Latin American research review

The population census of 1725-1740 was one of the few general censuses to occur in Peru during the colonial period. The census left a mass of detailed demographic data recording a unique moment when the population of the viceroyalty stood at its lowest historical level. It was the centerpiece of a major body of viceregal reform that affected levels of Indian tribute and the mita labor draft and permanently changed the base population subject to both levies, incorporating a large new sector previously partially or wholly exempt. It strongly influenced Peru's Indian and mestizo peoples throughout its execution and provoked the first major wave of popular unrest under the Bourbons. Yet despite the significance of the census, it remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed introduction to the census as a major administrative reform and a source for demographic and other history.

Uruguay has had only five general population censuses - (1852, 1860, 1908, 1963, and 1975). Hence it is necessary to survey other major existing demographic data, whether published or unpublished. This article describes sources for the proto-historical period, seeking to call attention to them, in order to prompt further research. Sources considered are: parochial archives and state population surveys, which can be divided chronologically. Problems caused by the nature of the data are also discussed. - E. Williams

The Rio de Janeiro state archive's collection of entry logs for the city's central detention center, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, provides a rare glimpse into the lives of Rio's—and Brazil's—poor and working classes who otherwise left few written records behind. During the time when the institution maintained the entry logs, police exercised broad power to make arrests. Although relatively few detainees were ever prosecuted or even formally charged, the detention center kept detailed records of detainees' physical appearance, attire, home address, nationality, sex, affiliation, and so on, as well as information about any criminal charges. This article explores the wealth of empirical data that the entry logs provide. It also suggests how scrutinizing this type of document across time shows how record keeping itself changed, in turn affording researchers rare insight into the inner workings of modern Latin American society.

This essay reconstructs the history of the Instituto Físico-Geográfico Nacional, its scientists, and their activities. After surveying the historical context and the first scientific activities in Costa Rica, it narrates the institutional history of the IFG. Also covered are the main activities of the Instituto - meteorology, botany, agriculture, and ethnography, especially the efforts to map Costa Rica in the 1890s. The work of this institute and the scientists associated with it mark the fitful beginnings of the institutionalization of modern science in Costa Rica. The case of the IFG clearly demonstrates the enormous obstacles facing scientists and scientific institutions in the agro-exporting economies of modern Latin America. As a small country on the "periphery of the periphery," Costa Rica offers an extreme example of the problems of cultivating modern science in developing nations.

In January 1875, the Buenos Aires municipal council legalized female sexual commerce within authorized bordellos. A decade of rapid urbanization and population growth, characterized by a high proportion of unmarried males, had created problems of social control and public health that had to be addressed by city authorities. Assisted in their task by doctors specializing in public health who were aware of European legislation on the issue, councilmen enacted a law purportedly intended to improve public health. Instead, the desire to create revenues from exorbitant license fees meant that municipally regulated prostitution served principally to keep prostitutes off the streets and enlarge city coffers. It was not until 1888 that the Dispensario de Salubridad (or Prostitutes' Registry) was established along with the Sifilicomio (the venereal disease hospital) to periodically examine and treat women in licensed houses of prostitution.

Now that racism has been officially recognized in Brazil, and some universities have adopted affirmative-action admission policies, measures of the magnitude of racial inequality and analyses that identify the factors associated with changes in racial disparities over time assume particular relevance to the conduct of public debate. This study uses census data from 1950 to 2000 to estimate the probability of death in the early years of life, a robust indicator of the standard of living among the white and Afro-Brazilian populations. Associated estimates of the average number of years of life expectancy at birth show that the 6.6-year advantage that the white population enjoyed in the 1950s remained virtually unchanged throughout the second half of the twentieth century, despite the significant improvements that accrued to both racial groups. The application of multivariate techniques to samples selected from the 1960, 1980, and 2000 census enumerations further shows that, controlling for key determinants of child survival, the white mortality advantage persisted and even increased somewhat in 2000. The article discusses evidence of continued racial inequality during an era of deep transformation in social structure, with reference to the challenges of skin color classification in a multiracial society and the evolution of debates about color, class, and discrimination in Brazil.

Based on primary research and fifty interviews, this article analyzes the history, institutions, and politics of agricultural policy formulation in Brazil from 1964 to 1992. It focuses on how trade, credit, and support-price policy evolved in response to economic crisis and democratization in the 1980s. Although the economic crisis caused policy to be redesigned, the change in political regime and in the institutions of interest-group representation significantly influenced the direction of policy reform. The return to a democratic regime permitted the Congress and the Brazilian judiciary to play more significant roles in shaping agricultural policy. Simultaneously, democratization led to the questioning of corporatist institutions and the emergence of more participatory organizations in the agricultural sector. These changes have caused policy making to become increasingly subject to explicit rules, which should lead to more predictable policies and a long-term reduction in discrimination against Brazilian agriculture.

