This research note reports on a collection of manuscript and print materials relating to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). The collection was acquired in 1999 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It features unpublished manuscripts in a variety of literary genres and an excellent representation of Borges's published works, including several rare books and periodicals from the 1920s, a period of increasing importance in Borges scholarship.

This article uses an interdisciplinary approach to present and analyze information on the smallest manifestations of popular culture in Latin American countries: postage stamps. The disciplines involved are semiotics (the linguistic study of signs), history, politics (internal and international), and popular culture. The project studies how these postage stamps carry significant messages, including expressions of nationalism, politics (national and international), propaganda, and cultural identity. The article begins with an overview of Latin American postage stamps, with an emphasis on internal and international politics. The latter category focuses on several cases of inter-country tension in which postage stamps have played a role.

En 1931 un diplomtico alemn destac las razones debido a las cuales su pas estaba interesado en prestar asistencia militar al extranjero en los siguientes trminos:

Del empleo de instructores militares en servicios extranjeros se espera, en general, dos provechos: uno no material y otro material. Aqul reside en la expectativa de alcanzar, mediante las tareas de organizacin y enseanza en base a preceptos alemanes, una cierta influencia entre los militares en favor de Alemania. Una ventaja de esta naturaleza no debe subestimarse, sobre todo en Suramrica, donde la Fuerza Armada suele ser un factor importante en la poltica interna. La utilidad material reside en el supuesto que con instructores alemanes tambin el armamento y equipamiento del ejrcito extranjero se realizar conforme al modelo alemn, y consiguientemente, los pedidos se realizarn en Alemania beneficiando a su industria y comercio.

Las traducciones de citas al castellano en el texto y las notas son del autor. Los nombres de los archivos se han abreviado del siguiente modo: Bundesarchiv-Militrarchiv, Bund.-Militarch; Politisches Archiv des Auswrtigen Amtes, Pol. A. des AA. Las Memorias del Ministerio de Guerra y Colonizacin de Bolivia se han abreviado con Memoria.

N. M. Rothschild & Sons (NMR), the banking house which the Frankfurt-born Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836) began operating from New Court in London in 1809 and which is continued to this day by his descendants, has a long history of involvement in Brazil. Extensive documentation of this history is preserved in The Rothschild Archive in London, where material up to 1930 is available for consultation. The firm's initial business with Brazil was in merchant banking activities and bullion dealing, but in 1855 it became the Brazilian government's financial agent in London and went on to handle the government's borrowing in the London capital markets and to be closely concerned with the country's fiscal, commercial, and exchange rate policy. With the bank at the heart of the development of Brazilian public finance, The Rothschild Archive is an important resource for an understanding of this aspect of Brazilian economic and political history, as well as the history of British informal imperialism and emerging patterns of globalization.

El criollismo ha sido elaborado—desde diversos géneros—como espacio del consenso identitario aún en momentos de graves tensiones simbólicas. Se trata de un lugar construido sobre la capacidad de desplazamiento de la voz letrada, en función de adaptarse a los cambios producidos en la esfera cultural. Con el fin de trazar algunos de los hitos de este proceso de apelación identitaria en el caso específico de Venezuela, revisaré textos, publicados en su mayoría en la prensa, a lo largo del siglo XIX y principios del XX. La lectura de este corpus mostrará la trama de discursividades sobre la cual se asienta la autoridad letrada que emitió el discurso criollista.

The relationship between media ownership and partisan bias has been an important source of controversy in emerging democracies. Systematic tests of the effects of ownership, however, remain relatively rare. Using data from content analysis of ninety-three television news programs, as well as more detailed examination of six provincial television stations, we assess the extent of bias exhibited by different types of broadcasters during Mexico's 2000 presidential campaign. We find that privately owned television stations were generally more balanced than public broadcasters, who typically followed propagandistic models of coverage. At the same time, private ownership often entailed collusive arrangements between broadcasters and politicians, based on the prospect of future business concessions (i.e., “crony capitalism”). We conclude that changes in ownership patterns are unlikely to eradicate partisan bias, and we discuss other institutional remedies aimed at insulating both private and state-run media from political manipulation.

Strikes have important effects on the workers and employers directly involved as well as significant indirect effects on consumers, economic growth, electoral outcomes, policy making, and political stability. Moreover, strikes form patterns that illuminate long-term social processes, the dynamics of economic and political conflict, and the functioning of industrial relations systems. Because strikes are important as both causes and symptoms of social change, an extensive literature has arisen on patterns of strike activity. To date, however, this literature has focused mainly on advanced industrial countries. To prepare the way for analyses of strike patterns in Latin America, more research is needed on the ways in which Latin American strike statistics have been collected and reported. This research note will report the results of such research for Argentina. The first section will assess the quality of strike statistics covering a century of Argentine history. The second section will compare four sources of data on Argentine strikes since the return to democracy in 1983, focusing on particularly useful data published by the Consejo Técnico de Inversiones (CTI) in Buenos Aires. The third section will make the CTI statistics available for research and will employ them to assess some widely held assumptions about labor militancy in Argentina during the period from 1984 to 1993.

One of the central issues in Latin American political history is the role played by oligarchies. In the case of Brazil, students of oligarchy have focused on elite family networks and coronelismo, the often violent manifestation of oligarchic politics at the local level. Drawing on the substantial body of literature on the family in Latin America, this essay proposes an interpretation of oligarchical politics in which changing family structures interacted in new political and economic contexts to produce distinctive types of oligarchy in a sequential rather than synchronic or functional manner. The dominance of traditional elite families on the Brazilian frontier was challenged during periods of social and economic change, resulting in the rise of transitional and new oligarchies with substantially different socioeconomic origins, career paths, and family structures.