During the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), Mexican women published poems that tested the boundaries of conventional definitions of female subjectivity and domesticity. Central to the construction of female authorship was the idea of a collective women's voice, a “lyrical sisterhood” that situated the individual poetic voice within a broader historical tradition and a contemporaneous coalition of women writers. In speaking out about the war, women poets foregrounded their symbolic authority to exalt Mexican resistance to the invader, to decry Mexico's political and military failures, or to measure the horrors of war. In doing so, they self-consciously used gender to blur the distinction between the public and domestic spheres.

In this article, I explore the creation of the Mexico pavilion that opened in 1982 at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center theme park in Orlando, Florida. I show how designers created a representation of Mexico intended to be recognizably authentic to EPCOT Center visitors by drawing on established touristic images of Mexico in the United States. I then discuss Disney's decision to hire Mexican American artist Eddie Martinez to oversee the design of the pavilion's main attraction, a boat ride through Mexican history and culture. Specifically, I examine Martinez's involvement in the Goez Art Studio and Gallery in East Los Angeles to explain how Mexican Americans gained cultural authority as interpreters of Mexico in the United States. Finally, I show how the pavilion reflected ways in which Mexican Americans read and reconstructed established visions of Mexico in the United States, particularly in relation to pre-Columbian cultures.

Using results of field research among Yucatec Maya in San Francisco, we compare two types of migrant associations: hometown associations (HTAs) and social service agencies, specifically in terms of the use and expression of ethnic identity. We argue that HTA leaders rely on a regional identity based largely on a sense of shared culture, which reproduces the dominant and widespread view of ethnic identity in Yucatán, namely that the Maya are not an indigenous people per se. In contrast, leaders of the social service agencies explicitly utilize indigenous identity in their programming and services. We maintain that the latter are reconceptualizing Maya identity, adopting a US multicultural framework that emphasizes ethnic difference as a basis for making claims for resources and rights.

As part of a long-standing debate about the extent to which official, government-linked unions in Mexico actively seek to win gains for their members, analysts of labor relations in Mexico have described the dominance of contratos de protección, collective bargaining contracts that offer little or nothing to workers while protecting employers from real union representation. In particular, a number of researchers have asserted that such contracts are universal in retail. Analyzing forty-one retail collective bargaining contracts from four Mexican cities, I find strong evidence that this is not the case. I find considerable variation in wages and fringe benefits, benefits in excess of the legal minimum in 27 to 68 percent of cases (depending on the benefit), and cases of sustained improvement in contractual benefits. Detailed consideration of the patterns suggests that these contracts are not uniformly protection contracts, indicating that there is strong as well as weak unionism in Mexican retail, including among official unions, but that competitive conditions in Mexican retail constrain the possibilities for strong unionism.

A large historiographic tradition has studied the Brazilian state, yet we know relatively little about its internal dynamics and particularities. The role of informal, personal, and unintentional ties has remained underexplored in most policy network studies, mainly because of the pluralist origin of that tradition. It is possible to use network analysis to expand this knowledge by developing mesolevel analysis of those processes. This article proposes an analytical framework for studying networks inside policy communities. This framework considers the stable and resilient patterns that characterize state institutions, especially in contexts of low institutionalization, particularly those found in Latin America and Brazil. The article builds on research on urban policies in Brazil to suggest that networks made of institutional and personal ties structure state organizations internally and insert them into broader political scenarios. These networks, which I call state fabric, frame politics, influence public policies, and introduce more stability and predictability than the majority of the literature usually considers. They also form a specific power resource—positional power, associated with the positions that political actors occupy—that influences politics inside and around the state.

This article examines trajectories of nationalism in twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru through the analytical lens of schooling. I argue that textbooks reveal state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood. In turn, the outlooks and practices of teachers provide a window for understanding how state ideologies were received, translated, and reworked within society. During the late nineteenth century, textbooks in Mexico, Argentina, and Peru conceived of the nation as a political community, emphasized civilization for having achieved national unity, and viewed elites as driving national history. During the twentieth century, textbooks eventually advanced a cultural understanding of the nation, envisioned national unity to be achieved through assimilation into a homogeneous national identity, and assigned historical agency to the masses. Yet teacher responses to the textbooks varied. In Mexico, under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), teachers predominantly embraced textbooks that promoted a popular national culture. Teachers in Argentina under Juan Perón (1946–1955) and in Peru under Juan Velasco (1968–1975) largely opposed the texts.

La presente nota de investigación aborda el tema de las representaciones sociales sobre la solidaridad, basada en una investigación recientemente realizada. El estudio intenta captar la circulación social del concepto de solidaridad, observando los discursos con que éste es construido, las prácticas que reflejan y los modos de vinculación social que promueven. Esta nota presenta las diferentes representaciones actuales sobre la solidaridad en tanto aparecen en piezas publicitarias del gobierno chileno, de empresas y de organizaciones sociales. En los llamados a la ciudadanía a ejercer la solidaridad, las diferencias entre estos discursos tienden a aminorarse y priman los valores neoliberales. Ello fundamenta la observación de una neoliberalización de la solidaridad. El estudio además concluye que este sustrato neoliberal del discurso solidario que utilizan las piezas publicitarias analizadas, pasa desapercibido al ciudadano común, que se centra principalmente en la presentación del tema, sólo muy extraordinariamente en la forma de presentación, y casi nunca en los efectos sociales de dicha enunciación.

