This essay reviews the following works:

The Achilles Heel of Democracy: Judicial Autonomy and the Rule of Law in Central America. By Rachel E. Bowen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 302. $35.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316630907.

Manipulating Courts in New Democracies: Forcing Judges off the Bench in Argentina. By Andrea Castagnola. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp + 184. $54.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780367372033.

Judicial Politics in Mexico: The Supreme Court and the Transition to Democracy. Edited by Andrea Castagnola and Saúl López Noriega. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xiv + 190. $48.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781138697829.

Courts and Social Transformation in New Democracies: An Institutional Voice for the Poor? Edited by Roberto Gargarella, Pilar Domingo, and Theunis Roux. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xiv + 328. $59.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781138264540.

Shifting Legal Visions: Judicial Change and Human Rights Trials in Latin America. By Ezequiel A. González-Ocantos. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 342. $36.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316508800.

Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America. Edited by Matthew C. Ingram and Diana Kapiszewski. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 359. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780268102814.

Mano de obra is one of the most studied novels written by the Chilean author Diamela Eltit (b. 1949). Scholars have paid particular attention to the novel’s socioeconomic commentary at the level of the plot. They have not, however, conducted a close examination of how the novel expresses this criticism through its narrative form. Nor have they explored the relationship of the novel’s literary techniques to the politico-cultural context that it portrays. This article engages in a close reading of the literary techniques that Mano de obra employs to depict a certain social context. It also addresses some politico-cultural implications of the novel’s narrative form in the context of Chile’s contemporary society to demonstrate that the novel foregrounds a sense of pessimism and hopelessness about linking Chilean workers’ subversive past with their submissive present.

Domestic workers, as essentially black women in highly precarious conditions, lacking social protection, and often not recognized as proper workers, are considered particularly hard, or even impossible, to organize compared to the “standard” male industrial worker. Yet they have been mobilizing for decades in several countries, including Brazil, where they won new labor rights in 2015. Through an ethnographic study of domestic workers’ unions in Brazil, I argue that what has made their mobilization possible is precisely the intersectional dimension of their oppression. While gender, race, and class have produced multiple forms of exclusion, these vectors of oppression have also enabled domestic workers to build alliances with women’s, black, and workers’ movements, thus giving domestic workers more visibility and more resources to organize their members. I have identified three forms of alliance building, each determined by domestic workers’ unions’ particular framing of gender, race, and class issues: rigid autonomy, critical alliance, and encompassing unionism.

This essay reviews the following works:

Contemporary U.S.-Latin American Relations: Cooperation or Conflict in the 21st Century? Edited by Jorge I. Domínguez and Rafael Fernández de Castro. 2nd revised edition. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xiv + 309. $49.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781138786325.

Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow: New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War. Edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Julio E. Moreno. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013. Pp. viii + 341. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826353689.

The Third Century: U.S.-Latin American Relations since 1889. By Mark T. Gilderhus, David C. LaFevor, and Michael J. LaRosa. 2nd revised edition. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Pp. xiii + 303. $39.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781442257160.

Latin America Confronts the United States: Asymmetry and Influence. By Tom Long. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 260. $29.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781107547056.

Cooperation and Hegemony in US-Latin American Relations: Revisiting the Western Hemisphere Idea. Edited by Juan Pablo Scarfi and Andrew R. Tillman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. ix + 260. $119.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781137510730.

Latin America in International Politics: Challenging US Hegemony. By Joseph S. Tulchin. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2016. Pp. vii + 235. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781626374485.

This essay reviews the following works:

The Economics of Contemporary Latin America. By Beatriz Armendáriz and Felipe Larraín B. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. xix + 439. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780262533157.

Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico. By Edward Beatty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. x + 342. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520284890.

Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History. By Gregory T. Cushman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xxii + 393. $84.29 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107004139.

Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization. By Cristopher R. W. Dietrich. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xviii + 352. $34.72 paperback. ISBN: 9781316617892.

Historia mínima de la expansión ferroviaria en América Latina. Edited by Sandra Kuntz-Ficker. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2015. Pp. 361. ISBN: 9786074628449.

The First Export Era Revisited: Reassessing Its Contribution to Latin American Economies. Edited by Sandra Kuntz-Ficker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xxii + 348. $109.67 hardcover. ISBN: 9783319623399.

