Predictably, a series of seminars spread over two summers and five general topic areas, with some two dozen academic and non-academic contributions, will produce results that are uneven in quality. The present volume, however, extends the range of variation to several dimensions so that the reader is left wondering about the selection criteria used by the editor. (Not all the contributions were even given before the Latin American Institute seminars of the Catholic University of America. Some were delivered before other groups, even in other countries.) By no stretch of the imagination does the title serve to identify an integrating theme for all of the papers included, and what purports to be an interdisciplinary inquiry is, in several instances, rather more an undisciplined one.
Hermán Echavarría’s once-over-lightly review, if such it can be called, of the Alliance for Progress brings nothing new at all to the attention of most HAHR readers and, indeed, makes a good many challengeable assertions within a relatively few paragraphs. Walter Sedwitz’s contribution, on the other hand, provides a somewhat more satisfactory introductory view of the Alliance, though in it there are a number of provocative themes which merit a much fuller elaboration than they receive here, and one can think of few people better qualified to make such an elaboration than Sedwitz himself.
Roughly comparable, at least in terms of the broad scope of concern and non-technical level of treatment, are several discussions of such topics as inter-American policy, Latin American integration, and investment and growth in Latin America. At the other end of some sort of spectrum, however, one finds Michael Kenny’s study of voluntary associations among Spaniards in Mexico City—an interesting topic in its own right, surely, but one which is scarcely related at all to any of the other themes touched upon in the volume, let alone germane to the kinds of processes usually suggested by the title of the collection. Albert Frances’ exploration of entrepreneurial concepts certainly has more to do with socio-economic change, but the connection with Latin America is barely mentioned. Oscar Echevarría Salvat’s piece constitutes an elementary discussion of cost-benefit analysis in very general terms, again with no specific attention to Latin America as such.
Several selections have to do, in one way or another, with the financial aspects of Latin American life, including joint business ventures, and these are perhaps among the more informative contributions, although they are mostly economic rather than socio-economic in focus and presentation. On the more clearly multidisciplinary side, Hugo Margain’s remarks on Mexican agrarian reform simply reiterate a few clichés, while João Gonçalves de Souza’s summation of the Sudene experience is only slightly less disappointing, especially considering what insights he might have provided. Juan Casasco’s look at urban slums comes closer than most of the selections to capturing the flavor suggested by the title of the volume, while Alberto Martínez Piedra’s epilogue on the population problem is similar in its bearing on the title theme.
In short, with considerable pruning and rewriting, the book under review might have been made into a more useful item for the nonspecialist reader. Fully a third, if not more, of the “contributions” might have been eliminated without any loss whatever.
