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.

Although this paper is a sequel to an earlier review of Latin American urban research (1965b), the volume and sophistication of work in the urban field during the past five years have made it advisable to limit the number of themes addressed, to dwell on complementary or discrepant approaches to certain central issues, and to suggest comparative perspectives. The first section, restricted to Spanish America, attempts to clarify some colonial antecedents of contemporary phenomena and is even less systematic than the other four sections as a research inventory. Attention to nineteenth-century developments is limited to references in Section V. The review of contemporary themes is weighted toward anthropological, sociological, and general institutional matters; the author has no credentials for prowling the arctic realms of economics, political behaviorism, and geographic place theory.

Among archaeologists concerned with the study of cultural regularities in the evolution of the early civilizations, few general hypotheses have stirred such controversy as that which postulates a causal link between the phenomenon of irrigation agriculture and the origins of the state. Adumbrated initially by Karl Wittfogel in the 1920s and stated by him most completely in Oriental Despotism (1957), the hydraulic theory has been subject to much discussion and to varying fates in recent literature and research history. Although Wittfogel's original formulation was based chiefly on Old World data, the theory has had major impact on research and interpretation in the New. The first large-scale use of the approach in American archaeology followed World War II, when the Institute of Andean Research sponsored the Viru Valley Project in North Coastal Peru (Bennett, 1948; Willey, 1953). In recent years American archaeology has become concerned with questions of process beyond the limits of simple historical reconstruction (Binford and Binford, 1968). Concepts derived from systems theory (Flannery, 1968a; Hole and Heizer, 1969) are increasingly invoked to explain the cause-and-effect feedback mechanisms involved in the evolution of culture. Concomitantly, a virtual explosion of data has occurred concerning the chronology, size, and sociological and demographic matrix of New World irrigation systems. Thus, both investigative techniques and theoretical frameworks have undergone considerable recent modification and the body of relevant data is large and growing. While some might consider the hydraulic agriculture hypothesis a dead issue, such is not the case. Changes in the total conceptual context of any theory, and new evidence both pro and con, necessitate reevaluation of the theory.

This essay discusses aspects of contemporary cuban politics and economics, up to but not including the 1969-1970 sugar harvest effort, from the point of view of a theory of sectoral clashes presented by Markos Mamalakis. The essay will focus on those hypotheses, derived from Mamalakis' previous work, which attempt to explain social and political conflict and policy making.

Mamalakis defines a clash or collision of sectors as the aggressive and administered struggle for privileges and advantages among an economy's sectors. The clash is administered or manipulated because the transfer of resources from one sector to another is brought about through governmental economic policy; it is aggressive because the transfer of resources goes beyond voluntary saving or nondiscriminatory fiscal policies to such an extent that the government is willing to risk the decay of one economic sector in order to promote another.

The Central Working Document for the Latin American Bishops' Conference, which met in the summer of 1968, in the industrial city of Medellín, after the Eucharistic Congress in Bogotá, mentioned in its introduction neither pastoral nor theological questions. It began with a matter-of-fact analysis of Latin American reality, discussed the underdevelopment of the subcontinent in sociological terms, and demanded finally a commitment from the Church to the social problems of hunger and misery, which the document stated are the urgent questions upon whose solution the future of Latin America depends. Hesitation on the part of the Church to do its share in creating a more free, more just, and more humane society would be tantamount to being in the state of mortal sin.

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.

According to the theory of sectoral clashes and coalitions, the sectoral element plays a unique role in affecting, on the one hand, the interrelationships between the economic processes of income creation, distribution, and allocation and, on the other hand, the interrelationships between economic, social, political, and institutional processes that make for change and progress. The objective of this essay is to extend the previous formulation of the theory of sectoral clashes and coalitions along two lines: first, by presenting statistical information from all of Latin America which prima facie supports the theory's basic premises; second, by defining and expanding these premises and the basic framework in an effort to obtain a clearer vision of the theory and its links to economic, political, and social reality. Although most criticisms of the theory find a specific answer and most of the suggestions for improvement are followed, this article is more than a rebuttal. In response to the urgent need for its further development, cited by all commentators and those who have applied and tested the theory in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, this essay seeks to open new ground and explore new dimensions.

“For Long it has Been the Conventional Wisdom—Repeated ad nauseum without ever an attempt at careful empirical demonstration—that the quality of Latin American studies is the lowest of all area scholarship. This judgment is clearly false for anthropology, history, and language and literature. How true is it for political science, one of the most maligned of the disciplines?” Thus, the question posed by a leading political scientist during the disciplinary soul-searching which followed in the wake of the Camelot affair. Perhaps none of the disciplines concerned with Latin American studies have been so subjected to self-conscious evaluations and assessments in recent years. While much has represented professional cocktail-gossip and conventioneering punditry, it has generally reflected the less than edifying overview of Merle Kling in the early 1960's. Countless political science graduate students with Latin American interests have read his assessment:

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.

The Archivo Nacional in Asuncion, Paraguay, is virtually unknown to historians of Latin America in the United States, despite the richness of its holdings on Paraguayan and Platine history. Few North American scholars have used the archive, and there is very little in print, either in English or Spanish, that can acquaint one with what documentation is available. The present writer, despite his efforts to learn as much about the archive as possible before his own extended research visit there in 1968, arrived in Asunción with little idea of what was available, how the archive was organized, or the extent and sheer mass of material awaiting him.

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.

This Study was conducted under the auspices of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, the organization of institutional members of LASA. Needless to say, the conclusions expressed here are those of the authors alone, and not those of the project's sponsors. The study focuses primarily on teaching programs, and specifically on the courses announced in the college catalogues. Clearly, there are other ways of proceeding and there are other types of information about Latin American studies programs that would be of value. It should also be borne in mind that the information given in such catalogues is only an approximate description of reality. However, the subject matter covered was believed to be that of greatest interest in view of the limitations of resources and personnel available.