This article examines bureaucracies using a novel dataset of Chilean central government employees from 2006 to 2020. Unlike perception-based sources, this dataset provides objective, disaggregated, and longitudinal insights into bureaucrats’ characteristics and careers. The authors validate it against official employment statistics and conduct an exploratory and descriptive analysis, presenting six descriptive findings about the Chilean bureaucracy that cannot be discovered using available aggregate data. The analysis reveals significant degrees of personnel stability and professionalization in the civil service, but with considerable rigidity in careers and substantial interagency heterogeneity in turnover, wages, and exposure to political cycles. These findings suggest that the Chilean national bureaucracy is mostly well developed along Weberian lines, though not uniformly so. These measurements also serve as a benchmark for comparing other Latin American bureaucracies in the future.

Accessing and retaining adequate housing can be a major challenge for low-income city residents, particularly women trying to escape domestic abuse. Focusing on housing struggles amidst urban poverty, this article explores a specific kind of gender-based violence – violation of women's property rights – recognised by Latin American legal systems as ‘patrimonial violence against women’. Drawing on qualitative research in Brazil, this article shows how women are likely to experience gendered evictions and dispossession, and why patrimonial violence against women remains largely misunderstood and underreported, despite legal progress. The discussion expands current understandings of the interplay between gender, violence (explicit or otherwise) and the reproduction of asset inequalities.

The emergence of ex-rebels’ political parties after peace accords creates a vehicle for political reintegration, which in turn has positive effects on peace and democracy consolidation after war. However, many of these parties tend to break apart and disappear, elevating the risk of renewed cycles of political violence. In times of war, cohesion plays a pivotal role in maintaining the bonds among members of armed organizations. It empowers them to perform effectively even in the face of challenging conditions and continues to be a critical factor during postconflict transitions. By means of a quantitative analysis of former FARC guerrillas in Colombia, now part of a newly founded legal political party, we test whether ideology, organizational dynamics, or individual perceptions and motivations help to explain their levels of cohesion. Our results show that even if all dimensions add up to the observed cohesion levels, perceptions of internal democracy, and inclusion, are the most relevant. We argue that assistance to former rebels in their organizational reengineering efforts after war will help to reduce the risk of the negative effects of rebel party collapse.

In recent decades, Brazilian voters have grown polarized between supporters of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT), known as petistas, and its opponents, known as antipetistas. What explains this animosity? One potential source of polarization is partisan stereotyping, a tendency for partisans to misperceive the social composition of both their own side’s bases of support as well as their opponents’. We show that most Brazilians overestimate the extent to which petistas and antipetistas belong to party-stereotypical groups such as Afro-Brazilians, evangelical Christians, or poor or rich people. We then show that stereotyping is associated with polarization: the greater the bias in perceived partisan group composition, the greater the perceptions of partisan political extremism and feelings of social distance toward the partisan out-group.

In Bolivia, expectations for a decolonised society turned into a political crisis in the autumn of 2019. Discussing the limitations of progressive politics in cultivating democracy, this article identifies three narratives of authoritarianism – liberal democratic, developmentalist and colonial – which the opponents of Evo Morales use to frame their disillusionment with his rule. It argues that these multiple narratives lend meaning to contradictory experiences in a context in which hopes for a major decolonising state-transformation process have devolved into a deep polarisation of Bolivian society. The events in Bolivia are discussed in the context of rising authoritarianism throughout Latin America.

Defined as a credible threat that strengthens the bargaining position of the executive, presidential vetoes, widely understudied, carry a stigma of confrontation between state powers. But under some institutional setups, partial vetoes can be an additional step in the executive–legislative bargaining process. After a discussion of whether partial vetoes are a proactive legislative tool or a bargaining tool to induce executive–legislative cooperation, we test four hypotheses using the 2,346 bills introduced in Chile between 1990 and 2018 that reached a vetoable stage. We identified 97 partial vetoes (4.2 percent) and one total veto. Presidents are more likely to veto bills with more complex legislative processes and when they have stronger support in at least one chamber, but more popular presidents do not veto more bills. As most presidential vetoes in Chile are partial, they are an additional executive–legislative bargaining step in the lawmaking process rather than evidence of hyperpresidentialism.

This essay reviews the following works:

Dealing with Peace: The Guatemalan Campesino Movement and the Post-Conflict Neoliberal State. By Simon Granovsky-Larsen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 275. $70.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781487501433.

Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954. By Patricia Harms. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2020. Pp. xii + 409. $75.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826361455.

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala: Cultural Collapse and Christian Pentecostal Revitalization. Edited by John P. Hawkins. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research, 2021. Pp. xxv + 448. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826362254.

Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala. Edited by Stephen Henighan and Candace Johnson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. v + 263. $36.95 paper. ISBN: 9781487522971.

Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution: A History of Religious and Social Reform, 1920–1968. By Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 254. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780268104412.

Cuando el indio tomó las armas: La vida de Emeterio Toj Medrano. By Emeterio Toj Medrano and Rodrigo Véliz Estrada. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021. Pp. 504. $354.00 paper. ISBN: 9786073043175.

How do mothers deal with chronic violence and the constant presence of guns in their neighborhoods? How do they build situated meaning and discursive practices out of their experiences and relationships with armed actors? We compare the experiences of women in two poor and working-class neighborhoods in Caracas. Through this comparative ethnographic project, we aim to show how, in the midst of state-sponsored depredation and with an overwhelming presence of guns in their lives, women use their cultural roles as mothers to perform everyday forms of resistance vis-à-vis the different armed actors that impose their presence in the barrios. In the mothers’ daily struggles, dramatic discursive actions—from more openly oppositional ones, such as shouting, scolding, and talking, to more hidden ones, such as both “circulating gossip” and “captive gossip,” to more vulnerable ones, such as whispering—are main resources in the micropolitics of their neighborhoods. Our findings suggest that strategies are context dependent and most likely vary according to numerous factors, including the history of civic organizing, policing practices, and the type of armed actor with whom they cohabitate in their neighborhood.

A partir de las series fotográficas Padre Patria (2014–2019) y Vírgenes de la Puerta (2014–2016), de Juan José Barboza-Gubo y Andrew Mroczek, este ensayo reflexiona acerca de la identidad de las mujeres trans en el Perú desde la sexualidad, el mestizaje y la colonialidad del poder. Padre Patria ofrece una narrativa visual de los crímenes de odio hacia la comunidad LGBTI en diferentes lugares del país. En Vírgenes de la Puerta se propone un nuevo modelo de feminidad a través de la apropiación de íconos religiosos como la Virgen María. A partir de enfoques decoloniales, feministas, de diversidad sexual y biopoder, este trabajo indaga sobre la reformulación del retrato fotográfico de las mujeres trans a través de la estética mariana y la violencia patriarcal. La dimensión política de este proyecto fotográfico busca visibilizar las experiencias de las mujeres trans en la actualidad.

A pesar de su abarcadora influencia, La ciudad letrada de Ángel Rama (1984) ha sido sometida en los últimos años a una intensa crítica que ha cuestionado la relación demasiado unívoca que el argumento planteaba entre escritura y poder, así como su exclusión de las formas de alfabetización indígena, mestiza y afrodescendiente. El presente trabajo parte de estos debates para, revisando la obra crítica y los epistolarios de Rama, ofrecer una nueva genealogía intelectual del concepto que daba título al libro póstumo. En particular, se rescata el ensayo de 1980 donde Rama se refirió por primera vez a la ciudad letrada, titulado “La señal de Jonás sobre el pueblo mexicano”. La relectura del libro en diálogo con este trabajo previo nos permitirá ver que la idea de ciudad letrada no aspiraba a describir la totalidad de la realidad cultural de la América colonial, sino uno de los polos que la tensionan, uno de los lados de un conflicto cultural. “La señal de Jonás” ofrece una visión significativamente diferente de la ciudad colonial, donde la fuerza cultural de una plebe urbana y multirracial desafía los muros de la ciudad letrada y alcanza a penetrar la práctica intelectual de algunos de sus guardianes. Frente al pesimismo de La ciudad letrada, late en “La señal de Jonás” un utopismo similar al de Transculturación narrativa en América Latina respecto a las potencialidades políticas y estéticas de esa cultura urbana popular de raigambre colonial.

