laird w. bergad is an associate professor in the Department of Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College, City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1980, and is the author of Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Princeton, 1983). He is currently completing a book based on archival research in Cuba titled Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Socioeconomic History of Matanzas, supported by a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a grant from the Social Science Research Council.
a. pieter jacobs is a Ph.D. candidate at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He is presently in Seville on a grant of the Unger van Brero Foundation conducting dissertation research on migration movements between Spain and America, 1598-1640.
susan e. ramírez teaches Latin American history at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, She received her Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently writing a book on Peruvian ethnohistory, focusing on the initial contact between the Indians and Spanish in the north and subsequent cultural change before 1575.
david sowell is assistant professor of history at Allegheny College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1986, having completed his dissertation on artisan political activity in Bogotá, Colombia from 1832 until 1919. He is continuing his investigation of laboring groups in Bogotá and is preparing for an investigation on the political culture of early national Bolivia.
rafael varón gabai is currently affiliated with the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of London. He received his M.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin and is now working toward his Ph.D. degree at the University of London. He is writing his dissertation on the Pizarro family and their establishment of Spanish colonial rule in Peru. He spent 1986-87 doing research in Spanish archives.