The Catholic Church of Peru supported the use of oral contraceptives between 1967 and 1976, believing that doctrine was compatible with controlling one's fertility. Yet the church did not treat fertility control only as a means to limit births or as an individual prerogative. Rather, it framed distribution of the pill within an education plan to promote the duties of responsible parenting. Joseph Kerrins, a U.S. Catholic physician, began the program in a poor area of Lima. By the late 1970s, the program operated in nineteen parishes. The program thrived even after the 1968 encyclical De Humanae Vitae, thanks to the support of priests, Peruvian and U.S. government agencies, physicians, and users of the program's services. Catholic family planning has been a more pragmatic and creative enterprise than hitherto believed. This article explores these developments within the context of the cold war and the transformations of the Catholic Church in 1960s Latin America.

A significant shortcoming in Latin American transitions to democracy has been the failure of some subnational units to follow suit, leading to the emergence of authoritarian enclaves. Recently, however, some of these nondemocratic regimes have moved toward a political opening. In this respect, the state of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil is intriguing. Antônio Carlos Magalhães and his associates, known as carlistas, were in office between 1970 and 2006, when Jaques Wagner, from the Worker's Party (PT), won the gubernatorial election. While the ascent of the PT was saluted as spearheading Bahia's democratization, numerous observers have signaled important elements of continuity, including personalism, clientelism, and top-down decision making. What changed and what didn't is thus a pertinent question. To answer it, I use Robert Dahl's procedural definition of democracy (completed and updated by more recent scholarship) as the guiding criterion to compare carlista and PT rule in Bahia. I conclude with a broad reflection on subnational democratization in Latin America.

In the national consciousness, Ecuador is a mestizo nation. However, it is also an ethnically diverse nation with sizable minorities of indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. In national surveys, there is also a considerable minority who self-identify as blanco (white). Although there is strong evidence of continuing discrimination and prejudice toward both indigenous and Afro-descended peoples, there is little public discussion or political action addressing such issues. The emergence of a powerful and resilient indigenous movement in the late 1980s gained international interest and acclaim in the 1990s, in part because of the peaceful mobilization efforts and effective bargaining tactics of the movement. However, indigenous leaders usually have not engaged in a discourse of racismo and/or discriminación. There has been much less social movement solidarity and activism among Afro-Ecuadorians, but their leaders commonly employ a discourse of racismo and discriminación. In August and September 2004, a survey of more than eight thousand adult Ecuadorians was conducted in regard to racism and related topics. In this research, we use several measures from this survey that focus on awareness of and sensitivity to issues of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. Self-identification of respondents enables us to contrast the responses of whites, mestizos, Indians, and Afro-Ecuadorians to the measures. Other independent variables of interest are level of education, the region in which the respondent resides, and whether the respondent lives in an urban or rural area. Regression results show differences among the ethnic groups in levels of awareness of racism, but more powerful predictors are level of education and rural residence.

Existing case-study research suggests that the recent increase in human rights violations in Latin America is attributed to the US-funded drug war. This narrative, which is referred to as the collateral damage perspective, stands in contrast to US human rights law, which makes governments' respect for human rights a precondition to receive aid. The apparent endogeneity between aid and human rights introduces bias that casts serious doubts on the validity of the collateral damage narrative. In addressing endogeneity, this article presents a simultaneous instrumental variable analysis of the human rights effects of US counternarcotic aid in the Americas. The results show that while counternarcotic aid to regimes increases overall violations of human rights, this effect is greater among democracies than autocracies. And with the exception of torture, this finding is consistent when disappearances, political imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings are also considered. The implication of this research suggests that policy makers in Washington risk losing regional support for US drug control policies if US laws that govern the allocation of aid are not effectively implemented.

Este artículo describe el proceso que llevó a Michelle Bachelet a la presidencia de la república en Chile, las condiciones que lo hicieron posible y las tensiones que vivió el país tras su instalación en el poder en el plano político y también cultural. Se pregunta por el impacto de tener una mujer en la máxima jerarquía política en una sociedad que vive las tensiones de la modernidad y por la medida en que su liderazgo profundizará las transformaciones sociales en curso.

Like many Guatemalan documents referred to by scholars in the past, the Libros Segundo y Tercero del Cabildo de Guatemala (Books Two and Three of the City Council of Santiago de Guatemala) have long been thought to be missing, thereby removing from consultation key sources concerning the events and circumstances of the early colonial period. It turns out that these two tomes, which span the years between 1530 and 1553, are not missing and have been part of the holdings of the Hispanic Society of America for the past century. We discuss how other documentary treasures were taken from Guatemala or disappeared from circulation altogether, identifying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the period during which national patrimony was most under threat from both internal and external forces.