Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City.

usually composed of two or more haciendas, dominated the social and economic structure of the country for four hundred years. A Mexican Family Empire is a careful examination of the largest latifundio ever to have existed, not only in Mexico but also in all of Latin America—the latifundio of the Sanchez Navarros. This book is based on the Sanchez Navarro papers—75,000 pages of personal letters, business correspondence, hacienda reports and inventories, wills, land titles, and court records spanning the 'period from 1658 to '1895. Harris's thorough research of these documents has resulted in the first complete social, economic, and political history of a great estate. The geographical and chronological boundaries of his study permit analysis of both continuity and change in Mexico's evolving socioeconomic structure-during one of the most decisive periods-in her history—the era of transition from colony to nation. Markets in Oaxaca is a study of the regional peasant marketing system in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. It relates the marketing system to other aspects of the regional economy, to neighbouring regions, and to the Mexican national economy. Combining ethnographic, theoretical, and regional analyses, it suggests new directions in the fields of peasant and development studies. Contributors to the volume describe the operation and nature of several marketplaces in the region, analyze village-based artisan production and various specialized economic roles (particularly the role of traders), and describe the operation of several total regional marketing systems. The editors then consider their findings against the background of political, economic, and social structures from the pre-Conquest period to the present. In their conclusion, they view the regional peasant economy as one molded by the dependence on the urban-industrial sector, although they found structural integrity and internal dynamism in the system itself. infusing and technical orientations aristocratic Latin occasionally by sociologists, labour economists, and educationists concerned with contemporary problems. The Ideal of the Practical is the first in-depth historical study of the problems involved. describes the efforts of Colombia's nineteenth-century political elites to introduce technical knowledge, skills, and value orienta- tions into its aristocratic society, which was founded on a static agrarian economy. The Ideal of the Practical opens with a description of the economic and social context of nineteenth-century Colombia, then discusses some early experiments with manual industrial training between 1820 and 1850. It explains the develop- ment of in Colombia after 1850. Chapters deal with the careers of upper-class youths sent abroad for scientific and technical training, the growth of indigenous engineering education, and the crystallisation of a Colombian engineering profession. While the book primarily explores the nineteenth century, it also touches on eighteenth-century Spanish Bourbon antecedents and provides an epilogue on the twentieth-century evolution of technical elites in Colombia. and on unprecedented access to various Brazilian archives, Brazil and the Great Powers offers a new interpretation of Brazilian economic policy during the 1930s. It serves as a revisionist view of the role of the military in the formulation of economic policy during that period. Furthermore, the book challenges prevailing notions of the effectiveness of the Good Neighbour Policy. The author focuses on Brazil's response to the intensive struggle between the great powers—Germany, Great Britain, and the United States—for overseas markets and raw materials during the turbulent years of the 1930s. In an evaluation of the policies followed by the Vargas government, he discusses individuals and groups involved in decision making on Brazilian trade policy and analyzes their motives. He pays special attention to the alliance of commerce and the military that led to a skillful, opportunistic policy among strong powers who made conflicting demands on Brazilian leaders. This is the first published catalogue of the collection of more than 1200 documents in the history of late colonial and early independent Mexico. Almost every major event is represented but the collection is specially valuable for the years after independence, containing the plans of Iguala, Casa Mata, Veracruz and many other places at later times, the texts of important diplomatic treaties and of Mexican constitutions, some news-papers and above all a wide selection of the fiscal and economic legislation of the successive governments after independence. Some of these laws are not found in the standard reference collections. This book describes the distribution of income in Colombia in the 1960's as well as trends during the previous three decades. Mr. Rodriguez O. argues persuasively that Spanish American independence did not bring about a sharp break between colonial and national periods. On the contrary, the conflicts which divided Hispanic society went on as before; all that Spanish America achieved was separation from Spain. This study of the dissolution of the Spanish empire in America is focused on the public career of one man, Vincent Rocafuerte, perhaps the most representative member of a group of Spanish American liberals who worked for independence and for a new vision of Spanish American com- munity. Rocafuerte participated in all phases of this movement (referred to by the author as Spanish Americanism) from its incep- tion in the Spanish Cortes (1810-1814) to its decline in the I830's. and