This study examines the effect of democratization on a key education reform across three Mexican states. Previous scholarship has found a positive effect of electoral competition on social spending, as leaders seek to improve their reelection prospects by delivering services to voters. However, the evidence presented here indicates that more money has not meant better educational outcomes in Mexico. Rather, new and vulnerable elected leaders are especially susceptible to the demands of powerful interest groups at the expense of accountability to constituents. In this case, the dominant teachers' union has used its leverage to exact greater control over the country's resource-rich merit pay program for teachers. It has exploited this control to increase salaries and decrease standards for advancement up the remuneration ladder. The evidence suggests that increased electoral competition has led to the empowerment of entrenched interests rather than voters, with an overall negative effect on education.

La existencia de un nacionalismo oficial identificado únicamente con el independentismo y el sentimiento antiestadounidense parece explicar la relativa escasez de estudios sobre la primera generación republicana en Cuba. Buscando disminuir este vacío crítico, este artículo estudia la obra de José Antonio Ramos para ahondar sobre una corriente de pensamiento nacionalista que intentó balancear arielismo y proamericanismo a principios de siglo XX. Sin lograr constituir una fórmula integral de reconciliación entre polaridades, este discurso terminó por reducir al aislamiento a gran parte de la primera generación republicana. Atrincherados en un discurso elitista de la antipolítica, el rechazo a la opinión pública de intelectuales como Ramos, conllevó a la imposibilidad de establecer las alianzas necesarias para la consolidación de una identidad nacional viable aún en los términos reformistas neocoloniales.

Asians in Argentina have received little scholarly attention despite the current proliferation of studies on Asians in Latin America. Asian Argentines' absence from academic research reflects, in part, their marginality and presumed foreignness in Argentina's past and current national narratives. Existing scholarship frames Asian descendants predominantly as members of single-ethnic colectividades (communities) illustrating ties to co-ethnics and country of origin. To broaden this perspective, I examine the possibilities of a panethnic and domestic “Asian Argentine” approach. Conceptualizing an Asian Argentine category can be problematized by ongoing theoretical discussions regarding the limitations of multiculturalism and nation-based inquiries. Situating these critiques in Argentina's particular context—from its historical insistence on whiteness to its newly ethnicized political arena today—I argue that an Asian Argentine approach can be a useful analytical and political tool to understand this group's position in Argentina and serve as a starting point to challenge the discourses that marginalize Asian Argentines as nonexistent or irreversibly foreign.

Latin American elites authored and disseminated ideologies of mestizaje or race mixture, but does the general population value them today? Using the 2010 Americas Barometer, we examined public opinion about mestizaje in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using survey questions that modeled mestizaje both as a principle of national development and as tolerance for intermarriage with black or indigenous people. We found that most Latin Americans support mestizaje, although support varies by country and ethnicity. Across countries, we find partial evidence that the strength of earlier nation-making mestizaje ideas is related to support for mestizaje today, and that strong multicultural policies may have actually strengthened such support. Ethnoracial minorities showed particular support for the national principle of mestizaje. Finally, we discovered that the national principle of mestizaje is associated with more tolerant attitudes about intermarriage, especially in countries with large Afro-descendant populations.

Desde una perspectiva cualitativa, el artículo (i) analiza cómo un grupo de migrantes españoles de alta calificación percibe, valora y representa su espacio vivido y cómo construye un sentido de lugar en la Ciudad de México, (ii) explora la identificación de este grupo con la ciudad y los lugares de residencia, sus relaciones interpersonales, de ocio, así como los vínculos con el país de origen y sus intenciones de estancia y (iii) evalúa hasta qué punto sus valoraciones, percepciones e identificaciones son válidas para entender los procesos migratorios y de asentamiento en el país de destino. El artículo se basa en un trabajo de campo realizado en la Ciudad de México desde mayo a septiembre de 2005 que consistió en veintinueve entrevistas en profundidad con migrantes españoles de alta calificación. El artículo concluye que estas personas mantienen vínculos con los lugares de proximidad, aunque no necesariamente impliquen un sentido claro de pertenencia y, en todo caso, estos vínculos geográficos sólo explican parcialmente las intenciones de estancia en México.

This article offers an articulation of liberation philosophy, a Latin American form of political and philosophical thought that is largely not followed in European and Anglo-American political circles. Liberation philosophy has posed serious challenges to Jürgen Habermas's and Karl-Otto Apel's discourse ethics. Here I explain what these challenges consist of and argue that Apel's response to Latin American political thought shows that discourse ethics can maintain internal consistency only if it is subsumed under the program of liberation philosophy.