Most economic historians are probably familiar with Ernest Labrousse's model of the “Crisis of the Old Regime,” although it remains largely unknown to economists, sociologists, and other specialists in the social sciences. Yet Pierre Vilar feels that it is one of Labrousse's most important contributions to the “development of a science of history,” and considers that as an “instrument of analysis,” it can shed light not only on the “old style” crises of Western Europe but also on many essential aspects of the agrarian history of “underdeveloped” countries. We do not mean that contemporary “underdevelopment” and the “economy of the old regime” are one and the same. Rather, our intent is only to emphasize with Vilar that the “historical roles played in most of the world by meteorological abnormalities and agricultural cycles in the recent past have not been subjected to sufficiently methodological and reasoned study.”

Historians have long complained that research on the regional and local impact of the Mexican Revolution has been eclipsed by macro-level analysis of national politics, including studies of formal institutions (the army, the Church, political parties) and biographies of “great men.” Very few of the global studies of the Revolution published in English have paid more than token attention to its regional complexity. It is ironic, for example, that until recently the most detailed, if idiosyncratic, treatment of regional politics in the 1920s was provided by Ernest Gruening's Mexico and Its Heritage (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1928). Its devastatingly drawn picture of violence at the local level was richly documented from official archives opened to the author by the Calles government in an effort to discredit its enemies. More recently, Jean Meyer's study of the period 1910–40 has provided historians with an analysis that offers both a general characterization of the revolutionary process and a narrative that is informed throughout by a keen appreciation of the Revolution's regional and local variations. Another particular merit of this and other work by Meyer is its iconoclastic vigor and insistence on viewing the Revolution as an event that deepened Mexico's dependence upon international capitalism, providing revolutionary leaders with abundant opportunities for personal enrichment.

There are few examples in the history of Latin American studies of such generally accepted “facts” that were so contradicted by subsequent events as the association of democratic politics with industrial economies. Lipset's (1960) simple comparative study of Latin American nations in which he found a striking positive correlation between the degree of economic development and the extent of democracy in the late 1950s has been upset. The military coup d'état that abolished democracy in Brazil in 1964 turned out to be not a unique event, but the first of a series of military takeovers throughout the most industrialized nations of South America: Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. For this reason, the study of the demise of electoral politics in Brazil acquires a new significance. And for this reason also, analysts are inclined to attempt explanations in terms of structural causes common to all capitalist nations on the periphery. The purpose of this paper is to examine one set of such explanations: those in which economic conditions play the major role.

The history of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 has suffered from the emphasis placed upon personalities and, as a result, critical political, economic, and social issues have been incompletely studied. In examining the causes of the 1910 Revolution in the state of Chihuahua, historians have concentrated their efforts on exposing the political oppression and, to some extent, the economic exploitation exercised by the Terrazas-Creel family. Perhaps more than any other figures of the Díaz era, Luis Terrazas and his son-in-law, Enrique C. Creel, have come to represent in Mexican revolutionary historiography the system of economic and social privilege against which the revolutionaries fought.

Past studies of urban ethnic residential patterns have focused mainly on European immigrant populations of our large, old, northern industrial centers. These studies have shown in general that (1) residential dissimilarity is a pervasive feature of ethnic settlement; (2) residential dissimilarity among ethnic groups, according to various indicators, denotes the social distance among groups; (3) social status differences only partly explain residential differences among ethnic groups; (4) ethnic groups most centralized in urban residential space are most recent in their immigration; and (5) with the exception of the black population, residential segregation and centralization decline with the length of time of the ethnic group's residence in the society.

Sociolinguistics, itself a relatively young field of scholarly endeavor, more and more has been reflecting an interest in Mexican Americans insofar as they, like blacks and American Indians, constitute a distinct linguistic-social group that is grappling with the problems common to poor ethnic minorities in the United States. This paper intends to survey the literature existing to date on the Chicano speech community as viewed from a sociocultural vantage point.

