James J. Parsons

THE NORTHERN ANDEAN ENVIRONMENT

The Andean Cordillera, one of the worlds great mountain ranges, dominates the landscape and life of Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela (Frontispiece). These three countries, with a comrbined population approaching 50 million, were briefly united politically as Gran Colombia in the years immediately following the nineteenth century wars of independence. They continue to retain a sense of common identity and interest that arises as much from the similarity of their physical environments as from their history (Romero, 1965). Their traditions and their economies are mountain-based. Half the population, and considerably more than half in Colombia, still lives within the mountains, despite a continuing downslope migration towards the surrounding tropical lowlands. Continuing high rates of population growth and the attractions of urban life in such major cities as Quito, Bogota, Cali, Medellin, and Caracas underlie the persistence of their political and cultural dominance and of their dense rural settlement pat-

The Migration of Canary Islanders to the Americas: An Unbroken Current Since Columbus

The history of migration from the Canary Islands of Spain to the Americas from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries is described. (ANNOTATION)

Mr. Sauer and the Writers

The geographer Carl Sauer was an articulate figure within the larger field of American scholarship. His distinctive worldview and his emphasis on the historical past in the shaping of the cultural landscape drew enthusiastic response from a significant group of avant-garde poets associated with Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and their iconoclastic mentor, Charles Olson (191o-1970). Olson was a central figure in the postmodern revolution that energized and transformed the appearance and substance of poetry in the United States in the years following World War II. Olson was strongly attracted to the originality and insightfulness of Sauers writings, his sensitivity to the aesthetic values in the cultural landscape, his insistence on the immutable link between history and geography, his identification with people living close to the land, and the vigor and authenticity of his writing style. Today, more than twenty years after Olsons death, his literary heirs are reaching back to the maestros roots, seeking to learn more about the man Sauer and his geography.

Southward to the Sun: The Impact of Mass Tourism On the Coast of Spain

Few phenomena have had greater social, economic, and environmental consequences for post World War II Europe than the emergence of an international mass tourism focused on the warm beaches to the south. As long as vacations were confined largely to the wealthy, the nearer shores of the French and Italian Riviera received most of this summer migration with lesser numbers seeking out the Atlantic side of the Iberian peninsula. The advent of popular tourism, based on low cost charter air travel and aggressive promotion bv the big tour operators, has made places such as Rimini, Corfu, Mallorca, Tenerife, and Torremolinos as well known to the average Britain, German, or Scandinavian as the resorts of the Riviera or Europes great capital cities. More and more the traditional tourist centers along with the museums, art galleries, cathedrals, and monuments of earlier civilizations have yielded primacy of popularity to the sun and sand of the warmer beaches to the south. Spain more than any other country has been the recipient of this massive influx of sun seekers. Its tourist industry, the largest and most up-to-date in Europe, has come to be the major prop under the

Carl Sauer's Vision of an Institute for Latin American Studies

This working association of Latin Americanists has kept before itself the general objective of culture history. . . . Our reach at least is Wellsian. We are trying to understand the fortunes of man in Latin America, considering that there has been a significant contiguity and continuity of man in that geographic frame. Perhaps I can take two common catch words and give them a new juxtaposition, saying that we are interested in the personality of the culture or cultures of Latin America. This means that we have been working on studies concerned with the content of culture, with the values by which these cultures have lived, with the diffusion of cultural elements or the resistance thereto, with plasticity, stagnation, and self-destruction, in short with many questions of cultural growth and change. - Carl O. Sauer, letter to Stacy May, 30 July 1937 In the 1930s Carl Sauer spent a great deal of energy, though to little avail, trying to institutionalize Latin American Studies on the University of California, Berkeley, campus and to obtain outside funding for them. This effort, which promised little personal benefit, is detailed in the Sauer Papers in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley - a rich and accessible lode for anyone who is interested in the history of geography, especially as it relates to Latin America - based research (Constance 1978).(1) Sauer came late to the study of Latin America (Parsons 1976). He had been appointed to the Berkeley faculty as a full professor in 1923, at the age of thirty-seven, with an established reputation based on work in his native Midwest. The record suggests that he first set foot in Mexico, without any previous indication of interest in the area or familiarity with Spanish, in May and June of 1926, when he led graduate students Peveril Meigs, Fred Kniffen, and Samuel Dicken on a four-week reconnaissance of northern Baja California, almost three years after he arrived in California. There is a message here to all geographers: Careers need not be defined by ones graduate training or dissertation, or even by ones early professional years. Sauers first substantial block of time in Mexico came in 1928, and thereafter he spent a month or more there in each of the next seven years. He happened onto a people and country that excited him, and he went for it, initially enticed by evidence that seemed to link the high cultures of central Mexico with the native peoples of Sinaloa, Sonora, and the Pueblo culture of the southwestern United States. Not until 1932 did he offer his first classes on Latin America. Oskar Schmieder, an early Sauer hire and a Latin Americanist, had elected to return to his native Germany, and the field was temptingly open. Interest in Mexico and the American Southwest was growing in other departments, and the Institute of Social Sciences, created three years earlier and of which Sauer was a part, promised limited support for fieldwork. EAST-COAST CONNECTIONS Sauers relationships with higher-ups in the East Coast foundation world developed early and were close. In 1934, only three years after he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, he was named to the influential Guggenheim Selection Committee, on which he was to remain for thirty years. Through Henry Allen Moe, the Foundations longtime secretary - and an unabashed admirer and personal friend - Sauer came into contact with the major figures in the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, as well as with other potential sources of funding. One of these was Joseph H. Willits, dean of the Wharton School of Business, who would later - 1939-1954 - head up the Division of Social Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. As early as 1934 Sauer had served with Willits on Franklin Delano Roosevelts Advisory Council on Population Redistribution, one of several Depression-born government agencies in which he was to become active. The uncommon warmth and mutual respect between Sauer and both Moe and Willits is richly documented in an extensive correspondence in the Bancroft Library (Sauer 1934). …

