ABSTRACT
This chapter goes back to the end of the 19th century to describe the principal cultural, economic and political processes which stamp contemporary Latin America, respectively, industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation. It also analyses in detail the constrictions, difficulties and tensions that these transformations brought with them. The importance of this analysis is that it illustrates the principal problems facing the population of Latin America in the third-quarter of the 20th century, and above all that it shows the challenges addressed by the region’s intellectuals. These were all the problems related with people’s difficulties in fitting into the modern world, the unjust distribution of wealth and – perhaps most important – those associated with the incessant rise of political violence.
