This article complements existing scholarship on religious transformation in Guatemala's western highlands by focusing on the important and often overlooked role played by Maryknoll women religious. The Maryknoll Sisters' hospital in Jacaltenango in the department of Huehuetenango became the center of a medical program that included eighteen clinics, a nursing school, a midwifery program, and a health promoters program. Mayas selectively embraced Maryknoll Sisters'medicine and actively sought opportunities to disseminate it. Evenas Maya health promoters and midwives introduced "Western" preventative and curative medicine and promoted a Romanized practice of Catholicism, they transformed the Maryknoll Sisters' medical programs to parallel an existingMaya leadership composed of chimanes and mid wives responsible for rituals of faith and healing. Mayas appropriated, interpreted, and synthesizedMaya and Catholic religious concepts and practices with Maya and Western health-care practices and beliefs. By incorporating Maryknoll women religious and their medical programs into studies of religious transformation in Guatemala's western highlands, we gain new insight into this process of change and into the central role that womenplayed in it.

To what extent has the Argentine party system been polarized along class lines? The political historiography gives mixed and contradictory answers to this question. We explore the social bases of Argentina's political parties using an original database, the most comprehensive database of Argentine elections yet assembled, and new methods of ecological inference that yield more reliable results than previous analyses. We identify two distinct party systems, one in place between 1912 and 1940, the other emerging after 1946. The first party system was not consistently class based, but the second was, with the Radical Party representing the middle classes and the Peronists, workers and the poor. Still, there were important exceptions. Lower-class support for the Peronists, as proxied by literacy rates, declined during Perón's exile, which implies that the party had trouble mobilizing lower-class illiterate voters. Since the return to democracy in 1983, class polarization has again found some expression in the party system.

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.

Este trabajo busca evaluar las brechas de salarios entre hombres y mujeres a partir de regresiones de cuantiles, utilizando los datos de la Encuesta de Protección Social 2002–2006. Las estimaciones realizadas toman en cuenta la potencial endogeneidad de la variable educación y se incluyen controles de experiencia laboral efectiva.

Se encuentra que el efecto características es pequeño y estadísticamente no significativo hasta aproximadamente el quintil 50 (mediana), donde se hace positivo (favorable a las mujeres) y crece monotónicamente hasta llegar a 12 por ciento en el percentil 90. El efecto parámetro (o componente no explicado) es siempre negativo a lo largo de toda la distribución. Notablemente, no encontramos un efecto techo en el mercado laboral chileno una vez que controlamos por la potencial endogeneidad de la variable educación. Las estimaciones intra-ocupación revelan que las mayores brechas de salarios se encuentran entre trabajadores del comercio y obreros y trabajadores agrícolas calificados.

The aim of this work is to analyze the situation of disabled people in the labor market in Mexico, taking into account socioeconomic variables and the spatial dimension. The results of our analysis provide guidelines for actions geared at improving the inclusion of disabled people in the labor market, and, as a consequence, in society. We apply cluster analysis to thirty-two Mexican federal states using data of the XII Censo de Población y Vivienda 2000; this allows us to identify spatial correlation processes and therefore spatial clusters. A dual structure emerges in the distribution of disabled people in the Mexican labor market, showing that effective economic policies to encourage the inclusion of disabled people into the labor market must take into account the socioeconomic diversity of different geographical areas.

La necesidad de mayor transparencia en las organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONG) ha llevado al propio sector a elaborar mecanismos de rendición de cuentas denominados mecanismos de autorregulación. Esta información debe estar al alcance público siendo Internet uno de los medios de comunicación más relevantes. En este contexto, el presente trabajo pretende, en primer lugar, ofrecer una comparación de las características de los mecanismos de autorregulación desarrollados por las ONG autorreguladoras de Latinoamérica con las de Estados Unidos y Europa; en segundo lugar, realizar un análisis comparativo del nivel de exigencia informativa en los mecanismos de autorregulación de tales ámbitos geográficos; y, en tercer lugar, el análisis empírico de factores que influyen en la demanda de transparencia informativa. Los principales resultados muestran que existen divergencias entre las ONG autorreguladoras estudiadas en cuanto al nivel de control de los mecanismos de autorregulación y ala exigencia informativa sobre el buen gobierno de la organización. El factor experiencia en la autorregulación es el aspecto que más influye en la demanda de transparencia.

This essay examines the Responsible Procreation campaign of Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO) within the context of “zones of crisis” characterized not only by the legacy of long-standing violence but by tensions experienced within the Catholic Church and Colombian society at large during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s. ACPO centered its Responsible Procreation campaign on a radical critique of authoritarian and exclusionary gender relations that could only be remedied by guaranteeing women's access to education and their participation as equals in household and community decision making. As a Catholic-affiliated organization, ACPO enjoyed legitimacy many secular organizations did not, enabling it to provide spaces where rural Colombians, especially women, could experiment with voice and agency and explore alternative visions of citizenship and community development without fear of reprisal or social ostracism. Christian social activism, the essay concludes, often laid the basis for the proliferation today of social movements spearheaded by rural women.

O objetivo do texto é estudar deforma comparativa a programação e a identidade político-institucional das emissoras de rádio do poder legislativo brasileiro (Rádio Senado e Rádio Câmara), sob a perspectiva da comunicação política em interface com a cultura e a democracia. A hipótese que orienta o estudo é de que, apesar de terem sido criadas em 1998, essas emissoras são herdeiras da tradição de rádio educativo no Brasil, projeto iniciado na década de 1920. Conclui que tal herança persiste, mas com uma nova abordagem, cujo foco é a educação para a democracia e a cidadania. Permanece, porém, o modelo tradicional de comunicação política, baseado no poder unilateral do Estado de decidir o que o cidadão deve saber e de que forma a educação e a cultura devem ser tratadas.

What do technology-driven bureaucratic sectors do when their budgets are cut? In Latin America, this type of state institution has come to expect budget reductions, given recurrent economic crises, lack of coherent science policy, and more recently, state rationalization policies. On the basis of in-depth interviews I conducted with nuclear specialists of the region and drawing from network theories, I argue that bureaucratic institutions with expertise in nuclear science and technology respond strategically to decreased government spending by becoming more active in transnational policy networks. I test this argument using social network and maximum likelihood techniques to study collaborative research projects in nuclear science and technology among twenty Latin American countries over a period of twenty years (1984–2004). Study findings confirm expectations and carry implications for how science policies are adopted in Latin American states under chronic budget deficits.

This article treats pre-1959 Cuban cookbooks as interlocutors to see how the struggle to define Cuba's racial and national body can be found in efforts to characterize what goes into that body by setting a close textual analysis of the books alongside an account of their historical context. In examining recipes, visuals, and nonrecipe prose, this article explores how later authors attempt to represent Cuba as white and European by ignoring and trivializing the culinary contributions of nonwhite Cubans and particularly Afro-Cubans, a move that encounters resistance in the ongoing persistence and popularity of Afro-Cuban cuisine. As an interface between political economic processes and personal choice, the author argues that cookbooks act as a site for assertions of racial and national identity in which some authors embarked on a racial project to civilize the consumer by civilizing cuisine via the cookbook, thus illustrating social fissures, tensions, and contradictions that climaxed in the 1959 revolution.