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This paper presents a review of the many dictionaries of psychology published in Latin America between 1916 and 2000. Information was retrieved from publishing house catalogs, databases, archives and libraries, and academic curricula, as well as through consultations with specialists in the history of psychology. The article mainly highlights those works that have become widely disseminated in the region. Within this framework, it foregrounds works produced by local authors, as well as foreign works translated into Spanish and Portuguese. The paper also makes reference to various thematic dictionaries, such as those of social psychology and psychoanalysis. Overall, it is argued that the widest dissemination of dictionaries in Latin America took place after the mid-twentieth century, when universities introduced psychology majors and an audience of psychology specialists had emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the notion of "gambiarra", a feature of Brazilian and Latin American culture, as a literary element in two short stories of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. In this sense, some theoretical-critical approaches will be proposed for possible meanings to "gambiarra," not only as a materially objectified element, but also as a process, an action and a production method. I present as hypotheses some of the socio-historical determinations that enable "gambiarra" as a social phenomenon as well as its categorization as a concrete expression of a certain ontological human tendency. The analysis of the short stories, after brief considerations about the author and his work, seeks to understand how the articulation of the "gambiarra" manifests itself in the narratives, allowing also dialectical glimpses about its social dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the case of Latin America, discussions of this kind on the political economy of academic research soon acquire a linguistic connotation. Many Latin American scholars regard English as a colonial or neocolonial language engaged in a permanent struggle with Spanish. This is an interesting point because in Latin America Spanish is itself a „„colonial" language that for more than 500 years has dominated a host of indigenous languages. In this paper discussion is rendered more complicated by the fact that those fostering progressive political aims have reverted to the nineteenthcentury ultranationalist view of English and Anglo-Saxon culture as a directthreat totheir (superior)Hispanicculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical analysis of the last 250 years of Cuban political history, from a perspective of its integration in the Spanish Caribbean. We discuss how the traditional Cuban political and ideological intolerance has contributed to the creation of an inefficient model of regime succession that has taken the country to its current stage. We present and examine several national and international conditions that we believe are necessary to achieve a peaceful transition toward an open and pluralistic system. We analyze and compare the transitions in Brazil, Mexico and Spain. And we draw several conclusions that may be applicable to the Cuban case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aesthetic and ideological project of Transculturalisation in Latin America we find Juan Rulfo. This paper aims at showing how Rulfo's novel Pedro Páramo (1995), deals with perspectives from contemporary Latin American narrative and encompasses a social memory. By means of metaphor, Pedro Páramo represents the history of populations in a Latin American context whose culture has been silenced and which slowly started becoming conscious of that history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discloses a personal interpretation --by no means arbitrary-- of the text On the concept of history or Thesis on the philosophy of history by Walter Benjamin, read in a situated manner: a reading whose penetrating sight pretends to be from Latin America. It will be insisted in the exceptional critique of Benjamin's work, suggesting that his proposal reaches a redefinition and transvaluation of the concept of history, one that usually determines us and prevents any act, any revolutionary praxis, which in times like ours are required more than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]