A Retrospective and Prospects

Forty years ago, when we met with more than a hundred progressive Latin Americanists in Madison, Wisconsin, and agreed to move ahead with the publication of a new journal, I was confronted with several challenges. James Petras endorsed the idea of an alternative journal and expected me as editor to assume all responsibilities and others to be supportive. I insisted, however, that the effort had to be a collective one—that I did not want unilateral authority and wanted to manage the journal’s affairs with a core of committed editors who would meet frequently and together decide on its content. Anyone identified with the journal would have to be participating in its activities. Only through the energies of many involved persons could we evolve differently from other academic journals. I would step in where others could no longer carry on, but we would find new people to replace them. Each of us would assume editorial responsibilities alongside administrative tasks. We would strive to be different while publishing peer-reviewed quality articles that were critical in their assessments and cast in theoretical frameworks. The journal would be Latin American, not North American, and the composition of its editorial board, its content, and its direction would be shaped by Latin American scholars and highly qualified Latin Americanists everywhere. I volunteered that I might be able to coordinate journal affairs up to 25 years but my aim was to build an editorial collective that could carry on without me.

Now, 40 years after that humble beginning, LAP is stronger than ever and with its initial principles and objectives intact and is reaching out in new ways to respond to the changes that confront publishing today. While we may carry on with a print edition, the journal is widely circulated electronically, reaching more than 7,000 subscribers. LAP is available to academic and research institutions throughout Brazil and Mexico, and it reaches most countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Our publisher has facilitated open access to the journal in many countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as well as Latin America. We are involved in exchanges of journals and journal ads, and we are working through rapidly changing and evolving social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other means. We promote our issues through podcast interviews with editors and authors. We are beginning to think about ways to repackage journal content in electronic book form. Since our beginnings we have devoted a portion of each editorial meeting to political education, assessing journal issues in progress or recently published, searching for controversy and new directions, and trying to stay on the cutting edge of critical scholarship. We also strive to be aware of political issues through a list serve that disseminates analysis through political reports. We devoted time at editorial meetings to seeking consensus on a statement celebrating 50 years of the Cuban Revolution (36 [1], 2009) and a critical analysis of the Obama administration and its failure to address its policy toward Latin America in constructive, helpful, and progressive ways (38 [4], 2011).

While we continue to work with young scholars and others whose initial manuscript submissions show promise but need substantial revision, we are overwhelmed with work to do, circulating to editors (of whom there are now more than 100) for review up to 20–25 manuscripts a week and considering some 600–700 manuscripts a year while simultaneously working on four or five journal issues in production and coordinating the assembly of another dozen or more forthcoming ones. Over the years the journal has grown from three issues to four and then to six issues annually. We began with a core of 12 coordinating editors (of whom 5 have remained deeply involved over all these years and 2 others continue to review manuscripts), but today we have 24. During our first decade we averaged 2,000 subscribers, but we often reprinted an additional 2,000 copies for classroom use, and the journal was available in 68 bookstores throughout the United States. When the minority interest of our publisher, a local newspaper, was bought out by the Wall Street Journal, we found a new publisher in Sage Publications, with whom we have enjoyed a good relationship. We have successfully repackaged material from the journal into books, some of them published alongside monographs in a series of 23 volumes during the 1990s by Westview Press. Since the turn of the century we have organized journal articles and new material into a series entitled “Latin American Perspectives in the Classroom,” published by Rowman and Littlefield and including volumes on development, women, social movements, the left, Latinos, and Venezuela. Rowman and Littlefield also sponsors an LAP series of monographs called “Critical Currents in Latin America.”

In contrast to most journals focused on Latin America, LAP not only ensures that its content is evaluated by Latin Americans but encourages and receives contributions from scholars in Latin America, most of them written in Portuguese or Spanish. Over the years we have worked to help scholars and especially Latin Americans shape their manuscripts into publishable form. We work with a dozen translators to bring Latin American writing to an English-language readership, on average translating 20–30 manuscripts a year—a costly effort that no other journal can afford to replicate. Long ago we published an issue of Cuban writing, all of it translated from Spanish, and three of us spent several weeks in Cuba assisting Cuban scholars with their revisions.

I am frequently asked where I think LAP can make a difference in the future. Our web site (www.latinamericanperspectives.com) shows prospectuses for most of our ongoing work on thematic issues, many of them focused on topics not in the mainstream. Currently, for example, we are working on the politics of collective memory, a theme that takes us back to the repressive moments under the military dictatorships of recent decades, and an examination of how “high levels of economic instability, violence, corruption and impunity have also motivated collective efforts to call for justice and nonviolence” while “struggling to meet more democratic and fair living conditions.” Other issues will explore such topics as the legacy of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, the dynamic internal political economy of contemporary Ecuador, Brazil and the state, Argentina and its transitions the past two decades, modern slavery and human trafficking, climate change, gender and democracy, the media, politics, and democratization, and religion and social inequality in Latin America.

