Indigenous peoples of Ecuador have organized and mobilized over the past thirty years, partly to reshape their identities after centuries of domination. This research is a preliminary effort to explore the contemporary complexity of that identity. Best viewed as a quantitative case study, this analysis uses responses from seventy-six indigenous college students to a self-administered questionnaire. The authors found that indigenous students with greater “acculturation experiences” with mestizo culture were more strident in rejecting elements of that culture than were their colleagues who had had fewer encounters with mestizo elements of Ecuadorian society. While the tendency to identify oneself ethnically by rejecting the dominant culture represents only one dimension of ethnic identity (maintaining distinctiveness), the authors consider the findings important for future research on the dynamics of the process of ethnic identification.

Este ensayo explica la evolución del debate en torno a la legalización de drogas psicoactivas ilícitas en Colombia. Este debate tuvo un protagonista central: el Presidente Ernesto Samper Pizano (1994–1998). En los años setenta fue un activo participante en la polémica a favor de una actitud más liberal y menos prohibicionista sobre la marihuana. Desde el poder dos décadas después, fue el que impulsó la major criminalización del fenómeno de las drogas. Este trabajo traza ese recorrido histórico y analiza los motivos pragmáticos para que Samper se movieira entre la legalización generosa y la prohibición categórica. Su pensamiento y su comportamiento reflejan en buena medida una actitud relativamente extendida en Colombia frente a los narcóticos: la oscilación entre convivir y combatir las drogas. En uno y otro escenario, el papel de Estados Unidos ha sido fundamental. El peso de Washington y su cruzada anti-drogas resultaron notoriamente influyentes en las discusiones colombianas sobre qué hacer con el narcotráfico y los narcotraficantes. Al inicio de un nuevo milenio, Colombia está frente a un abismo, un abismo en parte originado por la prohibición de drogas.

Local politics in Latin America have been attracting a great deal of scholarly interest as of late (Fox 1994; Nickson 1995; Reilly 1995). This interest can be attributed in part to the simple fact that over the past two decades, the institutional weight of Latin American local governments has continued to grow, spurred as much by the popularity of decentralization policies as by the seminal crisis of the central states in the region. Faced with shrinking resources and painful structural adjustment programs, local governments were often left with no other choice but to divest themselves of responsibilities they could no longer meet.

This article examines one formative moment in the making of a working class in Brazil to show how workers refashioned multiple identities in response to interlocking structural transformations from artisanal to factory production, from homogeneous to heterogeneous ethnic communities, and from a male labor force to one that was increasingly female. Anarchist labor organizers contested the myth of the happy artisan and conflated the exploitation of artisans and factory workers to advance class consciousness. Ethnic ties that had initially fostered organization began to hamper class solidarity, now strained under new ideological conflicts, and facilitated effective resistance from employers. As appeals to ethnicity became problematic, appeals to gender emerged: women workers made themselves visible and audible and played an important role in the evolution of the movement. The ways in which they were seen and heard in the streets, however, contrasted with their representations in elite discourse, which sought to use gender to manipulate divisions within the emerging working class.

In the history of human migration, rarely has a situation arisen in which simultaneous voluntary immigration and emigration flows have dramatically transformed the ethnic composition of an independent country. Belize since its independence in 1981 provides an example of such an unusual combination of circumstances. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, anecdotal evidence began to accumulate suggesting that the country's population was undergoing profound structural changes that included realignment of its settlement patterns and alteration of its ethnic mix.