There is variation among the Latin American sending countries in the timing, sequence, and form by which they have approved retention-of-nationality laws (dual-citizenship laws) and have extended political rights to their migrants abroad. This variation is the product not only of the characteristics of the migration in each country but also of the specificity of their political and electoral systems and of the historical relationship between the state and its citizens. I focus my analysis on Latin American migration to the United States, which, although not the only destination, has attracted the majority of Latin American migrants and has significantly influenced, with its immigration policies, the policies of Latin American sending countries towards their émigrés.

Este artículo propone una genealogía crítica de la trilogía escénica brasileña compuesta por la tragedia Orfeu da Conceição (1956) de Vinicius de Moraes; el filme Orfeu negro (1959), dirigido por Marcel Camus y el filme Orfeu (1999), dirigido por Carlos Diegues. Mediante el análisis comparado de los procesos creativos de estas obras, y de los múltiples vínculos ideológicos e históricos que las enlazan, mi ensayo demuestra la manera en que el viejo mito griego de Orfeo reconfigura y actualiza su carácter mítico en el Brasil escénico del siglo XX, en una trayectoria que recorre el teatro y el cine, el jazz y la bossa nova, el negocio del espectáculo y los discursos de identidad en Brasil, Francia, los Estados Unidos, y sus respectivas lenguas. Termino con una síntesis de estos procesos, recuperando el bosquejo mitológico de mi introducción a la luz de una reflexión general sobre mitografía.

This article examines the effect of perceived ethnoracial identity on electoral politics in the Dominican Republic and provides an explanation for the low salience of race and ethnicity in political behavior in Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, individuals will deal with ethnoracial discrimination and stratification through exit rather than voice —that is, they will reclassify their way out of marginalized ethnoracial categories instead of voting for candidates or parties that share their ethnoracial identities. This tends to be the case where ethnoracial group identity is inchoate and group boundaries are permeable. I also argue that where ethnoracial group loyalties are weak and immigration is widespread, citizens may emphasize national origin over race or ethnicity. Findings from an original field experiment and survey in Santo Domingo show that candidates did not consistently support candidates that shared their ethnoracial attributes, but they did slightly favor candidates perceived as white. Respondents strongly discriminated against candidates of Haitian origin.

Despite a growing literature on the left in Latin America, few studies have considered the fate of the right. This article examines a highly successful conservative party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which held power for close to two decades in El Salvador. The ARENA party used mano dura policies—defined by the introduction of discretionary crimes, diluted due process guarantees, and military participation in policing—to boost its support among constituencies plagued by crime. Two key factors prompted ARENA party strategists to emphasize security. First, a credible electoral threat existed from a leftist party hesitant to resort to harsh security measures. Second, factional divisions drove party strategy. Business elites who formed the core of the ARENA party refused to abandon unpopular economic reforms. Mano dura policies allowed the party to maintain support from traditional elites and their rural bases without reversals to its economic program. Party centralization facilitated the programmatic shift.

Until recently, the Peruvian government to a great extent has given corporations the responsibility for resolving the increasing number of conflicts with local communities in mining localities. In the literature on political and economic reforms, mobilization, and democratic influence, few studies have addressed the role of corporations in relation to those processes. This study contributes an analysis of how corporate-community relations affect communities' ability to mobilize and influence mining projects. The article is based on two case studies in which local communities pursued different demands and analyzes how corporations used various strategies to deal with demands and protests. The empirical analysis demonstrates that local communities can achieve influence by opposing projects as well as by collaborating with corporations. However, these forms of mobilization have different impacts on the collective identities and organizational structures that are essential to the scope of democratic influence for those groups.

Aunque Nicaragua sea el país más pobre de Centroamérica, no cuenta con la tasa de mortalidad infantil más alta de la región. La más igualitaria distribución del ingreso en Nicaragua, en comparación con otros países centroamericanos, es un factor que favorece la relativamente baja mortalidad. Empero, la población indígena nicaragüense afronta grandes desventajas en casi todos los aspectos, aunque esto no se refleja en la desigualdad nacional por ser una población minoritaria. Aprovechando el censo de 2005 y la regresión binomial negativa, modelamos la mortalidad infantil. Mostramos cómo los niños indígenas tienen 33 por ciento más riesgo de muerte, e incluso controlando otros factores, la diferencia del riego es casi del 5 por ciento. Hasta ahora no existían investigaciones cuantitativas que compararan la mortalidad entre grupos étnicos en Nicaragua. En nuestro estudio mostramos que los indígenas nicaragüenses están en desventaja a pesar de la baja desigualdad a nivel nacional.

