This essay argues that in the early Porfiriato Mexican officials deftly negotiated the pace and sequencing of the country's reinsertion in the world economy. Despite the government's financial weakness, officials flouted international conventions and obtained the foreign capital necessary to spark growth before settling the foreign debt, in default for more than fifty years. Rather than simply accommodating powerful private financial interests, the government's plans and policies often provoked conflict with its bankers and creditors. However, by employing a wide set of strategies that ranged from manipulating competitors to selectively not enforcing agreements to exploiting nationalist sentiment among local elites, Mexican policymakers preserved their autonomy and advanced a coherent set of policies. In addition to successfully exploiting international capital markets, the Mexican government also successfully maneuvered to establish a more competitive local market. The government's ability to exploit these capital flows, without undermining domestic support, helps explain the regime's early economic growth and political resilience. The findings of this essay extend to the financial realm previous historical scholarship that has noted that the early Porfirian regime enjoyed a surprising degree of autonomy from its economic partners.

This essay examines the influence that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru (TRC, 2001-2003) had in the recent novels Abril rojo (2006) by Santiago Roncagliolo, La hora azul (2005) by Alonso Cueto, and El camino de regreso (2007) by José de Piérola. In particular, I focus on how the TRC's treatment of mental health issues have provided these writers with new ways to approach violence and social justice after the twenty years of terrorist and state violence (1980-2000) that cloud Peruvian history. As part of its investigations, the TRC paid close attention to the mental health of the victims and the psychosocial effects of violence. Its investigation influenced the writers I study, who use representations of mental illnesses to allegorize the country's situation after the years of violence and to imagine processes of justice and reconciliation that will reestablish a healthy national community.

Democratization studies initially focused on processes at the national level, but in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the spatially uneven nature of democracy at, the subnational level This article draws on examples from Argentina and develops an analytical framework of closed games to analyze the functioning of subnational democracy. It argues that the less democratic provinces or states of nationally democratic countries are not necessarily authoritarian and that the concept of subnational authoritarianism prevents us from seeing political dynamics that may arise in the context of a reasonably well-functioning electoral democracy and may result in subnational closed games. The article takes into account the role of political families, media ownership, control of access to business opportunities, and control of the provincial state.

The Rio de Janeiro state archive's collection of entry logs for the city's central detention center, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, provides a rare glimpse into the lives of Rio's—and Brazil's—poor and working classes who otherwise left few written records behind. During the time when the institution maintained the entry logs, police exercised broad power to make arrests. Although relatively few detainees were ever prosecuted or even formally charged, the detention center kept detailed records of detainees' physical appearance, attire, home address, nationality, sex, affiliation, and so on, as well as information about any criminal charges. This article explores the wealth of empirical data that the entry logs provide. It also suggests how scrutinizing this type of document across time shows how record keeping itself changed, in turn affording researchers rare insight into the inner workings of modern Latin American society.

This article looks at the Chocó Department, where black and indigenous ethnic movements demanded collective land rights and autonomy to safeguard local livelihoods from resource-intensive economies. However, after decentralization and state restructuring reforms granted constitutional protections of local ethnopolitical autonomy in the nineties, most indigenous and black communities failed to benefit from the new rights. This has been explained as the result of human rights violations, neoliberal development, and armed groups' appropriation of regional economies, which created stressful conditions for self-governance. In such a scenario, autonomy was maintained only by communities that could resist violence and hold regional or national governments accountable. I build on these claims and add that the difference between the intent and the actual outcome of the reforms is explained by the way new institutions were territorialized or adapted by specific actors to local dynamics. In the Chocó Department, reforms were territorialized in a context of weak institutions, government corruption, and resource-intensive land-use changes that worked against ethnopolitical autonomy by enabling local intermediaries, who frequently made decisions that went against community rights.

In the village of Ch'umil in northern Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, competing heritage claims to Maya archaeological sites and artifacts politicize the region's cultural and ecological landscapes. Using a geographical understanding of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991), I ethnographically unpack Ch'umil residents' definitions of cultural and ecological heritage that reflect village-level histories of living and laboring in forests and archaeology sites surrounding Ch'umil. Villagers' definitions of heritage contrast sharply with the spatial claims made by global heritage advocates who campaign to designate the region as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Analyzing the politics of scale underpinning these conservation practices reveals that when global heritage advocates speak on behalf of a universal humanity, they often render local-level heritage claims invisible and illegitimate. This article urges heritage managers and cosmopolitan theorists who debate the ethics of mitigating global and local heritage claims to reconsider this spatial binary altogether.

An ethnic church from the Middle East without a missionary tradition has grown in a decade to several hundred parishioners in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Using anthropology and ethnographic methods, this article argues that interculturality, even if marked by subjectivity, equivocations, culturalism, and ephemerality, can also be characterized by the seduction of symbols, mutual appropriation, and inclusion. I will give particular attention to the role of assigned beauty and awe in the constitution of meaning and show that shared relational intelligence and the emotional security provided by the priests allow for semiotic distortions to be overcome.

The article reflects on the relation of drama, image, and anthropological “writing” from a visual anthropological perspective, based on the case of the Hã-Hã-Hãe indigenous people from northeastern Brazil and the production of a short participatory video documentary in support of the Hã-Hã-Hãe's case. Drama is discussed as a genre that provides the basis not only for the filmic representation of the Hã-Hã-Hãe's struggle for recognition but also for the public negotiation of the Indians' story and the social drama of which they are a part. Due to the nature of the subject, the article is presented as a work in progress, tracing the author's engagement with a continuously developing narrative and seeking to give an account of the fragmentary and event-oriented nature of ethnographic representation.

El artículo analiza los movimientos indígenas de México, los cuales exigen del gobierno central y de la sociedad en general el reconocimiento de México como una nación cultural y lingüísticamente plural. El municipio, implantado inicialmente en México por los españoles como instrumento de conquista, ha sido esculpido por los indígenas como un espacio desde el cual pueden defender su derecho a ser diferentes y a contrarrestar las políticas estatales. En espacios locales, independientemente de las posiciones políticas y las discusiones ideológicas, los indígenas han mantenido, recreado o elaborado formas de gobierno que se distinguen de aquellas localidades consideradas mestizas o no-indígenas. También las comunidades, localidades, en distintos momentos históricos se han valido de esta institución como un medio de defensa, resistencia e impugnación de las políticas del Estado.