When we as LARR associate editors learned of the proposal of Jeffrey Rubin, David Smilde, and Benjamin Junge for this special issue, we were eager to be involved. Representing the journal, we had the great pleasure to attend meetings in Boston in 2011 and 2012 of this important new research initiative, initially titled “Religion, Social Movements, and Progressive Reform in Latin America,” where we heard many stimulating papers from a diverse range of scholars working in Latin America and the United States. At each meeting the group of presenters was never the same, which made for much exciting cross-fertilization of thinking in efforts to work through these themes, with stimulating and lively discussions moving from conference venues to restaurants and spilling out later onto the sidewalks of Boston. As our gracious host and the main convener of the meetings, Jeff Rubin skillfully wove together disparate views and approaches, moving toward the common threads that you see highlighted in this volume: zones of crisis, the day-to-day experience of religion, and citizenship. Each of the papers configures these themes in a unique way, demonstrating the undeniable centrality of religion as an inspiration and shaper of subjectivities, personal and public action, and engagement with politics in diverse settings across the Americas.

Several scholars have argued that decentralization benefits states and municipalities, granting them more autonomy for managing their budgets and more resources to deliver their services. Others have questioned this assertion, claiming that decentralization makes subnational units more fiscally dependent on central governments. This article argues that the fiscal impact of decentralization must be differentiated across states. It theoretically specifies and empirically demonstrates which states benefit during periods of decentralization and centralization. It argues that powerful presidents who centralize resources have imposed greater costs on more developed and fiscally independent districts (which prefer to administer their own resources and can be serious challengers to presidential power), thus relying mainly on support from less developed and more fiscally dependent provinces, which prefer more redistribution. I present empirical evidence for Argentina (1983-2004), a developing federation with strong governors and high cross-regional inequality, and discuss some implications for comparative studies on the topic.

The United Nations describes aquaculture as the fastest-growing method of food production, and some industry boosters have heralded the coming of a sustainable blue revolution. This article interprets the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in southern Chile (1980–2010) by integrating concepts from commodity studies and comparative environmental history. I juxtapose salmon aquaculture to twentieth-century export banana production to reveal the similar dynamics that give rise to “commodity diseases”—events caused by the entanglement of biological, social, and political-economic processes that operate on local, regional, and transoceanic geographical scales. Unsurprisingly, the risks and burdens associated with commodity diseases are borne disproportionately by production workers and residents in localities where commodity disease events occur. Chile's blue revolution suggests that evaluating the sustainability of aquaculture in Latin America cannot be divorced from processes of accumulation.

In the last decade a unique form of struggle developed in Argentina: the appropriation of bankrupt enterprises by their workers. This article combines several sources of data to explain the emergence and development of this practice and its effects on Argentine labor politics. We argue that the recuperation of enterprises is the result of workers' contingent responses to a deep social crisis, the emergence of organizations that promoted this practice, and the presence of a class culture in which wage work is considered a dignified form of work. Furthermore, we argue that the recuperation of enterprises is now part of the repertoire of contention of Argentine workers.

O presente artigo busca responder a seguinte questão: quando confiar é bom? Diversas pesquisas têm se debruçado sobre o fenómeno da desconfiança, estudando suas causas e efeitos para o regime democrático. Porém, pouca coisa foi explorada em relação ao fenómeno contrário, o da confiança. Nosso argumento é que confiar é bom quando duas condições são satisfeitas: a existência de um contexto institucional que justifique a confiança e um ambiente informacional adequado. Para justificá-lo, utilizamos dados.de uma pesquisa sobre um projeto de socialização política no Brasil, o Parlamento Jovem. Trata-se de um quase experimento, com pré-teste, pós-teste e grupo de controle, realizado em Minas Gerais em 2008. A conclusão é que mediante um intenso fluxo informacional, os participantes do projeto adquiriram maior conhecimento a respeito do processo de desenvolvimento institucional da Assembleia Legislativa Mineira, passando, então, a confiar mais nela. Mediante esse quadro, pode-se dizer que confiar é bom.