Conservation-development interactions intensified as a consequence of environmental and land-use changes in Latin America during the 1985-2008 period. This study examines predominant changes in five countries (Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia). Multifold increase of protected areas for environmental conservation occurred together with agricultural growth and intensification. Conservation and agricultural trends were fraught with conflicts and contradictions, yet they also showed partial compatibility in the search for sustainability. Conservation, indigenous, and social movement organizations operating at multiple scales (local, national, and international) contributed to distinctly configured national conservation "booms" and sustainability discourses in the five countries. Neoliberal governments and global organizations sanctioned protected-area conservation via increased state institutions, national and subnational administrative mechanisms, widely publicized sustainability rationales, expanded territorial management and a property rights focus, spatial devolution, and official multiculturalism—the 1990s were a heyday of these activities. Subsequently Latin American conservation and sustainability efforts have evolved both as a global center of governance through payment for environmental services and under increased and diverse social agendas.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the main welfare office of the city of Buenos Aires, this article dissects poor people's lived experiences of waiting. The article examines the welfare office as a site of intense sociability amidst pervasive uncertainty. Poor people's waiting experiences persuade the destitute of the need to be patient, thus conveying the implicit state request to be compliant clients. An analysis of the sociocultural dynamics of waiting helps us understand how (and why) welfare clients become not citizens but patients of the state.

This article reviews recent neoliberal agrarian legislation in Latin America in terms of the advances and setbacks for women's and indigenous movements. Institutional reform of the agricultural sector has been heterogenous in part because of the role of these movements. In the twelve countries studied, the new legislation favors gender equity except in Mexico. The indigenous movement scored notable successes in Ecuador and Bolivia but suffered apparent setbacks in Mexico and Peru in the defense of collective land rights. The article also explores why the slightest progress toward gender equality was made in some of the countries with large indigenous populations and strong indigenous movements.

The fight against HIV/AIDS is an example of a global struggle for the promotion of sexual health and the protection of human rights for all, including sexual minorities. It represents a challenge for the understanding of its impact on political, social, and economic processes. My central goal in this piece is twofold. First, I underline the importance of a political and human rights perspective to the analysis of the global response to the pandemic, and I introduce the concept of policy networks for a better understanding of these dynamics. Second, I argue that, in the case of Mexico, the constitution of HIV/AIDS policy networks, which incorporate civil society and state actors, such as sexual minority activists and public officials, and their actions—both domestic and international—have resulted in a more inclusive HIV/AIDS policy-making process. However, serious human rights violations of HIV/AIDS patients and sexual minorities still remain. El combate al VIH/SIDA representa un esfuerzo global a favor de la salud sexual y la protección de los derechos humanos, incluyendo a las minorías sexuales, así como un reto en términos del análisis de su impacto político, social y económico. En este trabajo son dos mis objetivos centrales. Primero, quiero enfatizar la importancia de una perspectiva de derechos humanos en el estudio de la respuesta global a la pandemia e introducir el concepto de redes de políticas públicas para la mejor comprensión de esta última. En segundo lugar, sostengo que la formación de redes de políticas públicas con trabajo en VIH/SIDA en México, las cuales incorporan servidores públicos y activistas gays, y las acciones emprendidas por estas—tanto a nivel doméstico como internacional—han dado como resultado un proceso de hechura de políticas públicas más incluyente. Sin embargo, se observan persistentes violaciones a los derechos humanos de pacientes con VIH/SIDA y de minorías sexuales en general.

This article reviews the environmental history of the Amazon basin from early prehistory to the 1850s, concluding at the start of the rubber boom. It argues that the Amazon's past can be understood in terms of a transition from wilderness to landscape, in a broadly similar way to the environmental history of Europe and North America. A detailed overview of the archaeological record suggests that both floodplain and upland environments were heavily influenced by human intervention during prehistory. The colonial and early republican periods also saw dramatic environmental changes. Interpretations of the Amazon that stress environmental constraints on human agency or portray it as largely virginal or unsettled prior to the modern period are at best an oversimplification.

In Latin America, indigenous identity claims among people not previously recognized as such by the state have become a key topic of anthropological and sociological research. Scholars have analyzed the motivations and political implications of this trend and the impacts of indigenous population's growth on national demographic indicators. However, little is known about how people claiming indigenous status constructs the meaning of their indigenous ethnicity. Drawing from sixty-four indepth interviews, focus-group analyses, and participant observation, this article explores the double process of identity construction: the reconstruction of the Arapium indigenous identity and the creation of the Jaraqui indigenous identity in Brazil's Lower Amazon. The findings reveal six themes that contribute to the embodiment of a definition of indigenous identity and the establishment of a discursive basis to claim recognition: sense of rootedness, historical memory, historical transformation, consciousness, social exclusion, and identity politics.

THE GOVERNMENTS OF LATIN AMERICA, HAVING BEEN PREOCCUPIED MAINLY with industrialization since World War II, began to give more attention to social development during the Sixties. Priorities of development policy, stressed under the Alliance for Progress, now include education and health; improvements in both areas are regarded as means of raising output as well as furthering social progress. Analyses of Latin America's human resources, however, have concentrated mainly on manpower requirements and corresponding educational needs. They have been supported by evidence of high returns to investment in education, ² while studies of the region's health conditions have yielded no comparable evidence in support of health sector investments. Health improvements are evident, but economic analysis has not yet shown to what extent they are attributable to health expenditures alone. Poor health is closely associated with poverty, low education, and rural residence, but causal relationships among these and other variables remain largely unexplored.

The goal of “health for all by the year 2000” was endorsed by member nations of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) at the International Conference on Primary Health Care, held at Alma Ata, U.S.S.R., in September 1978. The goal of attaining total health care coverage of the population had been agreed upon by the Ministers of Health of the Americas at their III Special Meeting in 1972. Meeting again in 1977, the ministers took stock of the region's accomplishments and remaining shortcomings in preparation for the Alma Ata conference. They concluded that their institutional health care systems, which bear the major responsibility for providing total coverage, had not yet attained this goal; among the reasons mentioned were institutional rigidities that made it difficult to determine and respond to unattended needs for health care, and the financial inaccessibility to large population groups of the institutions providing health services. These problems were compounded by a “significant increase in the cost of medical care … which reduces the resources available for providing universal coverage.”

