En 1835, el esclavo cubano Juan Francisco Manzano escribió su autobiografía, cumpliendo con el encargo del abolicionista Domingo del Monte. El manuscrito original muestra un narrador psicológicamente escindido que lucha consigo mismo y proyecta una tonalidad terrorífica que produce una gran empatía a sus lectores. En oposición al horror, la modalidad terrorífica se define por su tendencia a la ocultación, al tiempo que crea incertidumbre e intriga. Esto es visible en los múltiples episodios de tortura en el texto, en el cual el narrador se centra en los momentos previos al suceso, evitando descripciones gráficas. A través del análisis de la transcripción del manuscrito de William Luis, arguyo que esta tonalidad logra expresar la experiencia de la esclavitud, una condición desconocida para la gran mayoría de los lectores. Gracias a un proceso imaginativo, los lectores pueden tener acceso a la experiencia y sentir empatía por el esclavo en el umbral del horror.

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association (online session), May 22–23, 2020.

The widespread violence in Mexico by state and nonstate actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to define has proven difficult from a bureaucratic, political, and aesthetic perspective. This article examines and contrasts three commemorative and transformative memorial interventions to show that in a context that lacks a clear transition and access to justice, memory activists respond to the state in a playing field that is not simply concerned with a politics of memory—who gets to decide how to remember the past—but with delineating the past from both the present and the future in the first place: a politics of time.

In recent years, citizen-run anti-crime organizations have brought important challenges to Mexico and other Latin American countries. Under what circumstances are citizens more likely to seek out their neighbors to confront crime directly? I argue that when citizens do not trust state authorities, their perception of the trustworthiness of their community can increase their likelihood of engaging in anti-crime organization attempts. I analyze data from Mexico and find that an average citizen’s perception of the trustworthiness of his/her neighbors correlates with his/her likelihood of engaging in an anti-crime organization attempt. Further, consistent with the main argument of this paper, I find this link to be stronger among those who distrust the police. These findings contribute by bringing back citizens’ relation to the state as an important moderating force in society, and helping us understand when social trust can translate into controversial forms of state substitution.

Este estudo objetivou identificar os efeitos e impactos da recriação das Superintendências de Desenvolvimento do Nordeste (Sudene) e da Amazônia (Sudam), sob o Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento, no desenvolvimento socioeconômico dos municípios atendidos. Para tanto, utilizaram-se modelos de Dados em Painel Dinâmico e de Diferenças em Diferenças, com informações dos municípios brasileiros, de 2005 a 2014. O indicador de desenvolvimento socioeconômico empregado foi o Índice Firjan de Desenvolvimento Municipal, tanto sob a perspectiva geral quanto sob suas dimensões (educação, saúde e emprego/renda). De forma geral, os resultados apontaram que as Superintendências impactaram positivamente os desenvolvimentos geral e da educação. Para a saúde, observaram-se impactos e efeitos positivos. Porém, embora as regiões beneficiadas sejam as mais necessitadas de políticas de desenvolvimento regional no Brasil, a reestruturação das superintendências, com os projetos e objetivos propostos, não foi capaz de cumpri-los integralmente, pois não foram identificados impactos positivos para emprego e renda.

Debates over shifting gender roles in nineteenth-century Spanish America included the question of women’s participation in the workforce. Writers of fiction and nonfiction posed arguments about paid employment for middle-class women and often represented work itself in ways that reinforced traditional gender norms by envisioning women’s entry into the labor force as an extension of their family and household roles. Nonetheless, the tactics that allowed writers to make stronger claims for women’s right to paid employment often reimposed limitations on women. The complex rhetorical maneuvers that many authors deployed bespeak their anxieties about the potential for social change brought by newly visible options for women. This essay examines novels and nonfictional essays and argues that authors who advance progressive agendas about and for women sometimes undermine their own purported arguments when they fall back on more conventional attitudes about women’s roles in families and society. This article contends that these problematic moments in the selected texts serve to maintain a system in which privilege accrues to male elites.

This article advances several arguments about scientific and diplomatic collaboration on peaceful nuclear energy technologies between Argentina and Brazil. First, although 1972–1980 is generally viewed as an acrimonious period in the neighbors’ bilateral relationship, nuclear energy officials in these South American countries made significant and unexpected progress toward technical cooperation, motivated by a shared geopolitical position. Furthermore, technological differences between the two nuclear energy programs, and experts’ ideas on their potential implications for agreement between key officials, opened potential avenues for diplomatic cooperation. Finally, this article illuminates a surprising quality of diplomatic behavior of the military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, Argentina and Brazil shared nearly identical stances on the unfettered right to pursue advanced nuclear technology. In combination with increased technical cooperation, this ideological alignment supported a landmark bilateral presidential summit in 1980 on nuclear energy collaboration.

