Electoral theories of governmental accountability assume that competitive elections produce responsive governments because they allow voters to punish or reward the performance of incumbent politicians at the ballot box. This research note investigates whether the increasing competitiveness of municipal elections in Mexico during the 1990s has improved the performance of local governments by focusing on the provision of potable water and drainage. The empirical evidence does not seem to support the electoral accountability hypothesis, but rather suggests that municipal governments are more responsive to the influence of socioeconomic modernity, as well as to the direct pressure of politically mobilized citizens. The findings cast doubts on the idea that competitive elections, by themselves, will significantly improve the quality of local governments in the country.

In the past few decades, a new era of socioenvironmental institutions and policies has promoted experimentation with alternative proposals for managing land and resources in the Amazon region. The rubber tappers' home state of Acre was transformed by the florestania policies of the “forest government” regimes that built on the rubber tappers' identity and history to promote forest-based development and to extend citizenship rights. Beginning in 1999, the state became a laboratory for experimentation with new approaches to development, at a time of rapid changes among both urban and rural populations. This article uses data from household surveys in the capital city of Rio Branco, as well as extensive secondary literature, to trace the evolution of these new policies and projects and their ambiguous implications for citizenship and sustainable development.

In prose and poetry and throughout his career, Roque Dalton used the life story of his U.S. émigré father to explore the themes of power, dependency, and identity that interested him and other Salvadoran intellectuals of his era. Yet it was a theatrical image of Winnall Dalton, that of a marauding, gunslinging cowboy, that other writers took as fact and that became part of the poet's posthumous reputation. I show here that the image of a western outlaw is wrong and that Winnall Dalton came from a comfortable, Mexican American family in Tucson that had fallen on hard times just before he migrated to Central America around 1916. Dalton delved into the paradoxes of his own upbringing—raised in a working-class neighborhood as the illegitimate offspring of a millionaire, a Marxist revolutionary who was the son of pure capitalism—almost until his death in 1975. Taken together, the shifting depictions of his father all point to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Dalton's views on power and the nature of identity than previously understood in the context of the revolutionary struggle that ultimately consumed him.

In recent years the idea of “culture as resource” has been hailed as a new epistemological paradigm for assigning value and significance to artistic practice. This article acknowledges this idea as determining values assigned to art in the recent context of globalization. Yet it questions the heuristic hold of such an episteme for the interpretation of some cultural practices, especially those of musicians in a world where many of them are not so much administering resources as managing their scarcity. It thus explores the disjuncture between the idea of care of the self, invoked by using the performativity of culture as the basis of the resource paradigm, and the actual practices of musicians in promoting careers that demand investments of money, affect, time, and other resources in order to sustain those careers. In such situations, musicians often privilege other values of music—aesthetic desires, stylistic options, and so on—as primary epistemic and affective reasons for determining their choices and what they find valuable in music. I explore this through the work of two Colombian musicians with contrasting careers and musical styles and practices, Lucía Pulido and Charles King.

En el año 2005, David Aniñir publica Mapurbe en Santiago de Chile, un poemario que ha generado polémicas y reflexiones sobre la identidad, la lengua y la globalización del pueblo mapuche-huilliche entre los críticos de la poesía chilena y los propios poetas indígenas. Debido a la novedad del poemario, pocos estudios han abordado Mapurbe desde un enfoque que trascienda el siglo XXI en Chile. De ahí la necesidad del presente trabajo al analizar el collage lingüístico en Mapurbe en el contexto de la poesía indígena contemporánea; y al situar en retrospectiva la propuesta estética de Aniñir a partir de dos categorías de las ciencias sociales: colonialismo y colonialidad.

Although much has been written on civil society participation in the formulation and monitoring of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), very little systematic and scientific evidence exists on the kind of organizations that participate and the elements that explain their involvement in these processes. This article considers one country case, Honduras, for which survey data were gathered from 101 civil society organizations (CSOs) in 2006. This study examines the characteristics these organizations display which explain (non)participation in the next participatory round of the PRSPs. The findings challenge some of the by now widely accepted ideas relating to the kinds of organizations involved in PRSP processes. The idea that predominantly urban-based, highly professional, well-funded, donor-bred-and-fed nongovernmental organizations participate is too blunt. The Honduran case shows that the players in participative processes are more diversified than much of the current literature on PRSPs suggests.

Sin olvidar la importancia que el factor económico juega en el fenómeno migratorio, y sin caer en el riesgo de proyectar una visión romántica del mismo, este trabajo pretende profundizar en aquellas migraciones que se inician siguiendo determinadas “motivaciones extraeconómicas”. De ahí que, desde el intento de contribuir a visibilizar la heterogeneidad de situaciones personales que conforman las migraciones internacionales, este artículo se centra en otro tipo de factores que incitan a migrar: razones profesionales, políticas, de orientación sexual o de ampliación de horizontes vitales. Para ello se parte de diferentes relatos de mujeres migrantes cubanas y ecuatorianas en España.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the main welfare office of the city of Buenos Aires, this article dissects poor people's lived experiences of waiting. The article examines the welfare office as a site of intense sociability amidst pervasive uncertainty. Poor people's waiting experiences persuade the destitute of the need to be patient, thus conveying the implicit state request to be compliant clients. An analysis of the sociocultural dynamics of waiting helps us understand how (and why) welfare clients become not citizens but patients of the state.