In recent decades, the impacts of climate on society and on human well-being have attracted increasing amounts of attention, and the forecasts that predict such impacts have become more accurate. Forecasts are now distributed and used more widely than they were in the past. This article reviews three cases of such use of forecasts in Latin America. It shows that in all cases, the users are concentrated in particular sectors and regions (agriculture in the Argentine pampas, fisheries on the Peruvian coast, water resources in northeastern Brazil) and that the forecasts are distributed not by government agencies but by intermediate organizations—semistatal organizations or nongovernmental organizations. It draws on the concept of environmental citizenship to discuss these cases and assesses them for such attributes of citizenship as equity, transparency, accountability, and promotion of collective goals. It traces the implications of these cases for the current era of global warming.

Deforestation in Latin America, especially in the Amazon basin, is a major source of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming. Protected areas play a vital role in minimizing forest loss and in supplying key environmental services, including carbon sequestration and rainfall regulation, which mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change amid a rising tide of economic development in the region. The area of protected forest has expanded rapidly since 1980 to cover one-fifth of Latin America and more than two-fifths of Amazonia, a region whose rain forest captures some 40 percent of Latin America's carbon emissions. The reserve sector has traditionally suffered from severe underfunding, but the possibility of new resources being generated through financial compensation for "reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation" (REDD) or "avoided deforestation" under a new Kyoto protocol after 2012 could help strengthen the environmental and social roles of protected areas. However, a number of major implementation and governance challenges will need to be addressed.

In the national consciousness, Ecuador is a mestizo nation. However, it is also an ethnically diverse nation with sizable minorities of indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. In national surveys, there is also a considerable minority who self-identify as blanco (white). Although there is strong evidence of continuing discrimination and prejudice toward both indigenous and Afro-descended peoples, there is little public discussion or political action addressing such issues. The emergence of a powerful and resilient indigenous movement in the late 1980s gained international, interest and acclaim in the 1990s, in part because of the peaceful mobilization efforts and effective bargaining tactics of the movement. However, indigenous leaders usually have not engaged in a discourse of racismo and/or discriminacion. There has been much less social movement solidarity and activism among Afro-Ecuadorians, but their leaders commonly employ a discourse of racism and discriminacion. In August and September 2004, a survey of more than eight thousand adult Ecuadorians was conducted in regard to racism and related topics. In this research, we use several measures from this survey that focus on awareness of and sensitivity to issues of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. Self-identification of respondents enables us to contrast the responses of whites, mestizos, Indians, and Afro-Ecuadorians to the measures. Other independent variables of interest are level of education, the region in which the respondent resides, and whether the respondent lives in an urban or rural area. Regression results show differences among the ethnic groups in levels of awareness of racism, but more powerful predictors are level of education and rural residence.

Declining profitability of agriculture and/or higher prices of forest products and services typically drive an increase in forest cover. This article examines changes in forest cover in Candelaria Loxicha, Mexico. Forest cover increased in the area as a result of coffee cultivation in coffee forest-garden systems. Dependence on forest products and services, and not prices of forest products, drive the process in our study site. Low international coffee prices and high labor demand outside the community might pull farmers out of agriculture, but they do not completely abandon the lands. A diversification in income sources prevents land abandonment and contributes to maintaining rural populations and coffee forest gardens. Un incremento en la cobertura forestal es típicamente consecuencia de la disminución en la rentabilidad de la agricultura o del incremento en el precio de los productos y servicios forestales. Este artículo examina cambios en la cobertura forestal en Candelaria Loxicha, México. La cobertura forestal aumentó en el área como resultado del cultivo del café en sistemas de bosque-café. La dependencia de los productos y servicios forestales, y no el precio de los productos forestales, fue determinante en el proceso que se ha llevado a cabo en nuestro sitio de estudio. Los bajos precios en el mercado internacional del café y la alta demanda de mano de obra fuera de la comunidad podrían alejar a los campesinos de la agricultura, pero el trabajo agrícola no ha sido completamente abandonado. La diversificación en las fuentes de ingreso previene el abandono de las tierras y contribuye al mantenimiento de la población rural y de los sistemas de bosque-café.

Despite empirical findings on women's varied and often extensive participation in smallholder agriculture in Latin America, their participation continues to be largely invisible. In this article, I argue that the intransigency of farming women's invisibility reflects, in part, a discursive construction of farmers as men. Through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews with one hundred women in Calakmul, Mexico, I demonstrate the material implications of gendered farmer identities for women's control of resources, including land and conservation and development project resources. In particular, I relate the activities of one women's agricultural community-based organization and the members' collective adoption of transgressive identities as farmers. For these women, the process of becoming farmers resulted in increased access to and control over resources. This empirical case study illustrates the possibility of women's collective action to challenge and transform women's continued local invisibility as agricultural actors in rural Latin American spaces.

