The Amazon was, until recently, one of those distant and unknown regions that excited the imagination but was largely irrelevant to the daily lives of scholars, policymakers, and the majority of Latin Americans. This is no longer the case. Developmentalists and disenfranchised people alike look to it as a vast resource area capable of yielding mineral, forestal, animal, and agrarian riches. Ecologists warn against the potential devastation of an environment that is still poorly understood. Agronomists are challenged by the variability encountered at every turn and the diverse responses of crops to standard management practices. Anthropologists and sociologists decry the lack of a social consciousness in the development of the Amazon and try to assess the human costs of this development paid by native and peasant populations. Many other specialists also have found the Amazon an important natural laboratory for their research skills. Yet much of this research remains inaccessible in specialized disciplinary or regional journals and unrelated to the central problems that are, fundamentally, multidisciplinary.

To think of Nicolás Guillén is to be immediately reminded of two observations. The first by José Martí, who, quite aptly argued:

The thirty-four-year reign of President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) is generally acknowledged to have been the period of Mexico's great economic transformation. In reality, Mexico was unable to avoid the accelerated change that overtook it during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as proliferating patterns of trade, which accompanied the burgeoning industrial development of the United States and Western Europe, tied Mexico ever more closely to the global economy. An international economic division of labor was negotiated between foreign industrialists and entrepreneurs—who urgently needed primary products, markets for goods, and opportunities for investment, and national and regional elites—who welcomed infrastructural improvements, modern machinery, an array of consumer goods, and the increasing availability of foreign capital.

In 1975, the CLACSO Employment-Unemployment Group held a meeting in La Plata, Argentina, about employment in Latin America. Due to the diversity and specificity of the interests involved, several subgroups were created to permit a flexible and decentralized working scheme. Zulma Recchini de Lattes, from the Centro de Estudios de Población (CENEP), was appointed coordinator of the subgroup on female participation in the labor market. Her first task was the compilation of a bibliography on the subject in Latin America, and a thorough survey of studies in progress by Latin American investigators and institutions. The results of this effort were presented at a meeting of the CLACSO Employment-Unemployment Group in May 1976. In August 1977, the subgroup met in Mexico to discuss future activities.

Japan has maintained rather intense contact with various parts of Latin America, previously through migration and recently through economic relations. Japanese scholarly production about Latin America, however, has never matched that contact. Although thousands of technical reports, travelogues, and general books on Latin America have been produced in Japan, scholarly works of value have been scarce. There are, however, a few works researched and written by Japanese, both in Japan and in overseas Japanese communities, that could contribute to, or at least add new source materials to, the study of Latin America; they are relatively unknown to foreign scholars, mainly because of the barrier presented by the Japanese language.

More than ten years have passed since the publication of Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina, thus providing a fitting opportunity to assess the impact of dependency theory after a decade of fiery debates and hopeful explorations. Cardoso and Faletto's book had an immediate and decisive influence, not only on the reading public but—perhaps more importantly—on the collective effort to define the issues and themes around which a new view of Latin America was to be built, based on the recognition of the central role of dependency in the shaping of Latin American realities.

The publication of the English edition of Cardoso and Faletto (1979) is a “happening,” an “event.” Consider the following:

Of all the approaches to development, particularly Latin American development, of the last fifteen years, none has had deeper or more pervasive influence, especially in the United States, than the dependency perspective.

Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina se ha constituido, sin duda alguna, en el análisis de los procesos sociales y políticos latinoamericanos que más impacto ha tenido en los círculos académicos e intelectuales de dicho continente en los ultimos quince años. Asimismo, la versión en inglés publicada en 1979 ha alcanzado una difusión semejante en los Estados Unidos y Canadá, habiéndose transformado en una referencia obligada de todo curso sobre sociedad y política en América Latina.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto's now-classic analysis of Latin American dependent development is perhaps the most important synthesis of the shifting alliances between classes and interest groups that have been cause and consequence of nation-building, state formation, and capital accumulation in Latin America. The book is admirable in many ways, but especially in the scale of its focus across time and space. Rather than telling us every detail of a particular country or period it uses an analytical perspective based on class analysis to compare “situations of dependency” across Latin America from the period of decolonization in the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. I am not a Latin Americanist and so I cannot evaluate the many interpretations of political events in the book. Rather my comments will focus on its theoretical implications, its special strengths, and its possible limitations from the point of view of the capitalist world system as a whole.