This book provides a first-hand account of the author's encounters as a
social geographer, based on his field research and travels in Mexico and
the Caribbean. The interlocutors of different classes and races
introduce the reader to a variety of urban and rural communities, many
of them involved in development projects. Two leitmotifs of the 1960s
and 1970s recur throughout the volume: decolonization, state formation,
and the quest for democracy in the post-colonial societies of Mexico and
the Caribbean; and the conditions which were likely to constrain or
challenge these developments, quintessentially associated with the 1959
Cuban revolution, the cold war and student radicalism.