The United Nations describes aquaculture as the fastest-growing method of food production, and some industry boosters have heralded the coming of a sustainable blue revolution. This article interprets the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in southern Chile (1980-2010) by integrating concepts from commodity studies and comparative environmental history. I juxtapose salmon aquaculture to twentieth-century export banana production to reveal the similar dynamics that give rise to "commodity diseases"—events caused by the entanglement of biological, social, and political-economic processes that operate on local, regional, and transoceanic geographical scales. Unsurprisingly, the risks and burdens associated with commodity diseases are borne disproportionately by production workers and residents in localities where commodity disease events occur. Chile's blue revolution suggests that evaluating the sustainability of aquaculture in Latin America cannot be divorced from processes of accumulation.

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.

The literature on the cycle of studies on Brazilian race relations written in the 1950s, supported by UNESCO, has considered it a milestone that offered solid findings about the variety of such relations and the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination in Brazilian society. Some evaluations of these studies have asserted that the results of the UNESCO Project frustrated expectations that Brazil could be used as a positive example for race relations and an instrument in the struggle against racism in the period following the Holocaust. This research note takes a different stand in arguing that from the early stages of the organization of the project, Brazilian, French, and U.S. social scientists favored broadening the geographical scope under investigation because they were aware of several patterns of race relations and racial prejudice in Brazil. Originally, a limited and idealized regional focus was to center on the state of Bahia, but soon the scope of investigation became almost national in including Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Pernambuco.

Using data from the National Survey of Standards of Living conducted in Guatemala in 2000, this article tests the hypothesis that Guatemalan households use child labor and reduce child schooling to cope with household shocks. First, the authors use factor analysis to estimate the latent household propensity to natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. Then, they estimate bivariate probit models to identify the determinants of child labor and schooling, including household propensity to natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. Results suggest that households use child labor to cope with natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. In contrast, the authors found no evidence that suggests that households reduce child schooling to cope with shocks. Findings also indicate that poor households are more likely to use child labor and schooling reduction as strategies to cope with socioeconomic shocks.

This article analyzes the impact of state policies since the 1970s on household food security in several Mapuche communities in the Araucanía region of Chile (Region IX). The author highlights key transformations in the national economy and food system and endeavors to link those to local phenomena, in particular the absorption of the local livelihood strategies and food systems into capitalist markets and the high incidences of food insecurity. The article concludes that a reconceptualization of macroeconomic and indigenous policies are required to rebuild the material and social foundations of rural Mapuche communities that provide the bases from which their inhabitants can reconstruct a mutually beneficial relationship with the broader Chilean society and avert the continued acceleration of tension and violence.

The study shows that the new privately managed pension system in Chile has increased gender inequalities. Women are worse off than they were under the old pay-as-you-go system of social security, in which the calculation of benefits for men and women did not differ and women could obtain pensions with fewer requirements than men. Currently, benefits are calculated according to individuals' contributions and levels of risk. Such factors as women's longer life expectancy, earlier retirement age, lower rates of labor-force participation, lower salaries, and other disadvantages in the labor market are directly affecting their accumulation of funds in individual retirement accounts, leading to lower pensions, especially for poorer women. Lessons from the Chilean reform should encourage scholars, policy makers, and the general public to engage in debates that more adequately incorporate gender variables in designing and implementing policy changes.

Historical research on Chilean population has been thwarted for some time by intractable sources and rudimentary methods. Nevertheless, within the past two decades researchers have begun to achieve some successes. Attention has turned from simply ascertaining gross population totals and growth rates to a much wider range of topics. Significant examples include: the relationship between population growth, illegitimacy, vagrancy, and labor supply; the social context of marriage, family formation, and kin ties; the nature, frequency, and intensity of mortality crises; demographic responses to population pressure; the social and economic repercussions of European immigration; and the determinants and consequences of rapid growth and redistribution of population in the twentieth century (Góngora, 1965; Bauer, 1975; Hurtado, 1966; Solberg, 1969; Young, 1974; Sadie, 1969). To study these topics satisfactorily we must both maintain the healthy skepticism of our distant precursors (e.g., Barros Arana, 1880–1900; Palacios, 1904; and Vergara L., 1900) and integrate the demographer's analytical tools with the historian's skill in finding, selecting, and interpreting a whole range of quantitative and qualitative documents. Demographers have demonstrated that even post-1920 data collected by the Chilean Statistical Bureau have substantial and varying degrees of error, notwithstanding the considerable advances in data collection techniques, improvements in the educational levels of the population, and economic inducements to insure the public's cooperation (Somoza and Tacla, 1969; Gutiérrez, 1969). In the not too distant past, civil administrators and priests received crude, if any, instructions, administered several hundred square kilometers of poorly defined territory, and faced an almost insurmountable task of enticing information from a widely dispersed, highly mobile, poor, and uneducated populus. Consequently, historical studies with exclusively demographic ends, using narrowly defined data bases and relying principally on arithmetical or statistical techniques, may prove to be extremely frustrating to carry out and somewhat barren in their findings. Attempts to replicate European studies with Chilean materials, whether simple aggregations of annual totals or tediously reconstructed family life histories, will run a high risk of failure unless researchers incorporate broader questions of social history, exploit an extensive range of documentation, and integrate historical, demographic, and statistical reasoning. While little mathematical sophistication may be necessary—elementary measures may prove the most powerful—a mature, sensitive understanding of the logic of these disciplines, which comes only with considerable study and experience, is essential. The slavish application of demographic formulae and the invention of ill-considered measures are direct pathways to embarrassing nonsense.

