3 Some I had never seen. Schwartz in turn draws from an earlier article by Steve Stern, but this is not the place for discussing historiography. Instead of focusing on economic and political structures of dependency, the new studies turned to a myriad of subjects, from gender relations to indigenous societies, from rituals to racial identities, all in one form or another advancing the thesis that Latin America is immensely more complex than the adjunct status appointed to it by dependency analysis. Although heavily weighted toward economics, dependency is a valuable tool. His general thrust, as in most of the essays that follow, is that persistence, or tradition in the argot of a generation ago, runs through Latin America much more deeply than in the experience of the United States.
Some essayists find the new approaches a bit stifling and doctrinaire.
In doing so, he joins a loud debate in the academy of Latin Americanists over the new cultural history that has produced almost as much fire as light. The pitfalls of synthesis are evident in essays with such a broad sweep. For example, Stern's characterization of evangelical Protestantism's role in late twentieth-century society misses an important nuance of this sweeping movement. My point is not to pick on Stern but rather to thank him, as I do other contributors in this fine collection, for bringing these trends, issues, analyses, points of view before us whether we agree with them or not. Having written a textbook recently, I am painfully aware of the difficulty of trying to reconcile the old with the new, to forge a synthesis, to explain so much that is so different in a coherent narrative.