Este artículo examina el papel constitutivo de los periódicos bolivianos en los inicios del proceso deformación nacional (1825–1855, aproximadamente). Discute su intervención en los debates políticos y legales del momento, sus esfuerzos por definir los elementos que identifican con la nacionalidad, su inserción en un precario mercado, su promoción de los valores patrios y participación en la formación de ciudadanos. El artículo muestra la capacidad incorporadora de elementos heterogéneos que tienen las hojas impresas y, sobre todo, la reconceptualización del tiempo y el espacio que articulan en términos de lo nacional. Finalmente, sin minimizar las contribuciones del proyecto letrado de construcción nacional, destaca también las tensiones y limitaciones que le son inherentes.

In the “fourth wave” of transitions to democracy sweeping the globe over the past twenty years, the Chilean case stands out as an exception. Although most instances of democratization following military rule have tended to yield rightist governments, Chile is one country in which the ruling coalition that emerged was Center-Left in ideological orientation.

Real wages describe changes in the material standard of living of wage earners. This article reviews the national experience of Mexico through the twentieth century, surveying more than thirty studies from the late Porfiriato to the opening of the twenty-first century. The data suggest that real wages follow a long-term cyclical pattern of alternate periods of declining and rising wages. As a consequence, twentieth-century Mexico was not kind to workers because the gains of one period seem to be offset by falls in the next. Wage trends in Mexico and the rest of Latin America seemed to follow similar paths, except during the years following Mexico's revolution, when a new labor regime especially benefited the country's wage earners. Following a significant downturn in the 1940s, workers in Mexico and Latin America experienced a favorable period of income growth during the postwar boom. The debt crisis of the 1980s induced a long decline that continued through the early years of globalization.

This study discusses the responses of Mexican intellectuals to the 1968 massacre in the Plaza de Tlatelolco. Several published studies and anthologies have covered the poetry, narrative, and essays written on the subject, but no such consideration has been given to the theatrical works written and staged since 1968. Jeanette Malkin's theory on memory-theatre, Pierre Nora's “lieux de mémoire,” and Michel Foucault's concept of countermemories all shed light on how these dramatic works function in a changing Mexico, now moving toward authentic democracy and ready to revive a segment of history suppressed and distorted but never forgotten. Of the many plays commemorating the events of 1968, four that focus on the process of memory are analyzed in this essay. Because of the slow democratization of Mexico, the growing maturity of former participants and witnesses, and the postmodern craving for testimony, the repressed memories of Tlatelolco have not faded into oblivion but continue to inspire the dramatic imagination.

In this paper I move beyond binary conceptions of the Colombian state as either strong or weak, failed or successful. Instead, I analyze particular sublime and gross qualities of the state as they are expressed through contestations over the space of el pueblo. I argue that this space—el pueblo—has been constructed around an internal contradiction. On one hand, it is figured as distant and in opposition to the city-state. On the other hand, it occupies the center of the nation. Marginalized by the official state, competing actors have incorporated el pueblo into “shadow states” that subvert the sublime image of the state. Lacking legitimacy within el pueblo, both the official and shadow states employ institutionalized violences in order to assert symbolic, discursive, and physical control over it. The result is the creation of a “culture of terror” that marks the real and imaginary space of el pueblo. The “spatialized vocabularies of citizenship” articulated by each actor—the state, shadow states, and el pueblo itself—from these margins mutually constitute Colombia's competing and intertwining “languages of stateness.”