The Brazilian democratization took place between 1985 and 1988. In 1985, the authoritarian power holders transferred political power to civilians, and in 1988, a new democratic constitution was enacted, thus finalizing the transition. The end of the transition triggered processes of participation in different Brazilian cities, such as São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. However, only in Porto Alegre could the political context in the postdemocratization period generate a process of reverting priorities, that is to say, of inverting the pattern of democratic participation and the pattern of public investment at the urban level. In this article, I show the social conditions of the poor in the city of Porto Alegre in 1985, explain the emergence of participatory budgeting in the city, and show how democracy made a difference in the living conditions of the urban poor in the city of Porto Alegre. In the second part of the article, I analyze the recent expansion of participatory budgeting in Brazil and its recent expansion to midsize cities. In the final part of the article, I show how new participatory institutions are being introduced at the federal level of government. Participation at the local and national levels is making a difference in the living conditions of the Brazilian poor.

Northern Veracruz has experienced dramatic transformations in its landscape over the longue durée. Geological forces shaped it into the northernmost tropical rain forest in the Americas. Paleolithic humans appeared as early as 7600 BCE and tinkered with it, exploiting it for their own survival for thousands of years. Their ecological footprint was light enough until the communities grew and adopted agriculture. At that point, around 2500 BCE, the landscape of the Huasteca Veracruzana became more humanized, but the survival of the rain forest was not at risk, even when the first towns formed in the first centuries of the Common Era. Urbanization and civilization were highly localized, collapsing for reasons not well understood. The rain forest thus endured to confront Spanish colonialism in the 1500s. Changes in the land were uneven under the Spanish, however, and the rain forest outlasted colonial rule as well as the turmoil of nineteenth-century national politics. Transformation came in the twentieth century, as a result of oil extraction. Under the oil barons, the Huasteca experienced the full impact of capitalism and industrialization. Between 1900 and 1940, the oil industry eliminated the rain forest, leaving the Huasteca open to further environmental change. In the aftermath of oil, the landscape shifted to grasslands and monocrop agriculture. Oil remained present but largely in disguise: as petrochemical inputs to force poor soils to sustain citrus production and cattle ranching.

Today women in Guatemala are killed at nearly the same rate as they were in the early 1980s when the civil war became genocidal. Yet the current femicide epidemic is less an aberration than a reflection of the way violence against women has become normalized in Guatemala. Used to re-inscribe patriarchy and sustain both dictatorships and democracies, gender-based violence morphed into femicide when peacetime governments became too weak to control extralegal and paramilitary powers. The naturalization of gender-based violence over the course of the twentieth century maintained and promoted the systemic impunity that undergirds femicide today. By accounting for the gendered and historical dimensions of the cultural practices of violence and impunity, we offer a re-conceptualization of the social relations that perpetuate femicide as an expression of post-war violence.

We examine the extent to which social networks among indigenous peoples in Mexico have a significant effect on a variety of human capital investment and economic activities, such as school attendance and work among teenage boys and girls, and migration, welfare participation, employment status, occupation, and sector of employment among adult males and females. Using data from the 10 percent population sample of the 2000 Population and Housing Census of Mexico and the empirical strategy that Bertrand, Luttmer, and Mullainathan (2000) propose, which allows us to take into account the role of municipality and language group fixed effects, we confirm empirically that social network effects play an important role in the economic decisions of indigenous people, especially in rural areas. Our analysis also provides evidence that better access to basic services such as water and electricity increases the size and strength of network effects in rural areas.

The political rhythms of pro-free trade coalitions in North and South America seem to be out of sync. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, free traders looked like they were on a roll towards expansion throughout the hemisphere. Chile was poised to follow Mexico into NAFTA. Mercosur began to take off. For much of the post-NAFTA period, however, most Latin American governments were more prepared to sign a hemispheric free-trade agreement than the United States was. NAFTA’s persistent domestic political costs blocked President Clinton’s effort to renew fast-track negotiating au-thority. By the time President George W. Bush scraped together a slim congressional majority to regain presidential trade-negotiating author-ity, the political winds in South America had shifted and were empow-ering skeptics in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. By early 2003 negotiations towards a Free Trade Area of the Americas had reached their late middle phase, a timely moment to review research on the political economy of North American economic integration.

Using recent data from southern California and Mexico we challenge the notion that the demographic profile of post-1970 Mexican migrants to the United States has remained constant. We find that more recent cohorts of migrants: (1) are more likely to settle permanently in the United States, (2) have higher proportions of females, (3) are younger, (4) have higher educational attainment, (5) are increasingly likely to originate in southern Mexico and the Mexico City Metropolitan area, and (6) are increasingly likely to depart from urban areas within Mexico. Although we find no direct evidence that the legalization programs mandated by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 led to a stronger propensity to settle permanently in the United States, logistic regression analyses demonstrate the importance of the other three principal explanatory factors suggested by Cornelius (1992), namely, economic crisis in Mexico, the changing character of U.S. demand for labor, and social networks.