The perception of the international economic system as one of industrial center and agrarian periphery, in which the former dominates the latter, has had a tremendous influence in the analysis of underdevelopment; the significance of the idea is impossible to gauge because its acceptance is still expanding. Raúl Prebisch's analytical terms, and the concomitant theory of trade relations, now known as unequal exchange, have been adopted not only by the followers of a dependency theory tradition in Latin America, stemming directly from Prebisch, but also by non-Latin American writers (assuredly, with extensive modifications) such as Arghiri Emmanuel, André Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Johan Galtung, and Samir Amin.

It is a paradox that historians of the Mexican Revolution have paid so little attention to the complex social phenomenon that has come to be called caciquismo. Caciques—for the moment, let us identify them as local bosses, strongmen, or chiefs—were such a plague on the Mexican rural populace during the porfiriato that “Mueran los caciques!” took its place alongside “Tierra y libertad!” and “México para los mexicanos!” as the central rallying cries of the 1910 Revolution. Moreover, it is difficult to refute John Womack's proposition that to capture the intent of Madero's slogan “Sufragio efectivo y no reelección,” still the first commandment of the Institutionalized Revolution, it should properly be rendered: “A real vote and no boss rule.” Now, though only recently, a steadily increasing number of studies at the regional level by historians and social scientists is beginning to document that the epic Revolution found its energies in the small towns and villages and that the millions who fought, although primarily moved by the promise of land reform, were more immediately preoccupied with the related problem of breaking the political and economic stranglehold of the local power-brokers.

Ideally, the study of the political economy of Afro-Latin America should be part and parcel of that of the political economy of Latin America as a whole. Unfortunately, true to the tendency toward fragmentation and specialization in the human as well as in the physical sciences, that has not generally been the case. The problem has been made worse by the low salience of the nonwhite races in the Americas, due to their low socioeconomic and political status. It is further compounded by the ambiguity and evasiveness of the Latin American racial ideology, especially in its Brazilian form, which leads both local and foreign observers and social scientists to conclude first that there is no racial problem (though such a position is no longer seriously held by scholars) and then that race is irrelevant to the study of the region's political economy.

For too many years, women have been missing from or misrepresented in Latin American history. Like women elsewhere, they have not received proper credit for the role they played in their nations' development. Even with the increasingly scholarly attention now focused on women in Latin America, historical research lags far behind that on their counterparts in the United States or Western Europe. Many questions of approach, methodology, and sources, among others, remain to be answered and much labor must be expended before we can know the history of women in Latin America. But if we wish to have the necessary monographs and accumulated data before attempting to write syntheses, we must explore diverse aspects of women's lives, roles, and experiences, often concentrating on women in a single country or time frame.

Recent criticism of modern Mexican art has generally ascribed the expressionistic quality of Orozco's oeuvre to international stylistic influences such as German expressionism, postimpressionism and fauvism. These international stylistic affinities are equated with the universal or modern aspect of the mural movement in contrast to its local, Mexican, iconographic and stylistic aspect.

Sex has been and continues to be one of the most important elements that differentiates the functions performed by members of society, particularly those related to the social division of work. From a strictly biological perspective, the primary difference between men and women lies in the fact that, during specific periods of the life cycle, women direct a considerable part of their energy to the reproduction of the species. Beyond this difference, the physical and intellectual capacities of men and women are relatively similar. Nevertheless, it is a general fact that the levels of male and female participation differ extensively.

Urbanization and the increasing concentration of population in the major urban centers in Latin America is often conceived as the manifestation of a convergent economic process, that of industrialization (Roberts 1978). Internal cityward migration and natural increase are two dominant contributors to the increase in urbanized population throughout most of Latin America and the Caribbean in the last four decades (Elizaga 1965, Clarke 1974, Davis 1972). In Latin American research, studies of internal migration and urbanization have proliferated, investigating regional origins, migration networks, migrant selectivity, aspects of migrant assimilation in the urban social, economic and political realms, and the character and nature of initial settlement (cf. Morse 1971 for a summary of studies written between 1965–70). By and large, previous research has not fully explored the social and spatial dimensions of the process whereby migrants select initial residential sites and subsequently relocate (exceptions include studies by Brown 1972, Cornelius 1975, Davies and Blood 1974, Vaughn and Feindt 1973, Ward 1976). In short, we know very little about the paths a migrant follows between the time he reaches the city and the time he settles into a secure and stable dwelling environment.

