The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean

Book excerpt: Now in a larger format and fully revised, with new maps and photographs, this new edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean remains the essential reference for anyone concerned with the region. Copiously illustrated, lucidly written, and comprehensive in its coverage, the Encyclopedia has been developed for the general reader by an international team of seventy scholars. Structured in six parts, it explores the regional trends and general trends that will provide nonspecialists with the necessary overview. The Encyclopedia examines both urgent contemporary issues such as economic and population growth, trade and international debt, tourism and the environment, and the longer term factors that have molded Latin America as we find it today: the native flora and fauna, the emergence of early civilizations in Mexico and Peru, imperial domination over three centuries by Spain and Portugal, the struggle for independence in the nineteenth century, and then the political turbulence of the twentieth. Coverage is provided of music and literature, architecture, painting, and intellectual life, for this is equally the region of the tango and the samba, Borges and Neruda, García Márquez and Diego Rivera, Villa Lobos and Bob Marley.