Debates surrounding race in Brazil have become increasingly fraught in recent years as the once hegemonic concept of racial democracy (democracia racial) continues to be subject to an ever more agnostic scrutiny. Parallel to these debates, and yet ultimately inseparable from them, is the question of what it is to be “white.” In this interdisciplinary paper, we argue that whiteness has become increasingly established in Brazilian public discourse as a naturalized category. Seeking afresh perspective on what we perceive to have become a sterile debate, we examine Machado de Assis and his work to illustrate how assumptions surrounding his short story “Pai contra mãe,” and indeed comments on the author's very body, reveal the extent to which whiteness has come to be seen as nonnegotiable and fixed. Placing a close reading of Machado's text at the heart of the article, we explain its implications for the scholarly debates now unfolding in Brazil concerning the construction of whiteness. The article then develops an anthropological reading of whiteness by pointing to the inherent differences between perspectives of race as a process and perspectives of race as a fixed and naturalized given.

The Brazilian film director Jorge Furtado's O homem que copiava centers on two plots, both based on accepted social discourses: how to escape lower-middle-class poverty; and the perennial question of the obstacles to love. These two plots are intertwined when the love quest is made to depend on the former, that is, when success in love is predicated on success in social mobility. However, in making the film's protagonist black, Furtado inserts the question of race into these two discourses and highlights the discursive absence of race in dealing with the problems of poverty and race relations. The film underscores the role of education and the discursive implications of social representation in excluding marginalized groups from social mobility while exploring the underside of the mestiçagem myth, the role of race in the question of national identity.

This article examines the breadth and depth of anti-Americanism in contemporary Latin America. Using individual-level data from 2012, we employ regression analysis to understand why some Latin American citizens are more likely than others to distrust the government of the United States. By examining the attitudes of citizens of countries that are part of different groupings—such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas and the Pacific Alliance—we find great variation in the levels and predictors of anti-Americanism. While citizens' ideology is a common predictor in most countries, other variables such as the receipt of remittances, the perception of insecurity, and nationalism appear as predictors in only some. Furthermore, although there is a positive correlation between presidential approval and anti-Americanism in countries where leaders have an overtly anti-American discourse, this relationship disappears in countries where the president is perceived as neutral, and it is inverse in countries where the president is perceived as pro-American.

Este artículo aborda los debates en torno a la Ley de la Música Autóctona Tradicional Puertorriqueña, aprobada en el 2004, tomando en cuenta el complejo contexto en el que opera: un mercado musical profundamente asimétrico, cuyas dinámicas económicas, parámetros legales y valoraciones estéticas se ven atravesados por las tramas de la globalización y la condición colonial. Partiendo de un repaso histórico de las políticas culturales en Puerto Rico y de un examen de las transformaciones en las prácticas y representaciones de la música puertorriqueña en las últimas décadas, se analiza cómo los discursos sobre lo autóctono y lo tradicional, movilizados en defensa u oposición de la ley, se relacionan con asuntos sensitivos en la sociedad puertorriqueña contemporánea como lo son: el prejuicio racial, la desigualdad social y la subordinación política. Por otra parte, se abordan iniciativas y estrategias generadas por los propios músicos con el objetivo de preservar, transmitir, difundir y desarrollar las tradiciones musicales, al tiempo que agencian espacio laboral y capital simbólico.

This article tells the story of how an important group of social scientists in Latin America turned away from the problems of underdevelopment to the possibilities for democracy. It focuses on a network of leading Latin American intellectuals and their North American counterparts brought together by material stringencies as well as intellectual and political concerns arising from the sweeping wave of authoritarianism in the region. Brokered by private institutions and mediated by personal encounters, the decade-long endeavors of the network reveal the mechanisms through which social scientific paradigms are undone and refashioned.