Gabriela Mistral's uncharacteristic short stories, which she began writing at the age of fourteen, demonstrate the Chilean poet's need to express violence through the brief narrative genre. Mistral wrote six short stories and in all of them she blurs the boundaries between gender and violence. For the sexes to be defined, Mistral seems to use violence as a means to distinguish them. When women suffer through men's actions, both gender performances become more pronounced and defined: women and men exist precisely because of men's harmful actions. A shift of perspective and agency occurs when men fail to recognize their own behavior and blame women for their fate. Both sexes lose their subjectivity (or sexuality) and become so intertwined that their differences are no longer perceptible. The two stories analyzed in this essay are the first story Mistral wrote, "El perdón de una víctima" and her last, "El rival." In both, Mistral demonstrates her wariness to define a norm for heterosexual relationships, while at the same time, she attempts to discern female difference. Poco o nada se sabe de los cuentos de la obra mistraliana. De 1904 a 1911, Gabriela Mistral escribió seis cuentos que tienen como enlace el dolor y el desencuentro que existen en las relaciones amorosas entre hombres y mujeres. Estas primeras publicaciones se destacan por su énfasis en delinear las diferencias entre los géneros, empleando la violencia como un modo de distanciar las mujeres de los hombres y al mismo tiempo de destacar las imposibilidades de tener un verdadero amor heterosexual. De igual modo, Mistral trata de cuestionar la división entre los papeles sexuales a través de la violencia del protagonista masculino. Los hombres y mujeres existen a través de la violencia, y cuando ésto se refuta, las diferencias sexuales entre los géneros se mezclan y se borran. Los dos cuentos analizados aquí, "El perdón de una víctima" y "El rival" demuestran al lector cómo Mistral establece una estrategia discursiva para comprender principalmente al sexo femenino.

En un contexto de expansión educativa, incremento de los niveles de educación y aumento de la participación de la mujer en la actividad económica, este artículo examina y compara las pautas y tendencias en homogamia educativa en México y Brasil durante las últimas tres décadas. En concreto, trataremos en perspectiva temporal y comparada las siguientes cuestiones: grado y alcance de la homogamia educativa y simetría en las relaciones de género. Para ello utilizamos las muestras armonizadas de microdatos para los censos de México 1970, 1990 y 2000 y de Brasil 1970, 1980, 1991 y 2000, puestas a disposición por el proyecto Integrated Public Use of Microdata Series Internacional (https://www.ipums.org/international).

“Para el camino” Canto a la angustia y a las alegrias. Canto porque es necesario can tar para ir dejando una huella en los dias, para ir diciendo cosas prohibidas. “For the Road” I sing of anguish and joy. I sing because it's necessary to sing to leave my mark on time, to say forbidden things. Latin American New Song is distinct from the usual stereotypes of Latin American popular music. Songs such as “Para el camino” do not fit into the common categories of salsa, ballads, Spanish-language versions of U.S. hit songs or popularized traditional styles such as the ranchera and cumbia. Although New Song is not as well known as the more typical styles, its greater social significance has achieved an impact in Latin America far beyond the musical realm.

In a recent article published in LARR, Simone Bohn analyzed electoral results and survey data from Brazil to contest several theses concerning the reelection of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006. In particular Bohn asserted that beneficiaries of Bolsa Familia, a conditional cash transfer program that covered 11 million families at the time of the 2006, were already supporters of Lula in 2002, and that the program did not contribute to the change in Lula’s constituency from his election in 2002 to his reelection in 2006. We show these claims are based on voter recall data collected 9 and 57 months after each election analyzed that grossly overestimate support for Lula, probably due to well known reporting biases. Reanalysis of Bohn’s results with the same data, and analysis of more reliable surveys suggests that Bolsa Familia did play a role in the 2006 elections.

This study employs an original, nationally representative survey of individuals in Argentina to understand the economic and political factors that shape individual-level preferences for social insurance. In the past two decades, Latin American democracies have undertaken significant changes in their social welfare institutions, in some cases dramatically reversing course from previous policies. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how and when citizens will shift their preferences over competing social policy proposals. We emphasize the role of dissatisfaction with prevailing policies in creating political opportunities for the introduction of sweeping reforms. Our survey capitalizes on the 2008 pension reform in Argentina to test competing hypotheses regarding preferences for different kinds of old-age insurance. We find that socioeconomic status and personal experience with earlier policies shape the role partisanship plays in forming preferences about changes in social insurance programs.

Who benefits and who loses during redistribution under dictatorship? This article argues that expropriating powerful preexisting economic elites can serve to demonstrate a dictator or junta's loyalty to their launching organization while destroying elite rivals out of government that could potentially threaten the dictator's survival. Expropriation also provides resources for buying the support of key nonelite groups that could otherwise organize destabilizing resistance. An analysis of the universe of fifteen thousand land expropriations under military rule in Peru from 1968 to 1980 demonstrates the plausibility of this argument as a case of redistributive military rule that destroyed traditional elites and empowered the military. Land was redistributed to "middle-class" rural laborers who had the greatest capacity to organize antiregime resistance if they were excluded from the reform. This finding directly challenges a core assumption of social conflict theory: that nondemocratic leaders will act as faithful agents of economic elites. A discussion of other modernizing militaries and data on large-scale expropriations of land, natural resources, and banks across Latin America from 1935 to 2008 suggests that the theory generalizes beyond Peru.

