This essay reviews the following works:

Orozco: The Life and Death of a Mexican Revolutionary. By Raymond Caballero. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. vii + 343. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780806157559.

Unrevolutionary Mexico: The Birth of a Strange Dictatorship. By Paul Gillingham. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 464. $42.30 hardcover. ISBN: 9780300253122.

Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency, and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926–1929: Fighting Cristeros. By Mark Lawrence. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. viii + 196. $112.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9781350095458.

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910–1940. By Nathaniel Morris. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 371. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780816541027.

Los Mensajeros de Job: Otra cara de la revolución en Yucatán. By Marisa Pérez de Sarmiento. Mexico City: UNAM, 2017. Pp. 292. $77 hardcover. ISBN: 9786073032995.

Edición y comunismo: Cultura impresa, educación militante y prácticas políticas (México, 1930–1940). By Sebastián Rivera Mir. Raleigh, NC: Editorial A Contracorriente, 2020. $30.00 paperback. Pp. ix + 286. ISBN: 9781945234781.

In Combat: The Life of Lombardo Toledano. By Daniela Spenser. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020. Pp. xiv + 422. $28.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781642593341.

For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. By Robert Weis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 200. $80.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108493024.

This article examines the encounter of activists from the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) with African, African American, and Asian anticolonial intellectuals through the League Against Imperialism (LAI), founded at the 1927 Brussels Congress. Drawing from LADLA’s newspaper El Libertador, letters from LADLA leaders, and speeches and resolutions in the LAI archive, it studies how exchanges begun in Brussels influenced debates in radical circles in the Americas. The article builds on extant scholarship and makes two primary interventions. First, it argues that a closer look at LADLA’s participation in the LAI shifts the traditional understanding of interwar Latin American regionalist ideologies, which LADLA rejected in favor of drawing connections to anti-imperialist movements around the world. Second, it argues that the exchange in Brussels influenced LADLA to eventually expand its initial focus on Indigenous struggles to think more critically about Black communities, including Black migrant labor, in political organizing.

Current research on Brazilian vacant buildings where squatters live tends to paint a familiar picture: the occupants are united in struggle, resolute in their understanding that squatting is within their constitutional, legal, and natural rights. However, drawing on new data from Rio de Janeiro, we argue that researchers have an incomplete understanding of this process. Our findings reveal considerable ideological variation among occupants regarding their rights to occupy abandoned property, including their understandings of private ownership versus the social function of property. In our analysis, we explain this ideological variation through what we call “moral economies of occupation.” Specifically, we focus on lived experiences of losing or being excluded from secure housing and the remembered role that the state played in that lived experience. This, we argue, is crucial for understanding why some occupants believe in their rights to squat while others doubt it.

Marxian anthropology is a particular trend of “dark anthropology.” Michael Taussig has dedicated his work to understanding the connections of colonialism, capitalism, and local cultures under a Marxian-Benjaminian perspective. This article examines the meanings of hope and future concealed within Taussig’s “dark ethnographies” accomplished in Latin America. The purpose of this analysis is to echo Taussig’s concern to write efficiently against terror to acknowledge that even ethnographies of violence and social injustice can carry powerful cultural messages of hope.

Although a few historians have discussed the influence of Peronism in Chile, research has been guided mostly by diplomatic studies and political history, which, though important, are less convincing for historians interested in logics of media representation, particularly from the satirical press. This article explores visual representations of Argentina’s president Juan Perón (1946–1955) in the Chilean magazine Topaze. By discussing and contextualizing a series of images produced by Chilean cartoonists, this study provides new insights into the important role played by the press in shaping anti-Peronist sensibilities and discrediting Perón within Chilean domestic politics. Studying the impact of Peronism in the region—particularly in neighboring countries such as Chile—is useful for thinking about Peronism as a transnational phenomenon with multiple meanings outside Argentina.

La cifra de desaparecidos en Argentina motiva debates recurrentes. Durante la última dictadura militar (1976–1983) sus denunciantes elaboraron diversas cifras y estimaciones pero el número de 30 mil desaparecidos adquirió un carácter canónico. Tras retornar la democracia, la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas registró 8.960 casos. En los años noventa, en un contexto de impunidad, grupos de la sociedad civil elaboraron sus propias cifras y en los dos mil el Estado ofreció nuevos registros. El resurgimiento del negacionismo y la relativización del crimen revitalizaron este debate. Este trabajo historiza las cifras de desaparecidos y víctimas de desaparición forzada elaboradas por diversos actores y propone una aproximación académica sobre el tema. Comprende a estas cifras en su doble dimensión: como fruto de la elaboración de conocimiento sobre las desapariciones y como expresión de los combates por la memoria sobre las violaciones a los derechos humanos sucedidas en el país.

This essay reviews the following works:

Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain. By David M. Carballo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 351. $37.99 hardcover, $23.99 paperback, e-book. ISBN: 9780197661451.

Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest. By Fernando Cervantes. New York: Viking, 2021. Pp. vxiii + 496. $35.00 hardcover, e-book. ISBN: 9781101981269.

