Con este número se inicia la publicación de una nueva revista dedicada al intercambio continuo y sistemático de información referente a investigaciones que se están llevando a cabo en la actualidad en América Latina en los campos de las Ciencias Sociales y las Humanidades.

To Understand the development of research on latin america we must not overlook the present status of the social sciences throughout the world. One of the characteristics of the contemporary world is that distances hardly exist; scientists thus continually stage “invasions” from more developed into the so-called underdeveloped societies. Such phenomena, of course, existed in the past, too; the origin of anthropology is linked to the study of primitive societies in colonial times. The amount of resources available today, modern transportation facilities, and the constantly growing number of researchers make it increasingly impossible that one area or country could be without social scientists studying something.

A comprehensive survey of recent research on latin american urbanization would be a large task for a team of specialists, particularly if it were to include local as well as comparative studies, the working papers which circulate through government and academic offices, and all the scholarly disciplines which now contribute to the topic. This paper is no more than a sampling of research on selected aspects of urbanization, interlarded with commentary and a bit of opinion. Except for Section 1, emphasis is upon scholarly output of the past five years. Whatever unity the presentation may have springs from the interests of a historian who is less concerned with physical and social engineering than with identifying cultural and institutional imperatives of the past which shape contemporary social process.

Land reform as a subject of investigation in latin america post-dates its appearance as a political measure, and although its appearance as a plank in programs of liberal and leftist parties and movements has been in vogue since the Twenties, few serious studies that can be properly referred to as land reform investigation took place until the Thirties. Many of the early studies that may be cited as pioneer works in this field are fact-finding land use studies by the geographers (e.g., McBride in Bolivia and Chile), and some early rural sociological studies in the same vein (e.g., Carl Taylor in Argentina and the Consejo de Bienestar Rural study on the Venezuelan Andes). In many cases these types of studies have continued into the past decade (DeYoung in Haiti, Ford in Peru, and Fals Borda in Colombia). The wave of anthropological community studies (mostly rural) were microcosmic, pioneer type research on land tenure. There were few agricultural censuses upon which any sort of nationwide study would need to have been based and in general the basic reference material for land reform until 1950 was most spotty and conjectural.