This essay reviews the following works:

Reconceptualizing Security in the Americas in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Bruce M. Bagley, Jonathan D. Rosen, and Hanna S. Kassab. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. xix + 368. $49.99 paperback. ISBN: 9780739194874.

Brazil in the World: The International Relations of a South American Giant. By Sean W. Burges. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Pp. xi + 280. £30.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781526107404.

U.S.-Venezuela Relations since the 1990s: Coping with Midlevel Security Threats. By Javier Corrales and Carlos A. Romero. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp. xii + 228. $47.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780415895255.

21st Century Democracy Promotion in the Americas: Standing Up for the Polity. By Jorge Heine and Brigitte Weiffen. New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xii + 208. $47.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780415626378.

Aspirational Power: Brazil on the Long Road to Global Influence. By David R. Mares and Harold A. Trinkunas. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016. Pp. x + 224. $32.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780815727958.

Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War. By Aragorn Storm Miller. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. Pp. xxi + 278. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826356871.

This article analyzes Jorge Luis Borges’s views on race, as he expressed them in personal conversations with Adolfo Bioy Casares and vis-à-vis his fiction. In the conversations recorded by Bioy Casares, Borges emerges as a man of his time and his social class in the worst sense possible: racism, bigotry, and his self-constructed whiteness inform almost all of his controversial statements on blackness and on Brazilian people. The article aims to expose a cohesive racial discourse underlying not only Borges’s private conversations but also his narratives. The goal is to challenge the enduring views of Borges as a “universal” author, dissociated from history and society.

Taking as a starting point the ontological differentiation between animal and human as a fundamental mechanism of biopolitical violence, I analyze the ambiguity of the imaginaries of flesh and animality in the contexts of revolutionary Cuba and Venezuela. I demonstrate how the dynamics of power marked by an ontological division between human and not human, often ascribed to neoliberalism, paradoxically operate in socialist regimes. I examine several instances of visual arts, performance, literature, and public demonstrations, to reveal, on the one hand, sacrificial state power over the population’s bodies and, on the other, examples of disobedience against the state.

Venezuela has one of the highest rates of homicide in the Americas. Those who are dying are mostly men, and most are shot. Based on ethnographic research in poor, urban neighborhoods in Caracas, where guns are abundant and the state is absent, this article focuses on the repertoire of responses of mothers of armed young men toward violence. How are mothers responding to meet the extreme challenges of safeguarding the survival of their families? In what ways do they participate in the containment but also in the dissemination of violence? We describe the safeguarding practices deployed by women, which we interpret as political survival strategies. Drawing on women’s narratives, we have identified four strategies that contribute differently to the containment and reproduction of violence: submission and taking refuge, collaborating, resisting, and negotiating or forging of pacts.

This essay reviews the following works:

Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–1969. By Mónica Amor. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. x + 309. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780520286627.

Brazil through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics. By Ana Lucia Araujo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. Pp. xxvi + 238. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826337450.

Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil. By Stephanie D’Alessandro and Luis Pérez-Oramas. New Haven: Yale University Press; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017. Pp. 192. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780300228618.

Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France. Edited by Regina R. Félix and Scott D. Juall. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Pp. 225. $45.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781557537461.

Proust’s Latin Americans. By Rubén Gallo. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. 280. $45.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781421413457.

Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars. By Michele Greet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 288. $27.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780415933048.

Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Performance, Transnational Encounters, and the Construction of Race. By Lisa Shaw. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. 231. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477314791.

Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s. By Elena Shtromberg. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 210. $29.95. ISBN: 9781477308585.

Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art, 1910–1960. By Edward J. Sullivan. London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2018. Pp. 336. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781786271556.

For the first time within living memory, the rural Roman Catholic parish of Talavera in the south-central Peruvian Andes features only native clergy. By placing the Talaveran Catholic priests in theological and historical context, this article shows how this current generation of Catholic priests in Talavera must be understood within the context of the post–Vatican II Catholic Church in Latin America, which explicitly encouraged the training of native clergy and recast the relationship between the sacramental and the human as mutually compatible and constitutive. Although such initiatives are generally associated with liberal parishes unlike Talavera, the nouvelle theology that shaped Vatican II nevertheless meant that the dual nature of the Roman Catholic priesthood—as concretely human but also ineffably sacramental—fundamentally shapes the lay relationship with the Catholic priests in Talavera, too. The resulting tension between the priest as a sacramental mediator to the divine and the priest as a human man is continually renegotiated by laity and clergy alike, and is essential to understanding Catholic priests in Latin America and how lay parishioners experience the Catholic priesthood.

