Managing editor's preface.

The fourteenth volume in the series of MACLAS: Latin American Essays presents a selection of eleven papers given at the Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Mid Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies held at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York on April 7th and 8th, 2000. It also includes Jose Morales paper, given the previous year at the Ursinus Conference, but whose subject falls within the purview of the St. John Fisher Conference: "Democracy and Human Rights: Latin America and the World." One roundtable, 15 panels, 2 plenary session panels, and a banquet speech, in all 64 papers, were scheduled at the Twenty-first Conference. John Francis Maisto, U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, gave the keynote address: "Democratization in Latin America: The Case of Venezuela." In addition to the collection in hand, Richard Hillman has published another volume of Conference Papers especially relevant to St. John Fisher's Institute for the Study of Democracy and Human Rights.

Testimony dominates the selection of five papers in the Language and Literature section. Stacey Alba D. Skar, one of two winners of the Street Award, analyzes Jacobo Timerman's testimonial from Argentina's "Dirty War" (1976-1983). She illustrates how he recreates his voice from the realms of fragmentation and obliteration engineered by his persecutors. Javier F. Campos comments upon the scarcity of artistic works devoted to exposure of the abuses of Chile's military dictatorship. He compares Roberto Brodsky's novel El peor de los heroes (1999) with two films: Gonzalo Justiniano's Amnesia (1993) and Ariel Dorfman's La muerte y la doncella to conclude that the national trauma is too recent to permit explicit, full-scale remembering. Margaret V. Ekstrom addresses the issue of the critical reception of Rigoberta Menchu's testimonials. Some scholars fear that study of such texts in American schools will displace classics of the canon. Others analyze the style and content of Menchu's testimonials: her use of narrative devices to gain authority, the historical basis of her narrative, the ideological precepts of that narrative, and her displacement of native Indian codes in favor of the Spanish and European. The indigenous woman's modern self-assertion also figures in Gioconda Belli's Utopian novel Waslala. Ruben L. Gomez traces Melisandra's voyage of self-discovery through her travel to and return from Utopia; she prefers to remain in the fallen world where she can be an agent for beneficial change in society, including improvements of women's situations.

The final essay of this section deals with the topic of European and American literary relations. Alfred Wedel searches for the German roots in Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Mann, Ernst Junger, and Fritz Mauthner of several of Borges' concepts: the importance of the will, the concept of the artist as a physically defective but spiritually exceptional being, the importance of the sub-conscious as revealed in Surrealistic narrative, and the nature of language itself.

The two articles under the sociology classification discuss woman's various roles in Latin America. In their interviews of fourteen women, Sautu, Messeroni, and Perez discovered that these Argentine nationals were subject to the same pressures as their North American counterparts in meeting the multiple demands of work and home (children, husbands, parents). Sister Maria Consuelo Parks traces the history of the nuns of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in their pedagogical missions in Peru and Chile. They sought to extend instruction from children of upper-class families to those of poorer families. In addition, they sought to maintain their schools in an ambiance free of political ideology but committed to the religious formation of Christian conscience, which recognizes the obligation to assure social ...