In the present issue, LARR initiates a change in its Current Research Inventory section. The Research Inventory now will be published only once a year, in the final number of each volume, rather than in three installments broken down along geographical lines.

In this issue of larr we publish a symposium of three interconnected Articles on the developing subject of the social history of Latin America in the colonial period.

The three papers originated with a session of the 1968 annual meeting of the American Historical Association. At that meeting, Professors Frederick P. Bowser and Karen Spalding presented papers, Professor James Lockhart gave a commentary, and the Editor was chairman. The three authors* negative reaction to the conventional wording of the session title, together with other historiographical positions they held in common, made them aware that a new movement in social and ethnic history was taking shape in the colonial Spanish American field. The three colonialists and the Editor of LARR therefore began to plan the joint publication in LARR of articles which would take formal cognizance of the movement and make its scattered members more aware of the issues in the field and of the activities of other scholars engaged in related research.

“Social History” should be readily definable as the study of historical phenomena which transcend the individual and manifest themselves in human groups. But such a definition includes almost all meaningful history; it seems to fit precisely those political and institutional studies to which social history is ordinarily contrasted. Since our main concern here is with practical historiography rather than with questions of genre, I will simply indicate through description and elimination the kind of history I mean.

Historians who have sought to examine the native societies of the Americas, whether before or after the European conquest, have often felt a need to go beyond the traditional bounds of the discipline, loose as they are, in their efforts to comprehend the values and the actions of people whose societies did not conform to the European pattern. In the study of Indian societies, anthropology and history joined early and have continued to collaborate; the very term ethnohistory, which some would consider an unnecessary coining of a new name for social history, is clear evidence of this union. Further evidence, if such be necessary, is provided by the degree to which scholars have drawn upon the approaches and conclusions of both disciplines in their work. While this practice is of long standing, earlier work showed a general tendency to utilize the data and the conclusions of other disciplines, rather than drawing upon the theories and the approaches developed by others in order to reexamine one's own materials. This highly pragmatic approach to the potential contributions of other disciplines is increasingly giving way to deeper collaboration and interchange.

In the last four decades, forces and events too obvious and too menacing for restatement here have prompted a dramatic increase in scholarly investigation of all facets of the African experience in the Western Hemisphere. The study of the black man in colonial Spanish America, which dates from the early seventeenth century, has profited as a matter of course from this development. The bibliography for the colonial period increases with every passing year, and virtually every region of Spanish America, from Hispaniola and Mexico to Argentina and Chile, is represented by at least one scholarly work. Further, continuing scholarly endeavor is certain to increase both the depth and breadth of our knowledge in the immediate future.

Throughout most of the fifties and sixties many latin american governments adopted Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) as their principal method to achieve economic growth and socio-economic modernization. By the opening of the Seventies, however, there is considerable doubt about ISI's success in solving the region's development problems. In many countries the possibilities for further import-substitution had disappeared. Industrial growth had slowed, job opportunities in industry for Latin America's rapidly growing urban population were scarce, income distribution had in many countries either remained unchanged or had become more concentrated than in the early post-World War II years, and most industrial goods produced within the region were priced so high that export possibilities were severely limited.

Canadian Association of Latin American Studies Annual meeting Mexico City, Mexico May 24-27, 1971

Contemporary Latin American Literature, Houston, Texas, March 17-18, 1972. The Committee on Latin American Studies of the University of Houston is organizing this meeting on contemporary Latin American poetry, fiction, and theatre. Participants will include distinguished writers and scholars from Latin America as well as North American scholars. For information write: Harvey L. Johnson, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77004.