Major social and economic changes in Latin America brought about by adoption of the neoliberal model of development have been documented in the recent research literature. We ask to what extent such changes have affected the character of popular collective mobilizations in major cities of the region. We present data from six recent field studies in major Latin American cities that identify goals pursued by contemporary popular movements and organizations and the strategies they adopt to achieve them. These studies provide an overview of how urban society has reacted to the constraints, crises, and opportunities brought about by the new model of development and cast light on what has changed and what remains the same in determinants of popular collective demand-making in major metropolitan areas. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

The Honduran Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve has become a place of struggle over natural resources. This paper examines a land contest between the Miskito Indians and the Garifuna, an indigenous group and Afro-indigenous group respectively. The area in question is Lasa Pulan, a one square kilometer of forest and farmland, historically shared by both Miskito and Garifuna collectives. Through discursive analysis, this paper traces contemporary discourse and practice that these actors employ to justify exclusive claims to Lasa Pulan. Such contemporary claims are structured by longstanding colonial and postcolonial racial ideologies that stereotypically label blacks as “immoral” and “violent” and Indians as “ignorant” and “backward. ” This paper argues, through analysis of Miskito and Garifuna claims to Lasa Pulan, that natural resource struggles are simultaneously racial struggles, and it acquaints policy makers with the multiple tenure arrangements in pluricultural Honduras.

The Andean khipu was a medium of colored knotted cords used to record different types of information in the pre-Columbian and colonial periods. Although currently there is no way to read the khipu that have survived, numerous texts written in the colonial period claim to have relied on khipu as sources of information. A comparison between two khipu transcriptions of Inca biographies on the one hand and the European biographical genre on the other reveal a distinctly Andean poetics—in the sense of a structural format—with very suggestive links to semiotic conventions of the khipu.

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares “marginality” as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called “new poverty” today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.