We welcome the animated debate raised by Analytic Narratives concerning social scientific methods and the scope of rational choice. Advocates of mathematical and rational models have long claimed they have much to tell us about situations where behavior can be quantified or where the situation under study recurs many times. However, it was thought impermissible for rational choice theories (and rational choice) to venture into the analysis of big events. Political scientists like Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba (1994) implicitly conceded the issue by concentrating on the problem of case selection when the number of cases is small but greater than one.We believe unique events are too important to leave aside, and we use rational choice, particularly game theory, as a means to study unique events.

Research on immigrants and the eventual outcomes of immigration processes was at the very foundation of American sociology. But with the exception of a couple of studies on the Mexicans in the United States, such as Paul Taylor' (1932, 1934) monumental work on the life story of Mexican immigrant laborers in the Chicago and Calumet region during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Manuel Gamio' (1971 [1930], 1971 [1931]) anthropological studies of Mexican immigrants in the United States, and Edith Abbott' The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935 (1936), Latinos were remarkably absent from such studies. Instead, these studies focused on the European immigrant experience and the experience of black Americans as newcomers to America' cities. Scholarship on Latinos (much less by Latinos) simply did not put down roots as early as scholarship on Afro-Americans. Perhaps this was partly due to the smaller size of the population back then, coupled with its being largely immigrant—composed of people who thought they would one day return to where they came from.

The world-systems perspective was invented for modeling and interpreting the expansion and deepening of the capitalist regional system as it emerged in Europe and incorporated the whole globe over the past 500 years (Wallerstein 1974; Chase-Dunn 1998; Arrighi 1994). The idea of a core/periphery hierarchy composed of “advanced” economically developed and powerful states dominating and exploiting “less developed” peripheral regions has been a central concept in the world-systems perspective. In the last decade the world-systems approach has been extended to the analysis of earlier and smaller intersocietal systems. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills (1994) have argued that the contemporary global political economy is simply a continuation of a 5,000-year-old world system that emerged with the first states in Mesopotamia. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall (1997) have modified the basic world-systems concepts to make them useful for a comparative study of very different kinds of systems. They include very small intergroup networks composed of sedentary foragers, as well as larger systems containing chiefdoms, early states, agrarian empires, and the contemporary global system in their scope of comparison.