This article explores the spatial politics of Peru’s gastronomic revolution and corresponding efforts to territorialize Peruvian agricultural products by tracing the spatial dynamics of quinoa’s trajectory from highland dietary staple to coveted national food. Efforts to codify Peru’s national cuisine have involved mapping ingredients and dishes onto specific regions while dramatically reshaping agricultural production geographies and culinary topographies. Because of quinoa’s success as a high-value export crop, the Peruvian altiplano is no longer perceived as a landscape useful exclusively for livestock pasture and mining. Instead, it is imagined as agriculturally productive: the country’s quinoa heartland. At the same time, quinoa’s trajectory illuminates spatial contradictions in the gastronomic boom’s purported objectives and its tangible effects. The revalorization of quinoa led to a geographical expansion of its production outside the high Andes, undermining the spatially bound concepts of authenticity promoted by gastronomic leaders in Peru. Broadly, efforts to commercialize marginalized food products and their corresponding regions can at once reconfigure territorial discourses in important ways, reinforce long-standing geographical inequalities, and generate contestations of the geographic imaginaries of food and nation.

Diverse elements have driven inflation in the Cuban economy in the early 2020s, but the big-bang devaluation of the peso in 2021—the key measure that unlocks monetary reform—stands out as the main determinant. Analysis indicates that the inflation rate ranged between 174% and 700%, well above the government’s 2021 consumer price index estimate (77%) and closer to the deflator of household consumption derived from the national income accounts (442%). Even with this larger inflation, there is room for a real depreciation of the peso in the short term. The relative rise of tradable goods prices and incomplete pass-through from the exchange rate to inflation create new incentives and enhance financial transparency in the short term. However, the absence of sufficient structural reforms, the complex macroeconomic scenario, and the persistence of high fiscal deficit, inflation, and devaluation of the peso in the informal market after 2021 put most of the potential benefits of the monetary reform at risk. Monetary instability is a deep, continuing problem.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Alzate family, of Medellín, Colombia, grasped the magnetism of the Natural Man (a malleable myth with porous edges that combines both the Edenic and the cannibalistic visions of indigenous peoples) and its economic potential and orchestrated a family craft business of fake pre-Columbian pottery. They created pieces that would engage in dialogue with collectors’, anthropologists’, museums’, and tourists’ desires and imaginaries, as well as authenticity criteria, about indigenous pre-Columbian peoples. This article shows the relationship between these forgeries’ production, circulation, and consumption and the ways Latin American indigenous peoples have been conceived of by others. Moreover, this research stresses how authentic fakes, together with official and popular discourses and images, certain exhibition and validation rhetorics, and other mises-en-scène construct what is sacralized as uncontaminated, original, and traditional. Such fakes operate politically by undermining social hierarchies linked to essentialized race and identity.

Este artículo analiza la propuesta teórica del posjudaísmo articulada por el proyecto YOK en respuesta a la crisis del judaísmo institucionalizado en Buenos Aires, Argentina. Contrario a cualquier forma de pensar lo judío en términos tradicionales y normativos, el proyecto posjudío se planteó como una deconstrucción capaz de derribar los muros del judaísmo tradicional y, con el mismo movimiento, dar voz a aquellos judíos que no encuentran acomodo en las infraestructuras institucionales de la comunidad. Nuestra hipótesis es que su arquitectura conceptual, cuyo objetivo es conseguir la total liberación de las formas identitarias judías, termina legitimando una nueva servidumbre, esta es: la adaptación de lo identitario a la fluidez del mercado. Para demostrarlo, me detendré en reflexionar sobre cómo el posjudaísmo repiensa, desde el andamiaje de las filosofías posmodernas, la comunidad tradicional con el fin de proponer un judaísmo en las antípodas de este, un judaísmo basado en un trabajo de autocreación incesante que apele a lo plural, a lo abierto y a lo emancipado de toda norma y de todo dogma. Esto me permitirá demostrar cómo la autocreación es fruto de las dinámicas posmodernas de transformación de la subjetividad cimentadas sobre la emoción y la individualidad creadora.

This study reconstructs remittances from different regional haciendas to the main treasury of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, located in Buenos Aires, between 1800 and 1810. It estimates the extent and periodization of the decline of the situado of Potosí during the last colonial decade, determining whether the contributions from regional treasuries made up for it. It also estimates the impact of transfers on the regional treasuries. By drawing on the accounting books of various treasuries, the article identifies the main mechanisms that the Royal Treasury of Buenos Aires implemented to seize surplus resources of the viceroyalty’s interior haciendas at the end of the colonial period. The ability of the Royal Treasury to seize those surpluses was significant and implemented through various mechanisms of the ancien régime.