We are reshaping our book reviews to focus on clusters of books related to the theme of an issue and short reviews of books by LAP editors. We continue without much success to look for and review important books that break new ground theoretically. In addition, we have added a new section on Latin American film, including reviews and the streaming on our web site of recent films.

This issue celebrates 40 years of Latin American Perspectives. Its content includes a historical analysis by Jawdat Abu-El-Haj, several accounts by founding editors of LAP, and testimonials by participating editors and others.

A critical overview of 40 years of journal experience is an enormous undertaking, and Abu-El-Haj has not only accomplished this but brought a fresh perspective to our editorial collective. We are appreciative of his observations not only because they take us back to our origins and offer syntheses of major directions pursued by the editorial board over many years but because they challenge us to reassess our objectives and to think seriously about our future directions.

In his profiles of some of the founders, he identifies our bourgeois origins, our family upbringing and school socialization, and the transformative experiences in Latin America that led us to new understandings of what we needed to do to engage with the region and its essential issues. Initially, some of us viewed these profiles with skepticism, but his depiction of me is evidence of the way my outlook has been shaped by new ideas and changing perspectives. I grew up in a conservative setting. My father, having survived the Great Depression, felt compelled to work hard to survive and was afraid of failing to provide for his family. I followed his path through private schools and universities, but my preference turned to public education. In the course of nearly four months’ travel in Latin America during 1958 I became deeply sensitive to the region’s problems and issues—influenced by the Cuban Revolution and by a commitment to help Latin Americans confront their problems, in particular to resist and transcend U.S. influences and policies. Our university teachers did not always comprehend Latin America, but Latin Americans taught us to think differently, to be constructively critical, and to engage with new ideas, theories, and methods. Our early experiences in Latin America awakened us to the necessity to return there frequently and directly experience the struggles of Latin Americans with poverty, inequality, authoritarianism, and external influences. We also became suspicious of sectarian influences and participated in many activist groups whose success emanated from focusing on economic, social, and political issues and problems and in working together with others whose politics, ideologies, and commitments may have differed. As we evolved toward the founding of LAP we discovered that most of our concerns revolved around the capitalism under which we lived, the imperialism that appeared to determine outcomes everywhere, and the socialism to which we aspired.

Abu-El-Haj argues that our collective assumed the model of the public intellectual espoused by C. Wright Mills. Indeed, Mills, especially his study of the power elite and the sociological imagination, was for me an early inspiration, and his writings on Cuba clearly helped shape our own lasting commitments to its revolution. Mills also became interested in and drew us to Marxism, but so too did Paul Baran, whose Political Economy of Growth was a best seller in Latin America and whom I knew because he was a professor at Stanford during my graduate student days there.

Abu-El-Haj correctly refers to the early experiences of a core of LAP founders at Stanford and later in universities and progressive organizations in Southern California, where we learned to work together and respect our political differences by focusing on common problems in Latin America. We were dedicated to our academic professions and very committed as Latin Americanists to reaching out to colleagues in Latin America in search of solutions to their problems. In this spirit we worked through the Latin American Studies Association and through its membership’s desire to found an alternative journal, eventually launching Latin American Perspectives. We did not want LAP to be just another North American or European journal focused on Latin America, so we built an editorial board with a broad array of scholars from Latin America. We tried to be alert to debates and issues among intellectuals in Latin America, and we often carried their concerns to LASA so that the membership could vote (almost always favorably) on resolutions in support of their concerns. We committed ourselves to traveling and living in Latin America in an effort to be aware of and sensitive to those concerns. At the same time, we critically examined U.S and European influences in Latin America. We wanted to publish the work of Latin American scholars. We were receptive to the work of young scholars and during the early years even celebrated the publication of two undergraduate manuscripts and occasionally the work of graduate students. We opened our meetings to attentive graduate and undergraduate students, who served as interns. Some of them were eventually welcomed into the editorial collective, and most of them went on to become prominent scholars and university teachers.

We always tried to be on the cutting edge of theory and ideas. We were perceived early on as an alternative journal, but in our first decade many mainstream academics drifted toward the journal and found space for their writing there or even joined our ranks as editors. Clearly, our work on dependency was of major interest. In our first issue we published an essay that dismissed the dependency idea, at a time when it had challenged most of us to rethink our understanding of Latin America, and included debate in that issue. Thereafter we were only occasionally able to publish debate on controversial issues, but we did return to dependency many times, wanting to put it to rest but always stirring up new concerns.

