Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck) is considered one of the most significant works of Latin American cultural criticism. Despite the significance of Donald Duck to the history of Latin American cultural criticism and to Dorfman's own trajectory as a writer, thus far, critical studies of Dorfman tend to gloss his essays, ignore his journalism, and focus solely on his literature, especially on his play La muerte y la doncella (Death and the Maiden). While the attention to Death and the Maiden is certainly well founded, it is worth considering how these two works complement each other in Dorfman's career, given the apparent lack of a shared aesthetic between the playful cultural criticism of Donald Duck and the sparse language of Death and the Maiden. In fact, attending to Donald Duck and Dorfman's other nonfiction texts reveals the ways that he has worked across styles and genres on a series of central issues that form the core of his work. As a complement to research on Dorfman's literary production, this article focuses on his media criticism and his journalism, two areas of his work that have received the least critical attention, to suggest that Dorfman's literary production must be understood as part of a larger project, one that includes his essays, journalism, and other cultural activities.

Politicized consumer choice among brands and products is increasingly accepted as a novel mode of nonconventional political participation. However, scholars often overlook developing societies and seldom discuss consumers' perception of the marketplace as a political arena. This study reviews evidence of political consumerism in Latin America, measuring individuals' perceptions of corporations as agents that affect public goods, examining feelings of political efficacy over corporations, and analyzing motivations behind market-based activism. Research is grounded on representative samples of urban adults from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Logistic regression confirms political consumerism as driven by distrust of government and concomitant engagement with politics, suggesting a diversified repertoire of individual political action in Latin America.

Numerous recent country studies demonstrate that beneficiaries of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs vote for incumbents at higher rates. It is reasonable to expect that, as a consequence, those incumbents will perform better nationally in the next election. This article warns against such an extrapolation. It analyzes an original cross-national data set with information for eighty-four Latin American presidential elections that took place between 1990 and 2010. My results reveal that CCT programs have not improved incumbents' aggregate electoral performances in the region, contradicting common speculative claims of the literature. They also confirm the classic economic voting hypothesis that incumbents are held accountable in the polls for their economic performance.

This article focuses on three central impediments to police reform in Argentina, each of which has generated an important, yet distinct, paradox. First, although advocates of federalism argue that police reform facilitates innovation, in practice, reform efforts at one level of government in Argentina have been sabotaged by officials at other levels of government. Second, although electoral pressures have pushed police reform onto the policy agenda, these same pressures have also obstructed reform efforts because politicians depend on illicit party-police networks for campaign financing. Third, despite copious evidence of police involvement in criminal acts, Argentina's crime wave has energized conservative civil society groups whose demand for a heavy-handed response to crime has derailed the most promising attempts to restructure the police force.

Analysts of social movements have done a great deal to extend our understanding of how resistance groups frame injustices. They often assume that some form of collective (discursive) action is necessary to frame common understandings, but in many authoritarian regimes collective action is not tolerated. Instead, opposition is expressed in messages embedded in comics, films, and other images generated by popular culture. In this article we connect the literature on social movements and framing to the psychological and cultural understandings of humor, and specifically how text and images in humorous comics form a response to official frames of social peace, modernization, and development. Even when no one dares to write a letter of protest, or take to the streets, or set up a website, the political content of comics establishes understandings about group identity and justice. In more open and democratic regimes, dissident leaders are permitted to manipulate images and understandings. In closed authoritarian regimes, comics are “ready meals” for dissidents. We examine humorous comics in Mexico from 1970 to 1976 to show how text and images spoke of injustices such as torture, poverty, and marginalization.

O Brasil vem experimentando nas duas últimas décadas mudanças significativas com a queda da desigualdade, estabilidade económica, ampliação das oportunidades no mercado de trabalho formal e ampliação da escolarização. O artigo procura analisar o acesso ao ensino superior dos jovens de 18 a 24 anos por raça e renda com o objetivo de provocar uma discussão sobre as desigualdades no contexto de expansão educacional e os alvos das ações afirmativas no ensino superior em vigor no país, em especial a adoção recente da reserva de vagas nas Instituições de Ensino Superior Federais. Os dados são oriundos da Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra Domiciliar (PNAD), realizada pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Estatística e Geografia (IBGE), nos anos de 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008 e 2011, anos que marcam momentos específicos das mudanças ocorridas nas desigualdades e no sistema educacional brasileiro.

Este trabajo analiza, en el contexto de la Guerra Fría y del terrorismo de Estado, el comportamiento de una red integrada por referentes religiosos que, articulados con organizaciones de la sociedad civil y del Estado lograron el cese de la ayuda militar norteamericana al gobierno argentino, el otorgamiento de asilo político a algunos ciudadanos argentinos y pedidos por otros detenidos desaparecidos. Los religiosos que formaban parte de esta red fueron aquellos que, en diferente grado, incorporaron alguna nota de secularización: laicidad de la política, pluralización social o autonomía personal. Esta diversidad se explica por las distintas concepciones de lo sagrado de las que eran tributarios los sectores católicos.

En Latinoamérica, la transición demográfica se desarrolla, en general, de la misma manera en la que se desarrolló en Europa. No obstante, los efectos demográficos del proceso de modernización son muy variados, especialmente en grupos indígenas. Desde los años treinta las poblaciones indígenas del Gran Chaco Argentino comenzaron un proceso de modernización. El objetivo de este trabajo fue analizar los cambios demográficos en una población toba del norte de Argentina. Se utilizaron los censos de los años 1985 y 2002, registros de nacimientos y defunción de agentes sanitarios toba, del centro médico, del Registro Civil y entrevistas a mujeres tobas. Se estimó la tasa de crecimiento poblacional; se analizaron pirámides poblaciones y se obtuvo el índice de masculinidad, la tasa de mortalidad infantil y la tasa global de fecundidad. El crecimiento poblacional fue similar al provincial, se evidenció un rejuvenecimiento de la población, un moderado descenso de la mortalidad infantil y un aumento de la fecundidad. Se discute la necesidad de desarrollar modelos más integradores que consideren las variaciones demográficas de estos grupos.

Fair-trade networks have been working to temper the inequities and uncertainties facing small-scale artisans and farmers and to provide them with more secure and livable incomes. Drawing on earlier research in 1991–1993 and a brief pilot study in 2006, this research note examines farmers' perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of production for fair trade in three coffee-producing regions in Costa Rica. While the fair-trade movement has made significant headway in bringing social and environmental concerns to the marketplace and in providing farmers with guaranteed minimum prices for their coffee, farmers' reactions to production for fair trade indicate a number of problems that farmers and fair-trade cooperatives are facing in their efforts to reap the potential benefits of fair trade. As currently structured, fair-trade markets alone do not adequately address the needs of small farming families in Latin America.

In the past fifteen years, many Latin American cities have sponsored programs that promote reading through their city's public transportation systems. This article analyzes two of these programs, Libro al Viento in Bogotá, Colombia, and Santiago en 100 Palabras in Santiago, Chile, framed with examples from Buenos Aires, Argentina. These programs insert stories into public space to enhance social interaction and develop a positive sense of local belonging. Literary reading is harnessed as a socially embedded practice that can facilitate change, in response to previous periods of censorship and repression under dictatorship (in Chile) and political violence (in Colombia). Shifting the view of reading from an individual to a collective experience rather than focusing on functional literacy, these initiatives put literary reading to the service of civic and community development. The programs emerged during a period of increased investment by municipal governments in public space, including renovated subways and new bus rapid transit systems, and rely on a combination of public and private sponsorship. The intricate relationship between urban infrastructure and literary culture in these contemporary programs challenges but also perpetuates the role of the “lettered city.”