This article examines nineteenth-century citations of Silvestre de Balboa Troya y Quesada's Espejo de paciencia (1608, 1838) in Cuban histories and literary anthologies of that period. Although contemporary scholars reference these citations in their study of Espejo, they have not questioned the treatment of Salvador Golomón, the poem's enslaved epic hero, in these texts. Doing so not only elucidates concerns regarding race in Cuban nation building reflected in the trajectory of the nineteenth-century citations of the poem but also places race at the very center of any discussion of Espejo's historical and literary authenticity by contemporary critics and scholars alike.

This article highlights an important paradox: in Argentina between 2003 and 2013 the center-left Peronist government's approach to governance mirrors that of the center-right Peronist administration of the 1990s. While the latter centralized authority to pursue neoliberal reforms, the former have centralized authority in the name of expanding government intervention in the economy. In both cases, corruption has tended to go unchecked due to insufficient government accountability. Therefore, although economic policies and political rhetoric have changed dramatically, government corruption remains a constant of the Argentine political system due to the executive branch's ability to emasculate constitutional checks and balances.

To understand the momentous transformation in Argentine-Brazilian relations from rivalry to Mercosur, scholars need to analyze negative cases, when rapprochement was attempted unsuccessfully. This article examines the failed 1972 summit between Presidents Alejandro Agustín Lanusse and Emílio Garrastazú Médici, which is poorly explained by existing theories of international relations and overlooked or misinterpreted in many regional histories. I argue, based on research in the Argentine Foreign Ministry Archives, newly declassified US government documents, and a reexamination of published primary sources, that rapprochement failed in 1972 primarily because bureaucratic interests in the armed forces and foreign ministries of both states depended on the continuation of rivalry. Organizational politics, not popular nationalism or presidential diplomatic errors, best explains the persistence of Argentine-Brazilian conflict in the early 1970s. Successful cooperation between rivals therefore may require not only agreement between national leaders but also the support of the state apparatus on both sides.

How does corruption interact with inequality? To answer this question, we employ a field experiment that examines the manner in which police officers in a major Latin American city respond to socioeconomic distinctions when requiring a bribe. In this experiment, four automobile drivers commit identical traffic violations across a randomized sequence of crossroads, which are monitored by transit police. We identify the effect of citizens' perceived wealth on officers' propensity to solicit bribes and on the size of the bribes that they solicit. We complement our experimental results with qualitative findings from interviews with police officers. Our core finding is that officers are more likely to target lower class individuals and let more affluent drivers off with warnings. The qualitative results suggest that officers associate wealth with the capacity to exact retribution and therefore are more likely to demand bribes from poorer individuals. We conclude that a multimethod approach provides a richer account of corrupt behavior than that found in most contemporary research.

Using data from the National Survey of Standards of Living conducted in Guatemala in 2000, this article tests the hypothesis that Guatemalan households use child labor and reduce child schooling to cope with household shocks. First, the authors use factor analysis to estimate the latent household propensity to natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. Then, they estimate bivariate probit models to identify the determinants of child labor and schooling, including household propensity to natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. Results suggest that households use child labor to cope with natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. In contrast, the authors found no evidence that suggests that households reduce child schooling to cope with shocks. Findings also indicate that poor households are more likely to use child labor and schooling reduction as strategies to cope with socioeconomic shocks.

Postcolonial criticism and theory have been instrumental not only in showing how Western texts have constructed non-Western peoples and cultures, but also in analyzing discourse on the racialized Other in travel writings by members of formerly colonized societies and cultures who may reinscribe—consciously or unconsciously—the structural values of cultural domination. As privileged members of comparable societies that had assimilated and been assimilated into dominant ideologies of European cultural and biological superiority, Spanish American visitors to the United States during the segregation era uniquely exemplify such discourse and thus merit scholarly attention. Examining—within their respective cultural and historical contexts—selected texts by six Spanish American writers who visited or lived in the United States during the period 1880-1947, this paper analyzes their observations of, experiences with, and reactions to the realities of racial separation and the attendant violence against African Americans in order to determine the extent to which the writers resisted or participated in the “othering” process that represented African Americans as different and inferior.

As a consequence of US border policies that funnel migrants through the harsh Sonoran Desert, migrants since the 1990s have been crossing and dying in large numbers on Tohono O'odham lands. This article examines the spiritual and political journey of Mike Wilson, a tribal member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, who puts water out for migrants against the wishes of his tribal council. Wilson's road to human rights activism was a winding one. In the 1980s, he was a member of the US Army Special Forces stationed in El Salvador; politically, he was, in his words, “to the right of Attila the Hun.” How did a Green Beret become an outspoken human rights activist? This article argues that religion provided the material and cultural conditions of possibility for Wilson's conversions and was an important source of “friction” that both enabled and constrained his prophetic style of activism.

This article takes a governance perspective to examine the contemporary revitalization of Guaraní, a “repressed” language that is spoken by a majority of the population in Paraguay. A historical overview highlights the striking endurance of the language in spite of two centuries of official subjugation. The article traces the positive impact of political democratization since 1989 on the revitalization of Guaraní by examining four interrelated areas that are closely linked to the governance agenda: the education system, the media, the political system, and popular culture. However, the absence of a comprehensive language policy continues to limit progress in improving governance, as the weak impact of the official poverty reduction program exemplifies. The case of Guaraní demonstrates the need for wider recognition of the importance of language policy in promoting good governance through citizen empowerment and accountability of the state.

El artículo tiene como objeto abordar la singularidad de las trayectorias de mujeres consagradas durante la última dictadura militar en la Argentina. La hipótesis del trabajo es que su doble condición de mujeres y consagradas las situó coyunturalmente en una posición de ventajas comparativas para hacer frente a la represión estatal. Para llevarlo a cabo reconstruimos un derrotero típico a partir de una selección intencionada de historias de vida y entrevistas a profundidad realizadas a religiosas de diversas congregaciones para luego analizar comparativamente el repertorio de estrategias agenciado por las religiosas para enfrentar la represión estatal en distintos contextos, desplegado a partir de dicho derrotero típico. Para concluir exponemos cuatro tipos de estrategias, que combinan visibilidad y agencia, y que resultan eficaces para sortear exitosamente situaciones de represión estatal en las que estas mujeres se ven expuestas.