The scholar who is regularly concerned with Latin America is likely to regard the Handbook of Latin American Studies somewhat as he views one of his children: it is far from perfect, it is his, he would not want to live without it, it seems to show modest progress each year and it perversely resists radical, enforced improvement. One can take the position that modest change is the surest way to healthy growth; that we can all be grateful that the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress has proven such a conscientious and understanding institutional parent; and that we can thus go about our immediate academic chores, thankful to those of our colleagues who donate their time and specialized skills to the preparation of the Handbook’s contents, without thought of personal responsibility.
The improvements that have been made in the organization of the Handbook reflect a responsiveness on the part of the editor and his advisory board to the changing needs and expanding interests of scholarship on Latin America. Taken together with the editor’s notes on the practices and procedures of preparing an issue that preface Handbooks Nos. 23 and 24, these improvements demonstrate that the Handbook is sufficiently susceptible to rational analysis that the question can be asked: “Is it possible for the Handbook to provide the kind of coverage that would make it a fully authoritative bibliographic tool rather than what it is now, the most important of existing periodical scholarly aids concerned with Latin America?”
The present advisory board of the Handbook is well qualified to determine whether the probability of achieving full coverage is sufficient to justify the Hispanic Foundation in making the major additions to its editorial staff that would be needed to alter the present course of consistent but moderate change to the more radical one of frontal attack on the problem of providing the kind of coverage that would enable the user to know that anything not listed in the Handbook was intentionally omitted on the basis of an understood criteria of selection. If this approach is believed worth the risk, the Hispanic Foundation should be in a position to command support from each individual scholar as needed, as well as from any institution in our society concerned with Latin America. If the solution of the problem of full coverage is not considered feasible we can continue to put to good use the most effective example of inter-disciplinary cooperation that has yet appeared in the field of Latin American scholarship.
From the foregoing it is clear that this reviewer believes that scant purpose is served by remarking on the particulars of Handbook No. 24 with its entries representing, for the most part, material published between 1959 and 1961. The “flow system” of producing the Handbook (described in the “Editor’s note” to No. 24) is an excellent solution to the problem of getting each volume printed within a reasonably short time after the material described has been published. It also makes it purposeless to comment on missing items when the reviewer has no way of knowing whether or not they will appear in the next issue. More than this, his knowledge of the literature is too fractional to have any great meaning outside of his own discipline.
One of the immediate problems to which the editor and his board have addressed themselves is the attainment of a more uniform system of annotation directed at achieving an even quality and the saving of enough space to keep editions under 500 pages. The annotations are the specialists’ views of what “the reasonably interested and informed non-specialist” should know about the work described. They are not intended to be abstracts of the work in question. For this historian, and thus, “non-specialist” the annotations provided by Taylor and Wood on “Government and International Relations,” Garbuny on “Economics: Latin America except Brazil and Mexico” in the interests of space biographical data—items 2031 and 2039— could systematically be edited out); Newman and Salzano on “Human Biology”; and Dimmick on “Brazilian Literature” (Mexican prose fiction, incidentally, is missing from No. 24) are completely satisfactory in content and—especially in the ease of Dimmick— written with style and even wit.
In the interest of space perhaps the second entry for certain items could be omitted. A paper by Luis Ospina Vázquez, the Colombian economist, published in pamphlet form, was commented on in both the economics and the history sections with adequate cross reference. Because the economist best qualifies as the “specialist” in this instance, the remarks of the historian could be omitted. Two anthropologists comment separately on a book by their colleague Charles Erasmus. It would be the editor’s function to select one—particularly in this instance where the non-specialist might have doubts as to whether the book provides detailed treatment of the Maya Indians or those along the Mayo River. Given the policy of having the annotations prepared by “specialists” it seems odd that a 320 page book by an agricultural economist is found only under ethnology (item 728) and not in economics, while an article on agrarian reform by a sociologist is listed in economics (item 1920) but not in the sociology section. These are matters amenable to editorial treatment given an adequate staff.
The vast debt each historian owes to the Hispanic Foundation and the contributing editors has been commented upon. It remains only to congratulate the University of Florida Press for presenting us each year with a volume so easy to read and so remarkably free of errors.