The Global Political Economy of Raúl Prebisch. Edited by Matias E. Margulis. London: Routledge, 2017. Pp. xv + 217. $103.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781138219779.

The World Economy through the Lens of the United Nations. Edited by José Antonio Ocampo, Anis Chowdhury, and Diana Alarcón. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxv + 296. $90.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780198817345.

Palma Africana. By Michael Taussig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. 258. $25.00. ISBN: 9780226516134.

Un siglo de economía en Bolivia (1900–2015). Tópicos de historia económica (tomo 1) y Working Papers (tomo 2). Edited by Iván Velázquez-Castellanos and Mario Pacheco Torrico. La Paz: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2017. Vol. 1, pp. 643. ISBN: 9789995418526. Vol. 2, pp. 508. ISBN: 9789995418533. (Both volumes are available by download from the Periódico Digital de Investigación sobre Bolivia, https://www.pieb.com.bo/sipieb_nota.php?idn=11054).

Drawing from a combination of the author’s own research on Portugal’s empire and recent work across a range of disciplines, this essay discusses the growing dialogue between Latin American studies and science and technology studies (STS). It discusses key similarities and differences in the questions, methods, and theoretical frameworks which have guided research in both areas. It focuses particular attention on the divergent ways in which the two interdisciplinary arenas of scholarship have handled objects and materiality. The author argues that despite important differences in orientation, a focus on objects and materiality informed by STS perspectives can broaden the archive available to scholars of colonial Latin America, challenge and extend critical insights of colonial research, and call into question the adequacy of conventional Latin American and Atlantic spatial frameworks.

El 2 de octubre de 2018 marcó la quincuagésima conmemoración de la masacre del aún desconocido número de estudiantes, transeúntes y otros inocentes en la Plaza de las Tres Culturas de Tlatelolco. Como siempre, el programa cultural del Memorial 68 incluyó varias producciones teatrales, pero esta vez llamó la atención el uso casi exclusivo de la farsa como modo de expresión dramática. La farsa tiende a ser burlona, irreverente y alejada de la realidad, lo que lleva a preguntarse por qué tantos dramaturgos han recurrido a este género antiguo y poco respetado para tratar un capítulo tan doloroso y álgido de la historia mexicana. Este estudio se fundamenta en la teoría de la farsa, la tragedia y la risa y en la percepción extendida de la misma historia mexicana como una farsa. Aunque el uso de la farsa como vehículo para una conmemoración tan significante podría sorprender y hasta ofender, el análisis de cinco obras comprueba que la farsa es últimamente la expresión más realista del ciclo absurdo y sin fin de la historia mexicana, la que ha mostrado repetidamente que se puede matar con impunidad tanto a estudiantes como a todos los que se oponen al orden establecido.

Este ensayo reseña los siguientes trabajos:

The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. By Orlando Bentancor. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 416. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822944607.

Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. By Allison Margaret Bigelow. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 376. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9781469654386.

Living in Silverado: Secret Jews in the Silver Mining Towns of Colonial Mexico. By David M. Gitlitz. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 432. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826360793.

Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World. By Kris Lane. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 272. $32.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780520280847.

Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, México, 1546–1810. By Dana Velasco Murillo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 308. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780804796118.

Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. By Lisa Voigt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 235. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477310977.

Durante el último tercio del siglo XX, la crisis del régimen de hacienda en los Andes septentrionales marcó el inicio de una gran transformación social. En ese proceso, la identidad étnica devino en una poderosa herramienta de reivindicación por el acceso a recursos (y derechos) esenciales de los campesinos-indígenas sometidos al poder de los terratenientes. Tomando el ejemplo de la provincia de Chimborazo, en la sierra central del Ecuador, y tras una revisión de las peculiaridades de ese longevo sistema de dominación, el artículo centra la atención en las formas y alcance de la insurgencia indígena-campesina hasta la consolidación del proceso de reforma agraria, entre las décadas de 1960 y 1980. A continuación, se establecen los vínculos entre el desenlace de la reforma, el fortalecimiento organizativo indígena y la etnitización de sus demandas como recurso estructurante de su relación con el Estado y las agencias de desarrollo, ya en las postrimerías del siglo XX. La intención es aportar reflexiones sobre algunos aspectos de la politización de la etnicidad que, desde un escenario concreto, interpelan a otros fenómenos comparables de la región andina.