The Topia Road: A Trans-Sierran Trail of Colonial Mexico

FIG. i-Colonial roads in western Mexico. Key: I, West Coast-Interior Plateau connections; 2, West Coast Road (from C. 0. Sauer: Road to Cibola, Ibero-Americana, 3, Berkeley, I932); 3, Western Interior Plateau Road; 4, connections northward from Guadalajara. The Sierra Madre Occidental presents one of the most formidable obstacles to land transportation in Mexico. Throughout its length of 750 miles, from a point near the United StatesMexico boundary in the north to the Santiago River in the south, no railroad, auto road, or cart trail has ever traversed this barrier. Since colonial days only a few pack trails across the Sierra have served as direct lines of land contact between the Pacific coastal areas and the interior plateau of northern Mexico. The Sierra Madre is a plateau, I00 to I50 miles wide, with a steep western escarpment. It represents the higher western edge of the great Mexican plateau. Outflows of Tertiary extrusives, accompanied by uplift, have raised the Sierra to a general altitude of 8ooo feet above the sea, and some I500 to 2000 feet above the adjacent parts of the interior plateau; only isolated sections reach altitudes above I0,000 feet. The eastern part is characterized by a slightly rolling surface dotted with mountain meadows occupying the shallow north-northwest-south-southeast structural depressions. This part presents few difficulties to land transportation. To the west, however, the headward erosion of the streams flowing to the Pacific has cut deep box canyons into some parts of the plateau surface. These precipitous canyons, 8oo to I000 feet deep, are more numerous near the western edge of the highlands and impose serious handicaps on even mule transport. However, the most formidable barrier is the steep western escarpment, known as the barrancas. Scores of large westward-flowing streams have frayed this escarpment with enormous canyons, or barrancas, 2000 to 3000 feet deep, producing some of the most rugged terrain in Mexico. Pack trails must follow either the 406

Recent Industrial Development in the Gulf South

T HE physical growth of Americas industrial plant in the past decade has perhaps nowhere been more spectacular than in the Gulf South. Unsurpassed ac.cessibility to petroleum, natural gas, and key chemical raw materials is here combined with low power costs, tidewater shipping facilities, a mild climate, and a growing regional and export market. Each of these factors, together with a boundless enthusiasm for regional promotion, has contributed to a proliferation of industrial plants on the coastal plains and in the piny woods that is remolding the face of the landscape in much of Texas and Louisiana.

Gold Mining in the Nicaragua Rain Forest

In no country of the New World does gold and gold mining play so pro minent a role in the national economy as it does in the Central American Re public of Nicaragua. If the USSRs production is excluded, Nicaraguas annual bullion output of 260,000 ounces in recent years has accounted for better than one per cent of the worlds gold production. Among the Latin American> repub lics only Mexico arid Colombia surpass it; on a per capita basis Nicaragua (1950 population, 1,057,000) stands easily at the head of the list. With the worlds gold-mining industry in the doldrums gold was nevertheless the lead ing export from Nicaragua every year but one between 1938 and 1949. Recent ly, in the face of soaring coffee prices, it has dropped to second place on the countrys export list. In 1953 reported bullion shipments were valued at

Spread of African pasture grasses to the American tropics.

8.7 million (U. S.) or nearly

The green turtle and man

8 per capita.