This article reviews the state of Brazilian democracy at the close of the Cardoso-Lula era. Brazil has now completed a quarter century of competitive politics, the longest democratic period in the country's history. Although evaluations of the regime's prospects were often pessimistic in the 1985–1993 period, the performance of democracy improved markedly after the Plano Real stabilization plan in the mid-1990s, which was followed by significant policy achievements under presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, or PSDB) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers' Party, or PT). Since 1995, the axis of national politics has turned on the competition between the PSDB and allies versus the PT and allies. Under this emerging bicoalitional architecture, several key policy domains have been objects of consensus between the two camps, which has led to major policy advances; however, certain policy areas remain outside the zone of consensus and pose enduring challenges. Despite the improving quality of democracy, the mass public continues to display a surprisingly high level of indifference to the regime type.

Born free in 1766 along the American frontier separating the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the Afro-descendant Jacinto Ventura de Molina grew up to become a tireless writer of history, religious philosophy, and petitions for black nations and poor residents in Montevideo, Uruguay. After serving in black militias in the early 1800s and working as a shoemaker, he began a long career as a lawyer and was recognized with the title “defender of the poor.” Most impressive about this little-known prolific writer was that he operated in and moved between different social registers and contexts. He was a black letrado working in a white world of letters and knew well how to navigate multiple discourses and manipulate codes of the lettered city. His personality led in part to his popularity in 1820s and 1830s Montevideo. But he was best known for his writing, which spurred attacks from several contemporaries.

Despite empirical findings on women's varied and often extensive participation in smallholder agriculture in Latin America, their participation continues to be largely invisible. In this article, I argue that the intransigency of farming women's invisibility reflects, in part, a discursive construction of farmers as men. Through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews with one hundred women in Calakmul, Mexico, I demonstrate the material implications of gendered farmer identities for women's control of resources, including land and conservation and development project resources. In particular, I relate the activities of one women's agricultural community-based organization and the members' collective adoption of transgressive identities as farmers. For these women, the process of becoming farmers resulted in increased access to and control over resources. This empirical case study illustrates the possibility of women's collective action to challenge and transform women's continued local invisibility as agricultural actors in rural Latin American spaces.

This article analyzes the impact of state policies since the 1970s on household food security in several Mapuche communities in the Araucanía region of Chile (Region IX). The author highlights key transformations in the national economy and food system and endeavors to link those to local phenomena, in particular the absorption of the local livelihood strategies and food systems into capitalist markets and the high incidences of food, insecurity. The article concludes that a reconceptualization of macroeconomic and indigenous policies are required to rebuild the material and social foundations of rural Mapuche communities that provide the bases from which their inhabitants can reconstruct a mutually beneficial relationship with the broader Chilean society and avert the continued acceleration of tension and violence.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the book of kings, or dynastic history, was the dominant mode of historiography in Europe and the Americas. This article explores the as-if or in-theory dimension of colonial dynastic history by way of a reading of Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo's early-eighteenth-century histories of Spain and Peru. Peralta's histories have been read as sycophantic, premodern texts that not only do not live up to the modern standards of historiography but moreover are in bad taste, that is, rhetorically prone to the excesses of Lima's colonial court culture. In contrast, I argue that Peralta's poetics of history reveal the subtle and ingenious rhetorical means by which history came to occupy, via imitating the figure of the prince, a sovereign and prognostic position of critique as the prince's simulacrum, that is, as a copy that has no original other than itself. In the case of Peralta's histories, this position of critique was colonial and postcolonial.

The tradition of intermediaries negotiating conflicts between Indigenous and Western worlds in Latin America can be traced back to the colonial period. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, semiprofessional or petty lawyers known as tinterillos assumed a seemingly ubiquitous presence in rural communities in Ecuador. Often local elites with some education, tinterillos commanded respect among their largely nonliterate Indigenous neighbors because of their ability to read, write, and handle documents. These intermediaries commonly exploited their privileged position for their own economic, social, and political benefit. Nevertheless, Indigenous peoples came to rely on tinterillos to petition the government and to challenge landholder abuses. On occasion, rather than feeling disempowered or victimized, Indigenous peoples learned to negotiate these relationships to their advantage. Tinterillos provide a convenient medium through which to examine how power relations were negotiated between different cultures and across deep class divides.

This study considers whether there are gender differences in the ability of international migrants as well as remittance managers in households of origin to channel remittances to physical and financial asset accumulation. Drawing on a national-level survey of household assets for Ecuador, we show that while only a small share of male or female migrants are able to channel their remittances to asset accumulation, women are as likely to do so as men. Moreover, female migrants tend to exert greater control over their remittances than men, particularly when these are to be used for the acquisition of assets. In addition, women managers in households of origin are a majority of those owning the assets purchased with remittances. These results suggest that processes of international migration may strengthen the economic autonomy of women and facilitate greater gender equality.

Conservation-development interactions intensified as a consequence of environmental and land-use changes in Latin America during the 1985–2008 period. This study examines predominant changes in five countries (Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia). Multifold increase of protected areas for environmental conservation occurred together with agricultural growth and intensification. Conservation and agricultural trends were fraught with conflicts and contradictions, yet they also showed partial compatibility in the search for sustainability. Conservation, indigenous, and social movement organizations operating at multiple scales (local, national, and international) contributed to distinctly configured national conservation “booms” and sustainability discourses in the five countries. Neoliberal governments and global organizations sanctioned protected-area conservation via increased state institutions, national and subnational administrative mechanisms, widely publicized sustainability rationales, expanded territorial management and a property rights focus, spatial devolution, and official multiculturalism—the 1990s were a heyday of these activities. Subsequently Latin American conservation and sustainability efforts have evolved both as a global center of governance through payment for environmental services and under increased and diverse social agendas.