Several of the panels on Latin at the December 1990 meeting of the American Historical Association took up themes and debates of concern to historians of labor and the working class. In a panel entitled Immigrants, Not Conquistadors: The Spanish Presence in Latin during the National Period, Diana Velez (Tinker Foundation) stressed the way shifts in Spanish government policy affected the ebb and flow of emigration toward Latin in the pre-World War I period. While nineteenth-century governments had sought to bar or tightly restrict emigration out of national security concerns, a looser policy was adopted as officials came to perceive that permitting and regulating emigration could offer an alternative to agrarian reform, a means of widening foreign markets for Spanish exports, and a source of foreign currency income from Spaniards working abroad and sending a portion of their wages home. Birgit Sonnesson (New York University) compared Spanish chain-migration to Puerto Rico and Cuba, stressing the effects of the different social formations in the Spanish provinces where emigrants originated. Jos? Moya (University of Califor nia, Los Angeles) examined Spanish immigrants in Argentina between 1855 and 1930. Evidence from census manuscripts cast doubt on the standard two-class model of nineteenth-century Argentina, showing both an expansion of the middle class due to increasing public employment and a slow, incomplete process of proletarianization as industrial employment grew but mechanization lagged. Argentina attracted large numbers of skilled immigrants, and the labor force did not undergo deskilling in the early phases of industrialization. Indeed, the proportion of skilled workers in the labor force grew from 34 percent in 1870 to 43 percent in 1914. A panel on Recent Research on the History of the Family in Latin America included a paper by Mark Szuchman (Florida International University) that called for further research on changes in productive relations and the impact thereof on the proletarian family. He suggested that the Latin American experience con trasted with that of Western Europe. Whereas capitalist development weakened the patriarchal family in Europe, in Latin it worsened the position of women by driving them back into the home. Elizabeth Ann Kuznesof (University of Kansas) pointed out that recent research on family history in Brazil has highlighted the prevalence there of nuclear and female-headed households in urban areas and among ex-slaves, thereby challenging the paradigm developed by Gilberto Freyre wherein the patriarchal extended family was considered hegemonic.