Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a shantytown in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, this article studies the workings of Peronist “political clientelism” among the urban poor. It analyzes the web of relations that some slum-dwellers establish with local political brokers to obtain medicine, food, and solutions to other everyday concerns. The article also explores the main functions of the “problem-solving networks,” which are resource control and information hoarding, and pays particular attention to an underexplored dimension of the operation of clientelism: clients' own views on the network.

This essay analyzes the impact of an indigenous counterpublic sphere in contemporary Bolivia, arguing that it functions as an arena of differential consciousness for Aymara intellectuals and activists. In examining the work carried out by the Aymara nongovernmental organization known as the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), the essay highlights this sphere's importance as both a discursive and territorial arena where agency is expressed in the collaborative spirit of community. THOA's work is significant in strategically formulating a methodology of decolonization based on revisionist Andean historiography, territorial demands, and collective political action.

The U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 radically altered patterns of social and economic development. Examination of census and archival data on land tenure reveals that contrary to generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years from 1898 to 1915. Instead, and despite massive agro-industrial investments by U.S. sugar corporations, more small farmers owned land in 1915 than at the end of the Spanish colonial period in 1898. This surprising revelation contradicts the findings of all previous studies, and it prompts us to research further the social and economic impact of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The Catholic clergy and the military have played crucial roles in Mexican history yet have been largely ignored in recent twentieth-cenury scholarship. The military received some attention in the early post-revolutionary period because it was intertwined with political leadership, but religious elites and the Catholic Church, which were separate from the state and suppressed by it, have not been analyzed. As a rule, cohesive leadership groups in Mexico with values differing from politicians, strong institutional structures, and autonomy from the state have rarely been examined, especially in relationship to the state and politics in general. Conversely, the greater a group's ties to the Mexican political establishment, as measured by exchanges between leadership, the more scholars have learned about that group. Whereas intellectuals, entrepreneurs, military officers, and even opposition politicians share some ties with the state, the Catholic Church has no direct links, and its contemporary leaders, goals, and institutional structures remain relatively unknown and little understood.