This research note assesses how surnames in a Bolivian Quechua-speaking peasant community were transmitted and distributed from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth to show that parish register data can allow anthropologists to uncover the impact and significance of larger political, economic, and historical processes at the local level. I argue that patterns of surname transmission underwent a momentous shift between the early 1800s and the mid-1900s, from high percentages of illegitimate infants carrying their fathers' surname to virtually none doing so, an upshot of sweeping changes in sociocultural practices spawned by the revolution and agrarian reform in 1952 and 1953. This transformation in the allocation of patronyms to baptized infants reflected a new importance attached by both peasants and church officials to legitimate birth status and its coupling with genealogical reckoning via surname transmission. Such a coupling was important for peasants in order to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity in the midst of shifting and uncertain contexts structuring access to land and resources. It was also important for parish church officials, who probably thought it necessary to adhere more closely to national legal codes in a revolutionary setting.

Few periods in South American history have so captured the imagination and begged the attention of scholars as the Amazon rubber boom. For fifty years, the extraction of wild rubber from the jungles of the Amazon fueled unprecedented economic expansion in the region: per capita incomes in the Brazilian Amazon climbed by 800 percent; the regional population increased by more than 400 percent; urban centers and secondary towns blossomed along the river banks; and the vast Amazonian forest lands were integrated into national political spheres and the international market economy. But when low-cost rubber from British plantations in Asia flooded world markets in the 1910s, rubber prices plummeted, sharply curtailing financial returns from wild rubber extraction. The price shock drove scores of traders and export houses into bankruptcy when they were unable to collect debts that were based on the future value of rubber. Urban real estate prices crashed, and service industries withered along with their customers' incomes. By the early 1920s, the boom was over, and per capita income levels had shrunk to pre-boom levels. Today, nearly a century later, such incomes (in real terms) have yet to return to boom levels in many areas despite massive state investment in Amazonia.

This article studies the evolution of literacy in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1900 to 1950. A methodology is developed to overcome the lack of census data for half of the countries in the region for 1900, as well as the lack of comparability of the existing census data. Combining census data and literacy data gathered from marriage registrations, military recruits, crime statistics, and urban censuses, adult literacy estimates for twenty-two countries of the region are provided for 1900, which offer a new and more complete portrait of human capital formation from 1900 to 1950. There are wide variations across the region in literacy rates in 1900, as well as in the increase of literacy from 1900 to 1950, the latter being associated with variations in the expansion of primary education enrollment in different Latin American countries. However, countries also differ in their success in transforming school enrollment into adult literacy, which is partly associated with the prevalence of Amerindian populations.

This article examines gender struggles surrounding two women's collectives in a Sandinista village as a way to illuminate microprocesses of gender transformation during the Sandinista period and its aftermath. It argues for an analytical approach sensitive to the specificity of gender relations in particular contexts and the ways these were affected by state policies. It demonstrates that men's opposition to women's participation was enabled by ambiguities in Sandinista gender ideology that allowed men to interpret the meanings of revolutionary masculinity in their own terms. By examining these ambiguities, the article shows that, while the revolution failed to dismantle structures of gender inequality, as critics have pointed out, its incorporation of women as class and national subjects into the nation-building project could destabilize local patriarchies.

With the so-called linguistic turn, historians have begun to study the ways in which a multitude of cultural forms are imbricated in the colonial and imperial project. In analyzing the infinite ways in which power is exercised and manifested, historians are turning a critical eye toward a myriad of cultural productions for a better understanding of how culture, politics, and power work in concert. One example is the increasing scrutiny given to geographical conceptions and representations. In Latin American colonial studies, a number of recent works have analyzed the ways in which deep, culturally rooted structures of spatial perception and representation have influenced the colonial process. This essay attempts to bring a number of those works into meaningful dialogue with one another with respect to the cultural and political facets of cartography. It also introduces work by scholars studying other regions of the world that may push the field farther and the work of the “new cultural cartographers” who have problematized traditional notions about the mimetic quality of maps and their presumed objectivity. In sum, this essay surveys recent literature pertaining to colonial cartography in Latin America, analyzes a number of comparative and theoretical studies that may broaden future research, and suggests that cartography and maps offer a fruitful avenue for further study and analysis of colonialism, imperialism, and state formation.

Globalization has exacerbated the impact of three Northern-driven forces on Central American unions. Transnational firms have restructured or enhanced their levels of subcontracting. Governments, while weakening labor-code implemention, have launched extensive privatization schemes. And international supporters of unions have espoused new priorities and rechanneled funding. Although all three trends have caused major difficulties for unions, this article assesses whether or not their traditional spirit of “social-movement unionism” has been undermined. Based on extensive interviews and primary and secondary data, the study documents union resilience in the banana and maquila sectors despite problematic corporate behavior and market conditions. Stung by state privatizations, unions that fragmented following the Central American Peace Accords have partially regrouped to resist public-health takeovers and labor-code harmonization. Facing losses in Northern funding, unions have painfully adapted to fresh organizing strategies and sensitivity to women's issues, which they found to be fundamental to successful collaboration with corporate campaigns, trade pressure, and NGOs. Despite losses, unions have tapped a broader solidarity in their struggle against the demons of globalization.

This article proposes a framework for the analysis of social classes in Latin America and presents evidence on the composition of the class structure in the region and its evolution during the last two decades, corresponding to the years of implementation of a new economic model in most countries. The paper is an update of an earlier article on the same topic published in this journal at the end of the period of import substitution industrialization. Relative to that earlier period, the present era registers a visible increase in income inequality, a persistent concentration of wealth in the top decile of the population, a rapid expansion of the class of micro-entrepreneurs, and a stagnation or increase of the informal proletariat. The contraction of public sector employment and the stagnation of formal sector labor demand in most countries have led to a series of adaptive solutions by the middle and lower classes. The rise of informal self-employment and micro-entrepreneurialism throughout the region can be interpreted as a direct result of the new adjustment policies. We explore other, less orthodox adaptive strategies, including the rise of violent crime in the cities and migration abroad by an increasingly diversified cross-section of the population. The impact that changes in the class structure have had on party politics and other forms of popular political mobilization in Latin American countries is discussed.

This article focuses on environmental protection issue networks (EPINs), defined here as networks among domestic and international environmentally concerned actors that seek to protect local environments. EPINs may be important agents in efforts to promote environmentally sustainable development in Latin America, but their effectiveness has varied considerably. The article presents a model for assessing the effectiveness of EPINs based on their strategic capacity, the environmental visibility of the issues with which they deal, and the nature of their opposition targets. The model was inspired by hypotheses generated in comparing three EPINs established to address environmental and social problems created by development projects financed by the World Bank in Brazilian Amazonia between 1981 and 2000.

This article reviews the recent literature on the so-called myths of racial democracy in Latin America and challenges current critical interpretations of the social effects of these ideologies. Typically, critics stress the elitist nature of these ideologies, their demobilizing effects among racially subordinate groups, and the role they play in legitimizing the subordination of such groups. Using the establishment of the Cuban republic as a test case, this article contends that the critical approach tends to minimize or ignore altogether the opportunities that these ideologies have created for those below, the capacity of subordinate groups to use the nation-state's cultural project to their own advantage, and the fact that these social myths also restrain the political options of their own creators.