Inca Apocalypse: The Spanish Conquest and the Transformation of the Andean World. By R. Alan Covey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xix + 592. $34.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190299125.

Death in the Snow: Pedro de Alvarado and the Illusive Conquest of Peru. By George W. Lovell. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. Pp. xv + 280. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780228014409.

Strike Fear in the Land: Pedro de Alvarado and the Conquest of Guatemala, 1520–1541. By W. George Lovell, Christopher H. Lutz, and Wendy Kramer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 194. $32.95 hardcover, $21.95 paperback, e-book. ISBN: 9780806190044.

German Conquistadors in Venezuela: The Welsers’ Colony, Racialized Capitalism, and Cultural Memory. By Giovanna Montenegro. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. Pp. xvii + 372. $95.00 hardcover, $75.99 e-book. ISBN: 9780268203214.

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. By Matthew Restall. Updated edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xix + 272. $21.99 paperback. ISBN: 9780197537299.

Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan. By Stefan Rinke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. ix + 328. $34.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780197552469.

This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifested in diminishing social trust toward parties, debilitation of links between parties and social collectivities, lowering levels of partisanship, and rising incidence of personalism in the electorate. It focuses on some unrecognized and undertheorized causal factors behind partisan involution in the region, putting emphasis on mutually reinforcing processes. First, it identifies forces endogenous to the traits of origin of diminished parties that foster their uprootedness and decay; second, it lays out some of the manifold ways that the weakening of political parties fuels regime malperformance, in a mutually reinforcing vicious circle; third, it outlines the existence of mutual feedback loops between political agency and structure; fourth, it identifies various agential sources of party decay. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to expect continued party deinstitutionalization across Latin America going forward.

Generalizability of extant findings about media treatment of women in politics is uncertain because most research examines candidates for the legislature or heads of government, and little work moves beyond Anglo-American countries. We examine six presidential cabinets in Costa Rica, Uruguay, and the United States, which provide differing levels of women’s incorporation into government. These cases permit us to test hypotheses arguing that differences in media treatment of men and women cabinet ministers will decrease as women’s inclusion in government expands, and that media treatment of women is more critical when women head departments associated with masculine gender stereotypes. Results show that greater incorporation of women into government is associated with fewer gendered differences in media coverage, tone of minister coverage is more favorable for women who hold masculine stereotyped portfolios, and that the media does present qualifications of women cabinet ministers.

This article critically examines reasons for the persistent use of states of emergency (SOEs) as a tool of crime control in Jamaica and risks associated with normalising these measures in small, low-capacity, competitive democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). We attend to the question of permanent SOEs as an issue of law and certain policing methods becoming normalised. This differs from scholars who think about the use of permanent SOEs as suspension of law or executive rule and make a clear distinction between law and violence and normalcy and emergency. Our findings show that persistent usage of SOEs in Jamaica reflects the incapacity of the state to control violent crime as well as its effort to strengthen its coercive capabilities and compensate for the ineffectiveness of the police. It is also a response to public demand for SOE policing. State strengthening is a necessary condition for a more peaceful and law-abiding society but is also a carrier of risks of democratic degeneration via rights-disregarding policing. Nonetheless, we have seen authoritarian management of crime without descent into authoritarianism, in general, and strong boundary-marking and patrolling by some state-oversight institutions that enjoy the support of civil society.

Across Latin America, there continues to be strong resistance to the claim that racism plays a role in the production of urban space. Deemed antipatriotic, this issue remains widely unaddressed in urban planning and geography. Based on qualitative research in Bogotá and secondary literature on other Latin American cities, this article explores the afterlife of mestizaje (racial mixture) as a racial–colonial project from the viewpoint of its materialisation in the city and society–space relations. In particular, it illustrates how racism in the city is transfigured as ‘always something else’ (e.g., culture, class, regionalism, displacement) through a variety of normative, discursive and operational devices. Thus, the article confronts the need to divest from the racial hegemony of mestizaje in urban planning and geography, suggesting that it is hindering the path towards more equitable urban futures.

Repressive state violence, intended to tamp down collective mobilisation, sometimes inspires greater participation by protesters. When popular and/or elite reactions cause the repressing party to concede, civil resistance scholars define the failure of state repression as ‘backfire’. Some have proposed that movements’ nonviolent discipline is essential to backfire. This article demonstrates that movements that practise ‘unarmed militancy’ – forceful, combative tactics less damaging than armed violence – can also succeed through backfire, achieving policy concessions and even presidential resignations, and presents a qualitative comparative analysis of the outcomes of 48 protest events with multiple deaths in Bolivia between 1982 and 2019, and a case-based analysis of how either movements or repressors prevailed. Movements that confronted deadly repression succeeded in 57–8 per cent of cases. Whether or not protesters engaged in lethal defensive violence did not affect their likelihood of success. However, state repression of guerrillas and paramilitary groups, and during polarised partisan conflicts, was consistently successful. Current understandings of backfire need to be reconsidered in light of successful unarmed militant protest in Bolivia and numerous other locations worldwide.