Analysts of social movements have done a great deal to extend our understanding of how resistance groups frame injustices. They often assume that some form of collective (discursive) action is necessary to frame common understandings, but in many authoritarian regimes collective action is not tolerated. Instead, opposition is expressed in messages embedded in comics, films, and other images generated by popular culture. In this article we connect the literature on social movements and framing to the psychological and cultural understandings of humor, and specifically how text and images in humorous comics form a response to official frames of social peace, modernization, and development. Even when no one dares to write a letter of protest, or take to the streets, or set up a website, the political content of comics establishes understandings about group identity and justice. In more open and democratic regimes, dissident leaders are permitted to manipulate images and understandings. In closed authoritarian regimes, comics are “ready meals” for dissidents. We examine humorous comics in Mexico from 1970 to 1976 to show how text and images spoke of injustices such as torture, poverty, and marginalization.

O Brasil vem experimentando nas duas últimas décadas mudanças significativas com a queda da desigualdade, estabilidade económica, ampliação das oportunidades no mercado de trabalho formal e ampliação da escolarização. O artigo procura analisar o acesso ao ensino superior dos jovens de 18 a 24 anos por raça e renda com o objetivo de provocar uma discussão sobre as desigualdades no contexto de expansão educacional e os alvos das ações afirmativas no ensino superior em vigor no país, em especial a adoção recente da reserva de vagas nas Instituições de Ensino Superior Federais. Os dados são oriundos da Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra Domiciliar (PNAD), realizada pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Estatística e Geografia (IBGE), nos anos de 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008 e 2011, anos que marcam momentos específicos das mudanças ocorridas nas desigualdades e no sistema educacional brasileiro.

Este trabajo analiza, en el contexto de la Guerra Fría y del terrorismo de Estado, el comportamiento de una red integrada por referentes religiosos que, articulados con organizaciones de la sociedad civil y del Estado lograron el cese de la ayuda militar norteamericana al gobierno argentino, el otorgamiento de asilo político a algunos ciudadanos argentinos y pedidos por otros detenidos desaparecidos. Los religiosos que formaban parte de esta red fueron aquellos que, en diferente grado, incorporaron alguna nota de secularización: laicidad de la política, pluralización social o autonomía personal. Esta diversidad se explica por las distintas concepciones de lo sagrado de las que eran tributarios los sectores católicos.

En Latinoamérica, la transición demográfica se desarrolla, en general, de la misma manera en la que se desarrolló en Europa. No obstante, los efectos demográficos del proceso de modernización son muy variados, especialmente en grupos indígenas. Desde los años treinta las poblaciones indígenas del Gran Chaco Argentino comenzaron un proceso de modernización. El objetivo de este trabajo fue analizar los cambios demográficos en una población toba del norte de Argentina. Se utilizaron los censos de los años 1985 y 2002, registros de nacimientos y defunción de agentes sanitarios toba, del centro médico, del Registro Civil y entrevistas a mujeres tobas. Se estimó la tasa de crecimiento poblacional; se analizaron pirámides poblaciones y se obtuvo el índice de masculinidad, la tasa de mortalidad infantil y la tasa global de fecundidad. El crecimiento poblacional fue similar al provincial, se evidenció un rejuvenecimiento de la población, un moderado descenso de la mortalidad infantil y un aumento de la fecundidad. Se discute la necesidad de desarrollar modelos más integradores que consideren las variaciones demográficas de estos grupos.

Fair-trade networks have been working to temper the inequities and uncertainties facing small-scale artisans and farmers and to provide them with more secure and livable incomes. Drawing on earlier research in 1991–1993 and a brief pilot study in 2006, this research note examines farmers' perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of production for fair trade in three coffee-producing regions in Costa Rica. While the fair-trade movement has made significant headway in bringing social and environmental concerns to the marketplace and in providing farmers with guaranteed minimum prices for their coffee, farmers' reactions to production for fair trade indicate a number of problems that farmers and fair-trade cooperatives are facing in their efforts to reap the potential benefits of fair trade. As currently structured, fair-trade markets alone do not adequately address the needs of small farming families in Latin America.

In the past fifteen years, many Latin American cities have sponsored programs that promote reading through their city's public transportation systems. This article analyzes two of these programs, Libro al Viento in Bogotá, Colombia, and Santiago en 100 Palabras in Santiago, Chile, framed with examples from Buenos Aires, Argentina. These programs insert stories into public space to enhance social interaction and develop a positive sense of local belonging. Literary reading is harnessed as a socially embedded practice that can facilitate change, in response to previous periods of censorship and repression under dictatorship (in Chile) and political violence (in Colombia). Shifting the view of reading from an individual to a collective experience rather than focusing on functional literacy, these initiatives put literary reading to the service of civic and community development. The programs emerged during a period of increased investment by municipal governments in public space, including renovated subways and new bus rapid transit systems, and rely on a combination of public and private sponsorship. The intricate relationship between urban infrastructure and literary culture in these contemporary programs challenges but also perpetuates the role of the “lettered city.”

The conventional wisdom about contemporary Venezuelan politics is that class voting has become commonplace, with the poor doggedly supporting Hugo Chávez while the rich oppose him. This class voting is considered both a new feature of Venezuelan politics and a puzzle given the multiclass bases of prior populist leaders in Latin America. I clarify the concept of class voting by distinguishing between monotonic and nonmonotonic associations between class and vote choice. Using survey data, I find that only in Chávez's first election in 1998 was class voting monotonic. Since then, class voting in Venezuela has been nonmonotonic, with the very wealthiest Venezuelans disproportionately voting against Chávez. At the same time, Chávez's support appears to have increased most among the middle sectors of the income distribution, not the poorest. Finally, I find that whatever effect Chávez may have had on overall turnout, his efforts have not disproportionately mobilized poor voters.

Produced along the Río de la Plata during the nineteenth century, shipped to Havana, and consumed by African slaves, the salt-cured beef known as tasajo affected both of those places and, to some degree, the Atlantic world in general. Initial exploration of the tasajo trail that connected Buenos Aires and Cuba employs primary sources such as nineteenth-century descriptions and shipping records to characterize the landscapes, places, routes, and agents of the largely unexplored research territory of that anomalous commodity: one that, unlike others such as sugar, slaves not only produced but also consumed; one that underpinned more prominent, latitudinal transatlantic flows such as the slave trade, yet itself flowed meridionally; one that, like all those flows, had an oceanic component that comprised an actively lived space of flows rather than a dead space of separation; and one that might be mundane, yet helped fuel major transformations of two of the principal nodes of Hispanic Atlantic.

This article proposes a conceptual framework to discuss the left and left turns in Latin American politics. It then proceeds to argue that winning elections—the recurrent criterion for these turns—might generate tremendous enthusiasm but is also a restrictive benchmark. Other indicators I discuss here include the left's agenda-setting capacity, its redefinition of the political and ideological center, and its incipient challenge of the liberal setting of politics as actors experiment with post-liberal arrangements.