This article examines the sources of economic growth for a group of Latin American countries in relation to their export performance in China. The analytical framework is based on an extended normalized quadratic profit function. The econometric results confirm that a favorable export record with China represents a positive source of growth for Latin America. However, it also creates long-run dependability conditions in terms of reduced prices and thinner profits that weaken its growth capacity. Latin American countries must seek product diversification away from their current commodity base and aggressively climb up the value chain to remain competitive worldwide.

Global health-care models for developing countries urge integration of traditional medicine with Western biomedicine. This article shows how residents of a remote Peruvian village negotiate among biomedicine, traditional medicine, lay indigenous medicine, and local knowledge of medicinal plants. Villagers' health-care choices reveal that they often resort to medicinal plants before modern pharmaceuticals. Their discourses show that these choices reflect social and cultural processes beyond the medical: the revitalization of Andean identity, the conflictual relationship that villagers have with modernity, and the desire to evade or subvert the power that Western medicine has over them. This article elaborates the concept of the healthscape as an individual's subjective vision of a landscape's medical resources and institutions, limited by cost and accessibility and shaped by the uneasy coexistence of Western and indigenous medical systems.

Afro-Brazilian communities (quilombos) hold rights to a collective territory where they live and that supports their livelihoods. Historically, Afro-Brazilian smallholders have been subjected to contradictory programs and policies that either restrain traditional practices such as shifting cultivation or aim at empowering these communities. This is the first attempt to adopt the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) theoretical framework to study the historical transformation of the institutional structure in Afro-Brazilian territories of the Ribeira Valley, São Paulo, Brazil. Our results reveal a history of long-term, continuous relationships between locals and external groups, sometimes combative and at other times cooperative, reflecting tensions and contradictions. As a result, quilombo communities have gradually emerged as leaders in an institutional arrangement that is moving toward co-governance or partnerships. We believe that if these communities achieve full economic and political autonomy, they might be able to self-govern their territories and reconcile the dual goals of local development and environmental conservation.

Este ensayo propone un análisis deconstructivo del problema del habla y la escritura en Vidas secas (1938) de Graciliano Ramos. Al examinar la razón de la aparente discapacidad lingüístico-alfabética de los protagonistas de la obra, la crítica ha permanecido hasta el momento dentro de un esquema oposicional (habla/no-habla) que debería ser reevaluado por fuera de ese mismo esquema. Siguiendo las ideas de Jacques Derrida, el artículo considera a Fabiano y a su familia una suerte de filósofos que, en su divagar mental y físico, realizan una crítica onto-teológica y logocéntrica del sistema de diferencias metafísicas naturaleza/cultura y humanidad/animalidad. A la luz de las teorías de Giorgio Agamben, Fabiano representa igualmente al homo sacer, en tanto proscrito bajo estado de excepción en donde se anula la diferencia entre animalidad y humanidad. Como subalterno, el personaje se ubica en un espacio liminal, incluido por su misma exclusión.

This article argues that the national political context of Colombia in the 1970s and 1980s led the Colombian indigenous movement to elaborate an ethnic citizenship. The failures of the left and the decline in effectiveness of partisan citizenship played a large role in the representation and political practices of the premier indigenous grassroots organization Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca; CRIC). This article focuses on the formative moments of the 1970s and early 1980s when CRIC began to represent its movement as a primarily indigenous, ethnic one, minimizing the importance of nonindigenous actors. The nation-state, at each stage of the movement's development, fostered the “ethnicization” of the indigenous movement of Colombia in hopes of weakening the southwestern insurgency and legitimizing its institutions:

El artículo analiza la movilización y autogestión de empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores en Argentina, en tanto fenómeno surgido en el contexto de la crisis socioeconómica de dicho país (2001–2002), aunque vigente hasta la actualidad. Nos centramos en aquellos procesos y mecanismos que favorecen la autogestión. Específicamente, analizamos la relación entre el proceso de movilización y el proceso de inserción económica en el mercado por parte de estas experiencias colectivas. Estudiamos, en primer término, la presencia de mecanismos como la articulación política (correduría), la atribución de oportunidades, los cambios de identidad, la certificación y la competencia dados en el contexto argentino actual y que configuran este movimiento social. En segundo término, analizamos las estrategias de autogestión que implementan los trabajadores y la manera en que las mismas están condicionadas por las características de la movilización social.

In-depth interviews and a three-wave longitudinal study of workers in international export-processing plants (maquiladoras, referred to here as maquilas) of the central highlands of Guatemala were conducted to explore the effects of labor turnover on individuals and households. The data suggest a framework in which labor conditions and sources of support at home are linked to turnover of youths working in the maquila. Turnover in the study is associated with decreased input into important household decisions and a lowered sense of adjustment and life satisfaction. Despite this, turnover is often volitional, representing a form of resistance and response on the part of workers to adverse working conditions in the factories. The study reveals the complex dynamics underlying both involuntary and voluntary turnover in the maquilas.