuing decade, sponsored a series of regional conferences to discuss similar problems and to provide for future cooperation and interchange. One such meeting, held on the campus of Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), 12–13 February 1954, was organized by R. L. Predmore of the host institution, and was called the “Southeastern Regional Round Table on Teaching Problems in the Field of Latin American Studies.” Aníbal Sánchez-Reulet represented the PAU and explained the history and purpose of such regional meetings, which, in other forms, had actually preceeded the Washington round table by as much as thirty-five years.

Chile has a long tradition of collecting, publishing, and improving its historical statistics. The objectives here are to provide an introduction to the economic historical statistics of Chile since 1830 and guide the reader to their most significant primary and secondary sources. Mention is also made of attractive historical statistics research projects.

My task in critiquing James Street's recent article, “The Internal Frontier and Technological Progress in Latin America (LARR 12 no. 3, [1977]), is made doubly difficult because I am in agreement with so much of what he has to say and because he has qualified and strengthened his argument by incorporating in the final version of the essay most of the criticisms I offered on an earlier draft. Our already similar views were brought more into alignment, for instance, by the addition of such statements as the following: ”There is thus an enormous field developing for systematic research in what have been called ‘appropriate’ or ‘intermediate’ technologies“ (p. 50); ”In view of the gravity of the short-term crisis and the distorting pressures of long-term forces that have been described, it is entirely possible, if not probable, that no global strategy will emerge that will alleviate these trends“ (p. 50); ”By its nature an educational process takes time, and the trends described earlier may be moving with such speed that the development problems of Latin America will become increasingly intractable“ (p. 53).

Increasingly, historians of and in the Latin American countries are turning to quantitative data and analysis. TePaske (1972, 1975), Smith (1973), and McGreevey (1972, 1974) comment on work that has been and is being done and on problems inherent in quantification. The problems that students face as quantifiers of the past may be summarized under the rubrics: (1) sources, (2) methodology, (3) training, and (4) financing. It is with the first of these that this article is concerned, especially with sources for quantifying the nineteenth century after independence, a period neglected almost as much as the seventeenth century used to be, at least insofar as the smaller countries are concerned, except for their politics and personages.

For the better part of the last fifteen years, scholars in the United States researching late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba have worked under severe handicaps. First and foremost, obviously the richest collections of Cuban materials—in Cuba—are beyond easy access. It is not without some irony that the very phenomenon that made Cuba the subject of intense interest also placed the vast corpus of sources vital to the study of the island beyond the reach of the researcher in the United States. The researcher has had to suffer a general paucity of sources, and has been forced to reconstruct the Cuban past from incomplete and fragmentary materials scattered in archives, libraries, and manuscript collections across the country.

When Kalman Silvert died of a heart attack, Latin Americanist scholarship lost its greatest protagonist; American scholars lost one of the most active opponents of intellectual technocracy, and, thereby, the American public lost an important proponent of democracy; the Ford Foundation lost a guiding figure in international social science planning; his family and friends lost an individual of inestimable and irreplaceable personal worth; and Kal, himself, lost the opportunity to pursue his own course toward the development of a humanistic politics for the Western world. In the fall of 1976, Kal and Frieda Silvert were to have taken up residence in Mexico, to continue to work for the Ford Foundation, but in a new direction and with much more time for him to dedicate to the problems that interested him the most. Leaving some part of his task undone was inevitable; it is difficult to imagine anyone being able to achieve the goals that Kal set for himself.

My article, “The Internal Frontier and Technological Progress in Latin America,” seems to have disturbed Richard Clinton deeply, and he raises significant questions regarding social scientists and their obligations. His complaints focus on two distinguishable aspects of my work: my affective state of mind, and the sort of advice I should offer to Latin Americans concerning the solution of their problems.

The scholar examining nineteenth-century Central American (here defined as including Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) foreign relations, particularly foreign trade relations, constantly finds quite positive statements regarding British, French, and United States economic power in Central America. These often allege political domination of the individual nations through foreign economic influences. Invariably such claims are based either upon “common knowledge,” without supportive data, or upon data of a highly selective, unsystematic, or arbitrary nature. Confronted with the choice of accepting or challenging these allegations, the scholar may choose the previous “general wisdom,” “create” his own “wisdom,” or institute as systematic a study of foreign economic trade and navigation ties as existing data sources permit. For the scholar wishing to undertake a detailed study, this essay will describe the location, abundance, reliability, and accuracy of data relative to nineteenth-century Central American trade and navigation as encountered in sources from Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, the United States, Great Britain, France, Hamburg (until 1873), Bremen, the German Empire (beginning about 1880), Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. While the following discussion focuses upon the use of United States and European archives and the statistical and commercial serials for gathering data on Central American trade and maritime activity, obviously many of these same sources, archives, or serials possess identical data for most other Latin American countries or regions.

The impressive contribution of population history to our understanding of the past has generated extraordinary interest in new demographic methods and old population figures. Most research in the field of late colonial Latin American demography, aside from the studies of Cook and Borah and a few others, has been aimed rather modestly at enhancing our understanding of the population dynamics of a village or small community. This book may indicate a new trend: the attempt to establish the population structure of a large region by bringing together population reports for hundreds of parishes. Lombardi argues that through the development of a broad demographic context, analysis of the history of Venezuelan population can be most economically realized and the findings of micro-level studies properly interpreted.

Arequipa durante la Colonia se constituyó en uno de los ejes del intercambio de la región sur y alto peruana, la cuál se caracterizó por haber logrado un alto nivel autosustentado de producción agropecuaria. La emergencia de Arequipa se puede relacionar a un número de razones que lindan con la ubicación geográfica y sus características ecológicas, las características demográficas y sociales de su población, los recursos naturales disponibles, el tipo de producción agraria, la capacidad constructora urbana y la habilidad del “chacarero” arequipeño en el manejo del terreno agrícola, la existencia de grupos urbanos dinámicos vinculados a grupos extranjeros y de poder en el país, el tamaño de la ciudad y su desarrollo coherente al de la Campiña aledaña. Evidentemente unas y otras se superponen implícitamente. La ciudad tuvo un papel preponderante en la articulación de una micro-región que incluyó la Campiña, estrechamente interrelacionado a ella, los valles de la costa y otros interandinos para los cuales Arequipa se constituyó en el centro de mercadeo y servicios, de residencia y apoyo, que cubre desde lo financiero y cultural hasta lo relativo a las amenidades de la vida social.

Any scholar who has followed the ongoing debates in the profession over the use and misuse of quantitative data for the study of historical phenomena is well aware of the perils inherent in any attempt to use numbers to help explain the past. The controversy surrounding Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross is only the most visible manifestation of the continuing battle over the limits, usefulness, and standards of quantitative history. Closer to home, in the pages of this journal, we have witnessed the exchange between Wilkie, Smith, and Skidmore over the proper way to analyze and interpret Mexican budgetary accounts.