Claudio Véliz, The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America (University of California Press, 1994)
Alma Guillermoprieto,The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America Now (New York: Knopf, 1994)
Jorge G. Castañeda's Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1993).
Just why is Latin America the way it is? Indeed why is it not like anywhere else? These have been the perennial questions of those external to the continent who take an interest in its affairs. Now they are being regularly addressed by a new generation of Latin Americans who have become aware of this foreign discourse and wish to participate in it. For an important development of the last thirty years has been the noticeable increase in Latin America's production of its own intellectual interpreters of the current (and the historical) scene, indigenous commentators familiar with both the United States and Europe who have been able to make the necessary connections and comparisons.
There have always been nationalist historians and writers, but now there are a plethora of political scientists working in universities or newspapers, and increasingly it is their voices and their views that predominate at international gatherings of scholars, businessmen, diplomats and journalists. And it is they who provide both the research and the reportage. This is the significance of many of the most recent books about Latin America available in the North American market, and notably of the ones here under consideration.
