ABSTRACT
Latin America, as the first region of what is now called the Third World to be thoroughly subjugated by European colonialism and the first to throw off that subjugation, has long been the Third World's pacesetter and harbinger. From the perspectives of United States- and European-based scholars, as well as from those of Latin America's own creative and scholarly writers, the study of Latin America has been approached as the study of a problem, or set of problems. The historical-cultural approach to the study of Latin America and its problems focuses on the persistence in contemporary Latin America of attitudes, institutions, and social relations that are said to have been characteristic of the Iberian Peninsula in medieval times. By the end of the 1980s, the popularity of the corporatist paradigm appeared to be waning, and some of its former proponents, including Howard Wiarda, had turned to an emphasis on cultural causation.