From the beginning we were concerned with class and class struggle. Marjorie Bray never let us stray from it, and Michael Kearney even led a series of political education sessions around class as an orienting concept for our work. By setting aside an hour or so of an editorial meeting to focus on a question, we were able to remain alive to issues and not be swallowed up by the business of deciding what to publish.

Abu-El-Haj notes a tendency in the journal during the 1990s to be accepting though skeptical of studies of post-Marxism influenced by culture and the new social movements. While I believe that we usually rejected essays along these lines, we were confronted by shifts in academic direction such as the abandonment of Marxism by many progressive scholars and a tendency toward narrow case studies. I recall one LASA congress in which there were a couple of dozen panels on ethnicity, each with its presentations focused on case studies, lacking any theoretical framework. We published four issues and many individual articles on social movements while trying to be sensitive to the limitations of the case studies that often exemplified them and to encourage the development of theory to explain what was happening beyond the dogmatic Eurocentric formulas of the past. Our issues on social movements were popular and frequently used in the classroom, but we always wanted them to be theoretically informed and viewed dynamically. Whatever the limitations of our work on these movements, we certainly gave them more weight as political agents than political parties. I recall a LASA panel, for example, in which Guillermo O’Donnell strongly defended the political party as a democratic institution essential to the openings out of authoritarianism, while Maria Helena Moreira Alves, at the time an LAP editor, brought out the significance of social movements in moving society in new directions. Indeed, as Abu-El-Haj notes, LAP published an issue organized by Tim Harding and James Petras of views of Latin American scholars critical of the formal representative democracy models advocated by O’Donnell and others.

LAP published pioneering work on women, including three early issues that evolved into a classroom reader that went out of print after sales of 5,000 copies. We also published many issues on Cuba, including one that also evolved into a book and, I believe, was the first anthology of Cuban writing in English.

Just as its focus on dependency confronted prevailing understandings of development and underdevelopment, LAP’s work on neoliberalism has been an important challenge to mainstream thinking over the past few decades. Rather than glorify globalization as a panacea, LAP recognized it as a restructuring of capitalism and imperialism and analyzed its impacts on Latin America and the resistance to it. As a journal of capitalism and socialism, LAP has grappled with the economic forms and the political consequences of capitalism’s neoliberal and globalized form and their implications for a new left and socialist project in Latin America. Our November 2002 issue on globalization, edited by Richard Harris (29 [6], 2002), noted that, as with dependency, there were different currents within the left and LAP reflected those in its content. Harris showed that LAP was part of the countercurrent to globalization, challenging its intellectual foundations while identifying it as imperialism.

Abu-El-Haj portrays the LAP collective as initially a model of public intellectuals active in both the academy and society and gradually becoming less interested in confronting issues but recently once again involved in confronting theoretical issues and problems relevant to Latin America. I believe that our internal work as a collective has always been engaged in understanding social classes, analyzing power structures, and demystifying political projects. Recently we organized several issues in celebration of a half century of the Cuban Revolution. We also assessed the Obama administration and its unsuccessful policies in Latin America. In both cases the collective devoted a half year to debates, eventually finding consensus in position papers published in the journal. In practice, however, the collective is very busy keeping up with an extraordinary workload. For those who have been around since the beginning, the challenge has been passing along our ideals, convictions, and aspirations to new members of the collective and keeping the journal alive to new ideas. We want to preserve our legacy and move it in new directions.

Supplementing this overview by a Latin American whose observations were largely shaped outside the LAP collective, this anniversary issue includes five personal statements by founding early editors. Marjorie Bray looks closely at our origins and asserts that the ideas and practices that shaped our outlook in our early years are largely with us today. Bill Bollinger, also reflecting on the journal’s first decades, describes how journal life contributed to his own professional career and continuing activism. Norma Chinchilla emphasizes the success in overcoming personal struggles within and outside the journal that provided her with the strength to carry forward with commitment. Additional personal reflections on the journal are offered by longtime editors Richard Harris, who, despite frequently being far away, managed to participate in many meetings of the collective over nearly four decades, and Nora Hamilton, who has remained an editor since the very early years.

The several dozen testimonials from other editors that follow are reflective of the way we have tried to work together. These editors’ personal observations and insights offer a glimpse into our collaboration—our common concern for critical scholarship and contributing to the Latin America that we love and admire.