At the crossroads of scholarship scrutinizing digital religion and pilgrimage, this article analyzes the use of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram by devotees of Our Lady of Juquila, a Marian image in Oaxaca, Mexico. It combines the close reading of content and descriptive online ethnography with web scraping and data analysis. The article sketches these platforms’ role in pious expression, virtual community building, pilgrimage group communication, and devotional marketing, tracking closely the intertwining of religion and commerce, particularly religious tourism promotion. The data reveal that Facebook serves as the most popular platform for Juquila’s devotees, thanks to its open, pro-sharing design and flexibility regarding group formation. As a result, it has become the essential hub of devotee expression. YouTube, thanks to its particular affordances, has become an ideal niche for narrating travel to Juquila’s shrine and a showcase of the networked nature of devotion as users borrow tools, tropes, and expressive techniques from many sources, religious and secular. Instagram is the least popular platform among devotees because its design is less open and amenable to group communication. It does, however, facilitate both smaller, more intimate community formation, as well as shallow but significant community building on popular public pages run by religious tourism promoters hosting attractive, easily sharable, free stockpiles of images, memes, and devotional slogans. In the end, social media use appears to be stoking pilgrimage in Mexico and setting the stage for significant cultural change in the future as new tools, emerging shared devotional aesthetics, and media logics reshape religious expression and devotee communication. It is also becoming an unparalleled historical archive of popular religious culture.

This essay reviews the following works:

Indianidad evanescente en los Andes de Ecuador. By Víctor Bretón Solo de Zaldívar. Quito: FLACSO Ecuador; Ediciones Universitat de Lleida, 2022. Pp. xxxix + 372. €22.00 paperback, free downloadable e-book. ISBN: 9789978676301.

Indigene Autonomie in Lateinamerika: Zwischen Selbstbestimmung und staatlicher Kontrolle. By Michael Fackler. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2021. Pp. 322. €60.00 hardcover, €60.00 e-book. ISBN: 9783837657982.

Indigene Resistencia: Der Widerstand der bolivianischen TIPNIS-Bewegung. By Maximilian Held. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2022. Pp. 276. €45.00 hardcover, free downloadable e-book. ISBN: 9783837663686.

La revolución del arcoiris y su escala de grises: Movimiento indígena del Ecuador. By Stalin Herrera Revelo. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2022. Pp. 135. Free downloadable e-book. ISBN: 9789878133799.

Indigenous Civil Society in Latin America: Collective Action in the Digital Age. By Pascal Lupien. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. vii + 284. $29.95 paperback, $99.00 hardcover, $22.99 e-book. ISBN: 9781469672625.

¡Así encendimos la mecha! Treinta años del levantamiento indígena en Ecuador: Una historia permanente. Edited by Floresmilo Simbaña, Adriana Victoria Rodríguez Caguana, and Mateo Martínez Abarca. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala, 2020. Pp. 220. $15.00 paperback, free downloadable e-book. ISBN: 9789942884107.

This essay reviews the following works:

Latin America and the Global Cold War. Edited by Thomas C. Field Jr., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 440. $42.50 hardcover, $29.99 e-book. ISBN: 9781469655697.

La imagen tricontinental: La feminidad, el Che Guevara, y el imperialismo a través del arte gráfico de la OSPAAAL. By Alberto García Molinero. Santiago de Chile: Ariadna Ediciones, 2022. Open access: http://ariadnaediciones.cl/images/pdf/LaImagenTricontinental.pdf.

From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity. By Anne Garland Mahler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 347. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822371250.

Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left. Edited by Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2021. Pp. xi + 301. $90.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781683401698.

No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War. By Ariel Mae Lambe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 310. $37.50 paperback. ISBN: 9781469652856.

The Tricontinental Revolution: Third World Radicalism and the Cold War. Edited by R. Joseph Parrott and Mark Atwood Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xvii + 365. $120.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781316519110.

South-South Solidarity and the Latin American Left. By Jessica Stites Mor. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. Pp. xix + 266. $79.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780299336103.

Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy. By Christy Thornton. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. 301. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520297166.

Brazil, for many scholars and pundits, showcased the risk of democratic breakdown with the election of a far-right populist like Jair Bolsonaro. Against pessimistic expectations, however, not only has Brazilian democracy survived but politics has returned to business as usual. What can explain this supposedly unanticipated outcome? This article provides an analytical assessment of this this puzzle and offers an alternative explanation. We argue that both the diagnoses of Brazilian institutions and the predictions made were misguided. We explore the role played by the Supreme Court, party system, media, and congressional politics in restricting Bolsonaro’s illiberal initiatives.

During the past few decades, Latin American governments’ recurrent attacks against journalists have contributed to the erosion of press freedom in the region and, relatedly, of the quality of democracy. Yet what pushes governments to harass journalists? We argue that governments are more likely to harass journalists when popular support for them drops. Due to the ability of journalists to influence public opinion, governments could perceive the harassment of journalists as a means to punish and silence those individuals who are seen as contributing to their decline in public support or as obstacles to regaining popularity. We test our argument on a sample of Latin American countries observed from 1990 to 2019. We find that declines in governments’ popular support lead to more harassment of journalists. Our research contributes to the debate on the determinants of press freedom and sheds further light on the current decline of democratic quality in Latin America.

Indigenous peoples in Latin America have produced some of the region’s strongest and most enduring social movements, drawing on a diverse repertoire of contention to pursue their goals. In the twenty-first century, social media have transformed the landscape of collective action, compelling Indigenous movements to navigate the evolving dynamics of digital platforms. There is an ongoing debate in the literature regarding the role of social media in mobilization. But we know relatively little about how social media fit into the tactical repertoires of Indigenous actors and what tasks these platforms are used for. This article addresses this gap through an examination of how Indigenous actors use social media during protest events. We conducted a comparative analysis of social media content produced by Indigenous social movement organizations during major protest events in three countries from 2018 to 2019. We find that the most common functions include activating supporters and exposing state violence. These functions support several of the organizations’ core mobilization tasks by providing actors with tools to complement collection action.