The history of independent Brazil may be divided into three major state-society cycles, and, after 1930, five political pacts or class coalitions can be identified. These pacts were nationalist; only in the 1990s did the Brazilian elites surrender to neoliberal hegemony. Yet since early in the twenty-first century they have been rediscovering the idea of the nation. The main claim of this essay is that Brazilian elites and Brazilian society are “national-dependent,” that is, they are ambivalent and contradictory, requiring an oxymoron to define them. They are dependent because they often consider themselves “Europeans” and the mass of the people as inferior. But Brazil is big enough, and there are many common interests around its domestic market, to make the Brazilian nation less ambivalent. Today the country is seeking a synthesis between the last two political cycles—between social justice and economic development in the framework of democracy.

Now that racism has been officially recognized in Brazil, and some universities have adopted affirmative-action admission policies, measures of the magnitude of racial inequality and analyses that identify the factors associated with changes in racial disparities over time assume particular relevance to the conduct of public debate. This study uses census data from 1950 to 2000 to estimate the probability of death in the early years of life, a robust indicator of the standard of living among the white and Afro-Brazilian populations. Associated estimates of the average number of years of life expectancy at birth show that the 6.6-year advantage that the white population enjoyed in the 1950s remained virtually unchanged throughout the second half of the twentieth century, despite the significant improvements that accrued to both racial groups. The application of multivariate techniques to samples selected from the 1960, 1980, and 2000 census enumerations further shows that, controlling for key determinants of child survival, the white mortality advantage persisted and even increased somewhat in 2000. The article discusses evidence of continued racial inequality during an era of deep transformation in social structure, with reference to the challenges of skin color classification in a multiracial society and the evolution of debates about color, class, and discrimination in Brazil.

The transformation of Latin American societies from the 1970s onward and the recent sociopolitical and economic changes at a global scale call for reconsiderations of the relation between art and power and its role in processes of democratization. This article examines art's social function and its understanding as transformative social praxis—an activity that reflects upon the world and seeks to change it, and that at the same time critically reflects upon its own condition and relation to that world. It specifically suggests the idea of art's rhetoric in order to conceptualize art's critical potential and identify processes that generate and displace meaning across artistic, sociopolitical, and discursive contexts. Tucumán Arde (1968) in Argentina, Colectivo Actiones de Artes Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) in Chile, and Proyecto Venus (2000-2006), based in Buenos Aires, use interdisciplinary methodologies to critically intersect the public sphere. They scrutinize art's position in society, seek to raise awareness, and act as alternative networks of information and socialization.

This essay explores the various ways Mexicans and Colombians envisioned and employed modernity in the nineteenth century, especially the flourishing and collapse of an alternative mentalité I call American republican modernity. I argue that in the late 1840s a vision of civilization emerged that privileged political progress, measured by the success of republican projects and the enactment of extensive citizens' rights, as a marker of modernity over older visions, defined by high culture or wealth. Because conceptions of modernity deeply affected the hegemonic rules of political life in Spanish America, I also suggest how such a discourse enabled subalterns to exploit this language to promote their inclusion in new nation-states. The article concludes by exploring the collapse of this alternative modernity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Western notions of modernity—involving technological innovation, industrialization, and state power—became dominant.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period of dramatic economic and population change for the Spanish Caribbean, including Puerto Rico. This note describes a unique collection of population data that sheds nuanced light on older research themes and promises to inspire new inquiries. These aggregate population data, or padrones, commissioned by the Spanish Crown and now more widely available and usable than ever before, offer details on Puerto Rico's sex, age, status, and socio-racial composition on an annual basis for the period spanning 1779 to 1802. We describe the data, their accompanying limitations, and their potential uses to advance scholarship on late-colonial Spanish America.

This article explores the relationship among trade liberalization, deindustrialization, and income inequality in the more industrially advanced Latin American countries. It argues that, among the most important liberal reforms implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, trade reform was especially detrimental to equality because it accelerated deindustrialization. The analysis provides evidence to support this mechanism. Therefore, as the liberalization of trade increased, the deindustrialization process produced an increase in inequality. In short, evidence shows how the process of economic integration to the global market, as it took place, produced an increase in inequality through the destruction of formal employment.