Scholars have long recognized that the final quarter of the eighteenth century in Brazil witnessed an agricultural renaissance in which traditional exports expanded and new tropical products began to find their way overseas (Prado Júnior 1967; Novais 1979; Arruda 1980, 1986; Alden 1984). In recent years, more attention has been paid to the diversified productive activities supplying an increasingly consolidated domestic market during this period (Brown 1986; Barickman 1991; Fragoso 1992). Although most of those activities were agricultural, artisan trades also flourished and domestic industry appears to have been growing, particularly the cottage textile industry. My examination of an unexplored and unusual primary source has revealed grounds for assuming that cloth and thread were being made throughout much of late colonial Brazil. The primary evidence also suggests that this cottage industry resembled the incipient stages of so-called European proto-industrialization to a remarkable degree, although important differences cannot be ignored. Nor does the regionalized nature of the source allow for generalizing about the colony as a whole. This research is thus a preliminary investigation that calls for further research. It nevertheless points out the potential importance of domestic industry within the overall Brazilian colonial economy and stimulates awareness of its complexities.

Este trabajo estudia la generificación (la asignación de un género sexual) de los elementos del debate sobre la novela nacional en el siglo XIX en Chile. Analizando el caso de Alberto Blest Gana, sostengo que la novela nacional se propuso como una intermediación entre dos polos. Por un lado, la lectura por placer era socialmente percibida como femenina. La lectura de los textos clásicos era, por otro, masculina porque suponía un trabajo y una dificultad que hacía que el retorno recibido de la inversión de tiempo y dinero en la actividad fuera productivo, es decir, legítimo. En este contexto, la novela nacional y su lectura se construían como formas de mediación de estas polaridades que organizaban y constituían la cultura nacional. La hipótesis general es que la lectura de periódicos y las lecturas hechas en periódicos (como folletines y artículos) ocuparía un lugar intermedio que terminaría por mediar la distancia entre aquellas formas de lectura socialmente construidas.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a shantytown in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, this article studies the workings of Peronist “political clientelism” among the urban poor. It analyzes the web of relations that some slum-dwellers establish with local political brokers to obtain medicine, food, and solutions to other everyday concerns. The article also explores the main functions of the “problem-solving networks,” which are resource control and information hoarding, and pays particular attention to an underexplored dimension of the operation of clientelism: clients' own views on the network.

This essay analyzes the impact of an indigenous counterpublic sphere in contemporary Bolivia, arguing that it functions as an arena of differential consciousness for Aymara intellectuals and activists. In examining the work carried out by the Aymara nongovernmental organization known as the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), the essay highlights this sphere's importance as both a discursive and territorial arena where agency is expressed in the collaborative spirit of community. THOA's work is significant in strategically formulating a methodology of decolonization based on revisionist Andean historiography, territorial demands, and collective political action.