This issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review features three articles on twentieth-century Latin America in urban, rural, and cultural history, all pertinent to political history.In “Reconstructing the City, Constructing the State: Government in Valparaíso after the Earthquake of 1906,” Samuel Martland examines how a natural catastrophe conditioned political relationships among the national government, the municipal government, and foreign capital in Valparaíso, Chile’s major port and most important commercial and financial center. Ironically, the intervention of the national government in response to the disaster took place in an era of greater local autonomy after the civil war of 1891 and foreshadowed the intensifying asymmetry of federal-local relations that began in the 1920s. Urban historians will enjoy Martland’s analysis of urban renewal and expansion that rebuilt the city horizontally, rather than up the nearby hills, to merge with the adjacent city of Viña del Mar.Tanalís Padilla, in “From Agraristas to Guerrilleros: The Jaramillista Movement in Mexico,” contributes to the expanding historiography of post-1940 Mexican politics, tracing this important campesino movement that flourished between 1942 and 1962 in Emiliano Zapata’s home state of Morelos. Assuming the Zapatista mantle of land and liberty, the Jaramillistas deployed a standard politics of rhetoric, petition, and mobilization within the framework created by the Mexican Revolution and the process of postrevolutionary state formation. Eventually, however, government recalcitrance and the Mexican response to the Cuban Revolution impelled a radicalization of discourse and tactics influenced by Guevarista foquismo and Maoist theory. Padilla examines this turn within the context of volatile and shifting national politics.In “The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s,” Matthew B. Karush enters the debate between scholars who argue that class polarization in Buenos Aires increased during the 1930s and those who emphasize patterns of assimilation and social mobility among the children of immigrants. He argues that Argentine film melodramas and comedies, readily viewed by the lower middle and working classes and disdained by those of higher status, presented a subtle critique of social mobility. Depicting the poor as guardians of virtue and national authenticity and the rich as greedy and beholden to foreigners, these films failed to construct myths of national integration that marked Hollywood in these years. Scholars seeking to develop new ways of integrating the mass media into historical analysis will appreciate Karush’s explanation of filmmakers’ cinematic strategies and his counter-readings of melodrama informed by feminist film analysis.In our archival section, Rodney Anderson and Tamara Spike describe the Guadalajara Census Project (1791 – 1930). This hefty project — begun in the early 1990s and now available in the first of two CD-ROMs — is a model for future electronic databases of historical documents and records. The data are packaged for easy use by those with no special training in database software or statistics procedures. Nonspecialists will welcome their discussion of technological advances that have made data input easier and data analysis simpler. Their description of the procedures, variables, and potential insights of these particular censuses will be of interest to social, cultural, and economic historians. In a closely related vein, Vincent Peloso describes the heretofore untapped anonymous manuscript census of Lima, undertaken in 1860 and housed in the municipal archive of that city. The four volumes of this census document contain a detailed counting of city districts, streets and alleys, dwellings, and residents, presented in raw, disaggregated data. The census provides useful information on variations in space utilization, household size and composition, urban density, and the changing patterns of occupation of residential space. It also records information on Lima’s population by gender, education, religion, occupation, place of residence, place of origin, race, and ethnicity. The data attest to strong Afro-Peruvian representation in the city. While its authenticity seems solid, we can only speculate about who commissioned and conducted the count. Peloso offers some reasoning to suggest it was compiled by the Catholic Church.Our book review section opens with a valuable review essay by Jürgen Buchenau comparing new and recently revised Latin American history textbooks. His overarching observation is that there are three basic organizing principles that textbook authors can choose — chronological, geographic, or thematic — and that each structure entails certain strengths and weaknesses. He further notes that recent works emphasize the experience of ordinary people, in contrast with the macro political-economic perspective (and in particular the dependency paradigm) that characterized textbooks first conceived in the 1970s and 1980s.