Although at one time some Latin Americanists may have supposed that “(a) useful historical material from Latin America does not exist in statistical form, and (b) even if it did exist, the mystical qualities of Latin culture defy all efforts at measurement,” today we are aware of such fallacies. Leaving aside useful, relatively reliable data, however, we still face the question of how to handle figures which apparently are unreliable and unusable. This article approaches the latter problem by presenting some debatable hypotheses in order to suggest examples of little-examined descriptive statistics which might be investigated fruitfully to reveal new political, economic, and social aspects of Mexican life.

It has for years been accepted that as Latin American countries urbanize and industrialize, the proportion of people employed in tertiary (“services”) categories relative to those in secondary (manufacturing, construction) increases more swiftly than in the nineteenth-century industrial countries. This is usually taken to mean that urbanization here “outruns” industrialization, that people are released from precarious rural occupations faster than stable secondary-sector jobs are created for them. The situation is aggravated by the introduction of advanced technology that allows high worker-output ratios and by the lack of possibilities for migration abroad such as relieved Europe of 55 million “excess” persons in the period 1750-1939. Table 5 shows that although the per cent of Latin Americans working in factories more than doubled in the period 1925-60, thus increasing much more sharply than the per cent of city dwellers, the total share employed in manufacturing barely increased at all—and in fact shaded off in the 1950s—because of a relative drop in artisans.

We like to believe that ideals and conscious motivation govern history. In an area so controversial as United States-Latin American relations, a preoccupation with ideological determinants of policy and action has been part of a standard approach to problems and issues of Latin American economic, social, and political development, especially in the past decade. The influence of beliefs in the efficacy of the motive in history is illustrated by periodic harassment and quasi-purges of the Department of State, which is perceived by congressional critics as an organizational haven for the disloyal, weak, or misguided, and by diatribes from the left against official Washington which are typically based on some variation of the view that the state department harbors men with evil ideas.

For two days in December 1969, a group of eleven scholars came together in austin, Texas, for some eight hours of round table discussions on the status and future of research in Latin American literature. Sponsored by the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies (S.S.R.C.-A.C.L.S.), and hosted by the University of Texas' Institute of Latin American Studies, the conference represented an attempt to respond to a need as yet unanswered within any of the major professional organizations—the need to bring together a number of competent scholars in the field of literary research to examine past accomplishments, to exchange ideas about the nature of present problems, and to raise questions about future directions.