In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism and changing policy-making regimes presented social actors throughout Latin America with new challenges and opportunities. This article analyzes the political strategies developed by two organizations representing small manufacturers in Mexico for responding to these sweeping economic and political changes, emphasizing the organizational bases of political activism. Strategies are assessed according to organizations' public expression of support for or opposition to economic policies, the extent to which organizations work within existing arrangements for interest representation, and the political alliances made by small business organizations and their leaders. One strategy in Mexico entailed acquiescing to radical economic policy changes, deploying significant resources to preserve a set of corporatist institutions that regulated business association, and supporting the government incumbents. Another strategy entailed voicing persistent public criticism of neoliberalism, spearheading a national campaign against business corporatism, and supporting the Center-Left opposition. Analysis of these strategies demonstrates the important effects of institutional legacies during periods of regime change. The perseverance of corporatist institutions can make it difficult for weak actors to shed old modes of activism, notwithstanding a changed array of material and political incentives.

The study of Afro-Argentines has long presented something of a paradox. The field has frequently received inadequate attention from both students of Argentine history and from scholars concerned more generally with the issue of race in the Americas. This neglect has been partially fueled by the prevailing racial ideology in twentieth-century Argentina—namely that the nation is not only white, but indeed fundamentally European. That view has been buttressed by large-scale European immigration to the nation since the end of the nineteenth century. Academic neglect was also fueled by the conventional wisdom that in the twentieth century, the Afro-Argentine population had ceased to exist as a numerically significant group. The Argentine Census of 1895 recorded a black population of 5,000. By 1954 Argentine social scientist Angel Rosenblat, in what he admitted were hypothetical figures, indicated that Argentina had a population of 5,000 blacks and 10,000 mulattoes in an overall population of roughly 17 million. U.S. Argentinianist James Scobie would state in 1964 that even that low estimate was probably too high. Although there is a popular belief that Argentina never had a significant African presence, historians of Argentina know better, realizing that Buenos Aires was a major center for slave importation and that throughout the nineteenth century, Africans and their Afro-Argentine descendants were significant percentages of the population of Buenos Aires and other Argentine regions. The view is that the Afro-Argentine population disappeared by the twentieth century, the result of Argentina's nineteenth-century wars and the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1871, and that little in the way of an enduring presence remains either in terms of population or lingering cultural influence. This traditional view was captured in a statement by former Argentine President Carlos Menem who once declared: "In Argentina blacks do not exist, that is a Brazilian problem." Yet paradoxically there has also persisted in the twentieth century an undercurrent of national interest in Afro-Argentines, belying their supposed irrelevance to the development of the national culture. The 1924 publication of Memorias de un negro del congreso told the story of one member of a group of highly visible Afro-Argentines, congressional porters and doormen—a congressional hiring practice that began in the late nineteenth century and continues to the present. In 1926 Uruguayan-born Argentine writer Vicente Rossi published the folkloric Cosas de negros. Despite the book's often paternalistic racism, it did serve to remind Argentine audiences of the often pronounced impact Afro-Argentines had had on the nation's culture before the twentieth century. Rossi was particularly important for reminding a then very European-oriented Argentina of the African roots of the tango. Also, Argentine artist Antonio Berni routinely included black, mulatto, and mestizo figures in his paintings, depicting the everyday lives of the Argentine working class. Interest in Afro-Argentines increased from the 1960s onward, spurred on, at least in part, by international events: the civil rights movement in the United States, the emergence of independent nations in Africa, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the emergence of a more assertive Afro-Brazilian movement, and a growing resistance to traditional patterns of making Latin Americans of African descent invisible. It thus became a topic for occasional explorations by Argentine and foreign journalists. The field began to gain heightened academic visibility in the 1970s and 1980s, aided in part by the scholarship of Argentine historians such as Marta Goldberg and Ricardo Rodriguez Molas and North American historians such as Leslie Rout and George Reid Andrews. That new visibility grew in the 1990s and beyond, aided by Argentine scholars influenced by Afro-Americanist research in the United States, Brazil, and other American nations. Interest in the field also increased due to a new willingness among Afro-Argentines to publicly and vocally resist traditional patterns of marginality and invisibility and to press the case that their group's history be added to the national narrative. By the beginning of the twenty-first century even the Argentine government was beginning to show more of an official interest in Argentina's Afro-American past. At the behest of Afro-Argentine activists, a monument was dedicated to Afro-Argentine...

How does corruption interact with inequality? To answer this question, we employ afield experiment that examines the manner in which police officers in a major Latin American city respond to socioeconomic distinctions when requiring a bribe. In this experiment,four automobile drivers commit identical traffic violations across a randomized sequence of crossroads, which are monitored by transit police. We identify the effect of citizens' perceived wealth on officers' propensity to solicit bribes and oil the size of the bribes that they solicit. We complement our experimental results With qualitative findings from interviews with police officers. Our core finding is that officers are more likely to target lower class individuals and let more affluent drivers off with warnings. The qualitative results suggest that Officers associate wealth with the capacity to exact retribution and therefore are more likely to demand bribes from poorer individuals. We conclude that a multimethod approach provides a richer account Of corrupt behavior than that found in most contemporary research.