The dependency theory, under assault from Right and Left, is scarcely sustainable. Impatience with Prebisch's panacea, import-substitution industrialization, gave birth to dependency. A new bogeyman, the multinational corporation, now preoccupies the scholar and polemicist. Paradigms of Corporatism and Structuration supply the ongoing situation for further refinements in Confusionism. But this is the language of economics and political science. Students of chrono-politics (history) may still wish to inquire whether the historical evidence on which the dependency theory was based is more enduring than its currency in modern social science. The issues are very much alive. It was scarcely reassuring to be told, quite recently, that “radical writers on dependency are engaged in much productive and inventive research.”

The objective of this essay is to suggest an interpretation of the economic behavior of women in three developing economies; this involves an evaluation of the role of the sociodemographic determinants of the female labor supply vis-à-vis the role of the variables that affect the demand for their labor. A comparative study of the female labor force in Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay constitutes the basic source of empirical evidence for this paper; the purpose here is to integrate into a more general framework some of the findings of that study and infer more general propositions regarding the patterns of female employment in structurally heterogeneous economies.

The concept of dependency, Platt asserts, is “scarcely sustainable” because its historical foundation is unconvincing. “Students of chrono-politics (history),” he implies, find unacceptable the notion that “development and expansion” of Western Europe's economy dominated and conditioned that of Latin America since the conquest. The fact that Dos Santos' definition of dependency denies the presence of autonomous development in Latin America is “critical.” Economic autonomy, according to Platt, is the leitmotif of Latin America's evolution, certainly to the close of the nineteenth century, when there “finally awoke metropolitan interest in the neglected periphery.”

The visitor to Cuba cannot help but be struck by the overpowering presence of José Martí. Indeed, from the moment one arrives at Havana's Aeropuerto ‘José Martí,’ references to Martí are constantly encountered: the drive from the airport to the city center passes by the Biblioteca Nacional ‘José Martí,’ situated in the Plaza de la Revolución, which itself is dominated by an enormous statue of Martí; commemorative monuments and plaques are widely scattered throughout all Cuban cities, while even the smallest rural communities possess at least a bust of Martí; finally, as an illustration of the importance of Martí for the revolutionary leadership, pertinent quotations are continually exhibited at official congresses, and in all major museums of the island. In short, as any tourist soon discovers, Martí's image is projected everywhere: “en alguna medida Cuba es un país en torno a un hombre,” as one critic has correctly noted.

Since the early 1960s there has been increasing interest in Caribbean life and affairs; consequently, the discovery of new sources of materials and centers for research on the region are of particular importance to the growing number of Caribbeanists. The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C. is funded by the university and receives additional finances annually from numerous donors; it is a vital part of the university's library system and operates under the supervision of the office of the Vice-President for Academic Affairs. Among the thousands of books, articles, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, prints, and recordings on the black diaspora are myriad materials on the Caribbean. This Caribbean collection is as extensive and important an investigative tool as many of the better-known repositories in the United States or Canada; but this century-old holding is hardly known. Probably one of the main reasons for this oversight is that Caribbean source material may appear to be outside the academic scope of Howard University; hence, Caribbeanists frequent traditional centers such as the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston and the Bodleian and West India Committee Libraries in Britain.

Would I be wrong in detecting a whiff of odium scholasticum? I am clearly not popular for poking fun at the language of modern social science, but I remain utterly unrepentant. It reminds me too forcibly of Section E, Umbugotology and Ditchwateristics, of Dickens' Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything. But worse, in my paper I “ideate” some fanciful notions on autonomy.