N. M. Rothschild & Sons (NMR), the banking house which the Frankfurt-born Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836) began operating from New Court in London in 1809 and which is continued to this day by his descendants, has a long history of involvement in Brazil. Extensive documentation of this history is preserved in The Rothschild Archive in London, where material up to 1930 is available for consultation. The firm's initial business with Brazil was in merchant banking activities and bullion dealing, but in 1855 it became the Brazilian government's financial agent in London and went on to handle the government's borrowing in the London capital markets and to be closely concerned with the country's fiscal, commercial, and exchange rate policy. With the bank at the heart of the development of Brazilian public finance, The Rothschild Archive is an important resource for an understanding of this aspect of Brazilian economic and political history, as well as the history of British informal imperialism and emerging patterns of globalization.

El criollismo ha sido elaborado—desde diversos géneros—como espacio del consenso identitario aún en momentos de graves tensiones simbólicas. Se trata de un lugar construido sobre la capacidad de desplazamiento de la voz letrada, en función de adaptarse a los cambios producidos en la esfera cultural. Con el fin de trazar algunos de los hitos de este proceso de apelación identitaria en el caso específico de Venezuela, revisaré textos, publicados en su mayoría en la prensa, a lo largo del siglo XIX y principios del XX. La lectura de este corpus mostrará la trama de discursividades sobre la cual se asienta la autoridad letrada que emitió el discurso criollista.

The relationship between media ownership and partisan bias has been an important source of controversy in emerging democracies. Systematic tests of the effects of ownership, however, remain relatively rare. Using data from content analysis of ninety-three television news programs, as well as more detailed examination of six provincial television stations, we assess the extent of bias exhibited by different types of broadcasters during Mexico's 2000 presidential campaign. We find that privately owned television stations were generally more balanced than public broadcasters, who typically followed propagandistic models of coverage. At the same time, private ownership often entailed collusive arrangements between broadcasters and politicians, based on the prospect of future business concessions (i.e., “crony capitalism”). We conclude that changes in ownership patterns are unlikely to eradicate partisan bias, and we discuss other institutional remedies aimed at insulating both private and state-run media from political manipulation.

Strikes have important effects on the workers and employers directly involved as well as significant indirect effects on consumers, economic growth, electoral outcomes, policy making, and political stability. Moreover, strikes form patterns that illuminate long-term social processes, the dynamics of economic and political conflict, and the functioning of industrial relations systems. Because strikes are important as both causes and symptoms of social change, an extensive literature has arisen on patterns of strike activity. To date, however, this literature has focused mainly on advanced industrial countries. To prepare the way for analyses of strike patterns in Latin America, more research is needed on the ways in which Latin American strike statistics have been collected and reported. This research note will report the results of such research for Argentina. The first section will assess the quality of strike statistics covering a century of Argentine history. The second section will compare four sources of data on Argentine strikes since the return to democracy in 1983, focusing on particularly useful data published by the Consejo Técnico de Inversiones (CTI) in Buenos Aires. The third section will make the CTI statistics available for research and will employ them to assess some widely held assumptions about labor militancy in Argentina during the period from 1984 to 1993.

One of the central issues in Latin American political history is the role played by oligarchies. In the case of Brazil, students of oligarchy have focused on elite family networks and coronelismo, the often violent manifestation of oligarchic politics at the local level. Drawing on the substantial body of literature on the family in Latin America, this essay proposes an interpretation of oligarchical politics in which changing family structures interacted in new political and economic contexts to produce distinctive types of oligarchy in a sequential rather than synchronic or functional manner. The dominance of traditional elite families on the Brazilian frontier was challenged during periods of social and economic change, resulting in the rise of transitional and new oligarchies with substantially different socioeconomic origins, career paths, and family structures.

This article draws attention to archival research by Brazilian historians in Portugal and Brazil and the fruits of these labors in monographs, dissertations, and articles. Following a survey of historical writing in the colonial period, this essay discusses the growing movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to preserve documents in libraries, archives, and museums in Brazil. The existence of such institutions spurred divulgation of manuscript collections through journals and published transcriptions of documents. The essay then traces Brazilian historiography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as Brazilian responses to new trends in historical writing in the 1960s. A survey of archives consulted by scholars of colonial Brazil provides the background for the main section, which uses case studies to demonstrate how Brazilian historians have used these depositories. Scholarship published between 1983 and 1999 is emphasized. The intensive use of manuscript collections and the high quality of publications testify to the vitality of studies by Brazilian scholars of colonial Brazil.

Using recent data from southern California and Mexico, we challenge the notion that the demographic profile of Mexican migrants to the United States since 1970 has remained constant. We find that more recent cohorts of migrants are more likely to settle permanently in the United States, to have higher proportions of females, to be younger, to have more education, to be increasingly likely to originate in southern Mexico and the Mexico City metropolitan area, and to be 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 has led to a stronger propensity to settle permanently in the United States, logistic regression analyses demonstrate the importance of the other three main explanatory factors suggested by Wayne Cornelius in 1992: economic crisis in Mexico, the changing character of U.S. demand for labor, and social networks.

This study examines the political and economic determinants of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America. The analysis focuses on fifteen Latin American and Caribbean countries for the period of 1979 to 1996. Market size, workers' skill levels, and political instability are found to have a statistically significant effect on the investment behavior of U.S. multinational firms. In addition, we find that a poor human rights record and military coups d'etat positively influenced U.S. FDI flows during the time series.