Little is the same in the international economy since the 1980s. New patterns of investment, production, and trade (i.e., "globalization") present fundamental challenges to governments, firms, and social actors across the board. New forms of governance in the international political economy create new opportunities but also place constraints on what sorts of policies are feasible. Countries that are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), for example, accept multilateral disciplines on a broad range of economic policies, from how they set and adjust levels of tariffs and subsidies, to how they regulate the entry and operations of foreign investors, to how they go about granting and protecting intellectual property. Yet globalization and the increased scope of multilateral governance have been accompanied by trends toward regionalization as well. Throughout the world, we see more firms participating in global markets and more countries participating in global institutions, and we also see more countries pursuing regional arrangements. Regionalism, Ventura-Dias suggests in the introduction to her co-edited volume, is a coping strategy in a world that features more complex and intrusive forms of global economic governance: regional negotiations promise policymakers greater control over the "pace, sequence, and direction" of economic policy (12). The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) evince little deviation from these trends. Virtually every country in the region has adopted "export-oriented" trade and "open" investment regimes and virtually every country is a member of the WTO. At the same time, the region has experienced a spike in bilateral and plurilateral trade and investment agreements. While Latin America has always featured a dense network of regional agreement initiatives, the most salient aspect of the new regionalism in the Americas is the inclusion of the United States (and Canada). Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s, and Chile completed a similar agreement with the United States in 2002. More recently, the United States has concluded (or is in the process of negotiating at the time of writing) agreements with the five countries of Central America and the Dominican Republic (DR-CAFTA); Panama; and Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. And, of course, since 1994 negotiations have continued for the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), a hemispheric agreement including all thirty-four countries in the region (except Cuba). The broad changes in the global economy and, importantly, the LAC countries' position in and reaction to such changes are the subject of these four books. Globalization and Development emphasizes three fundamental asymmetries that mark the contemporary global economy, and any analysis of international development needs to take these issues seriously. First, our attention is drawn to the realm of credit and finance: the international political economy generates asymmetric vulnerabilities to pressures for pro-cyclical fiscal and monetary policy. Although private capital inflows tend to be pro-cyclical in all countries (i.e., capital is most available and accessible when economies are in good shape), in the developing world outflows demonstrate strong pro-cyclical tendencies as well (i.e., capital becomes hardest to access when it is most needed). Of course, that financial integration can limit policy autonomy is an axiom of macroeconomics, but the concern expressed here is that the constraints on policy are dramatically greater in developing countries. More to the point, the pressures and constraints are arguably perverse: rather than stimulating growth via looser monetary or fiscal policy, countries in recession or suffering from adverse external shocks face pressures to raise interest rates and reduce government spending so as to prevent further capital outflows. The second asymmetry regards the location of technical progress and the link between technological change and productive investment. Knowledge-generation and innovation are universal—everyone comes up with new ways of doing things every day. No one who has spent any time in the developing world could fail to see the extent of innovativeness and adaptability as individuals, families, and firms adjust to changing conditions. But not all innovation is the same, and the international political economy rewards some sorts of knowledge and innovation more than others. In particular, the emerging regimes on intellectual property and investment concentrate both the creation and the use of knowledge. Data...

This article addresses the way in which the Argentine Supreme Court has set out to redefine its own institutional role through its procedures and decisions, since its institutional reform in 2003. It shows that the Court has developed innovative ways of judicial intervention in public policy and rights issues, which include the participation of new kinds of actors and entail an emerging new relationship between the Court and civil society organizations in Argentina. The article argues that this change can be understood as a way for the Court to rebuild its institutional legitimacy, and that the reform is connected to the presence of strong nongovernmental organizations whose claims for a change in the Court’s composition and procedures gained momentum in the aftermath of the social and political crisis of 2001-2002 in Argentina.

This article challenges the assumption that parties and candidates with access to material benefits will always distribute goods to low-income voters in exchange for electoral support. I claim that a candidate’s capacity to turn to clientelistic strategies of mobilization is a necessary but insufficient condition to explain his or her decision to use clientelism. Besides having the capacity to use clientelism, candidates have to prefer to use clientelism to mobilize voters. In studying candidates’ capacities and preferences to use clientelism, this article provides an account of the microfoundations of political clientelism in Argentina. By combining quantitative and qualitative data at the municipal level, I find that the number of pragmatist candidates, who are capable of using clientelism and prefer to turn to such strategies, is almost equaled by the number of idealist candidates, who, though capable of doing so, prefer not to use clientelism. Resumen: Este estudio plantea la hipótesis de que la capacidad de los candidatos de utilizar estrategias clientelares es una condición necesaria pero insuficiente para explicar su decisión de distribuir bienes y beneficios materiales a cambio de apoyo electoral. Mas allá de tener acceso a bienes materiales y redes de activistas políticos que colaboren con la distribución de bienes, los candidatos deben también preferir usar estrategias clientelares. Este artículo combina datos cuantitativos y cualitativos a nivel municipal en Argentina para mostrar que no hay una diferencia significativa entre las preferencias de los candidatos que cuentan con la capacidad de usar clientelismo. El artículo encuentra una cantidad similar de candidatos que prefieren utilizar estrategias clientelares, candidatos pragmáticos, y candidatos que prefieren rechazar el uso del clientelismo, candidatos idealistas.

This article analyzes the persistence Of an official discourse of mestizo nationalism in Nicaragua in spite of the adoption of multicultural citizenship rights for black and indigenous costenos in 1986. These reforms appeared to directly contradict key premises of previously dominant nationalist ideologies, particularly the idea that Nicaragua was a uniformly mestizo nation. Instead of a radical break with the past, however, what we find in contemporary Nicaragua is a continuous process of negotiation and contestation among three variants Of official mestizo nationalism: vanguardismo, Sandinismo, and "mestizo multiculturalism" that emerged in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s respectively. This article traces the continuities among these disparate but intimately related accounts of national history and identity and the way they all operate to limit the political inclusion of black and indigenous costenos as such.