Este trabajo aborda un capítulo clave en la historia de persecución de los sectores radicalizados en Argentina: la represión del comunismo durante los primeros años de la década de 1930, encabezada por la Sección Especial de la Policía. Se trata de sistematizar y caracterizar la actuación de esta sección, denunciada ante la Justicia y el Parlamento, e indagar hasta qué punto implicó (o no) un quiebre con respecto a los procedimientos y concepciones de la fuerza y al marco legal involucrado. Para eso, repaso las concepciones y el accionar represivo desde principios de siglo, atendiendo a la orientación de documentos policiales de distintos períodos, y analizo en particular las reacciones de los distintos bloques de la Cámara de Diputados, inexploradas hasta el momento. La evidencia indica que en base a desarrollos previos se inició una nueva etapa signada por el resquebrajamiento del estado de derecho.

Latin American scholars in the twentieth century often pointed to the agrarian question and the dominance of the large latifundio estates as the key to explaining their countries’ underdevelopment. Yet, in more recent years, the emphasis on agrarian structures has declined and the latifundio is no longer seen as a relevant factor to economic development. In its place have emerged explanations that emphasize international trade relations, institutions, or the capacity of local states. This study makes a case for bringing the latifundio “back in” to explanations of underdevelopment in Latin America, and points to the persistence of particular property relations, low-intensity land use, and low-risk productive strategies throughout the region as barriers to development. Agricultural census data and various other sources on land use suggest that large latifundio estates are still a relevant factor throughout the region, and I argue that they continue to represent a significant barrier for the deepening of industrialization.

Este artículo examina cómo en el Ejército Colombiano, específicamente en la Escuela de Soldados Profesionales (ESPRO), fundada con el objetivo de profesionalizar a los soldados colombianos, coexisten diferentes narrativas en las que adquiere vida el proceso educativo militar. Este artículo muestra cómo en ellas se construye el guerrero ideal, cómo esta construcción tiene un vínculo con el pasado independentista y cómo, se da vida a las funciones de la ESPRO y a los medios usados para educar a los soldados. Nos ocuparemos también de cómo los soldados, exalumnos de la Escuela, definen la profesionalización. El artículo se basa en una investigación etnográfica conducida en el 2016 en la ESPRO, financiada por la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.

Este artigo investiga o impacto da diversidade de denominações religiosas de cunho evangélico no nível municipal sobre a proporção de votos obtidos pelos deputados eleitos que representam esse grupo demográfico. Para alcançar tais propósitos, utilizamos dados demográficos e eleitorais, assim como relativos à composição da bancada evangélica no congresso para as eleições de 2014. Comparamos o efeito da diversidade confessional nos municípios entre dois grupos de deputados eleitos: evangélicos e não-evangélicos. Verificamos que quanto o maior número de igrejas evangélicas com representação no município, maior a proporção de votos obtida pelos deputados evangélicos. O controle do efeito da diversidade confessional no desempenho eleitoral pelos outros parlamentares também nos permitiu confirmar que o efeito observado era exclusivo de deputados evangélicos, não sendo reproduzido em outros representantes. Os resultados aportam evidências empíricas consistentes a favor da hipótese de que existe complementaridade entre denominações religiosas no que se refere ao voto.

This study assesses the deployment of blackface in a performance of the Danza de Caporales at La Fiesta de la Virgen de la Candelaria in Puno, Peru, by the performance troupe Sambos Illimani con Sentimiento y Devoción. Since blackface is so widely associated with the nineteenth-century US blackface minstrel tradition, this article develops the concept of “hemispheric blackface” to expand common understandings of the form. It historicizes Sambos’ deployment of blackface within an Andean performance tradition known as the Tundique, and then traces the way multiple hemispheric performance traditions can converge in a single blackface act. It underscores the amorphous nature of blackface itself and critically assesses its role in producing anti-blackness in the performance.

This essay reviews the following works:

Staying Afloat: Risk and Uncertainty in Spanish Atlantic World Trade, 1760–1820. By Jeremy Baskes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 381. $54.57 hardcover. ISBN: 9780804785426.

The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. By Robert S. DuPlessis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 332. $29.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107105911.

The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. By Adrian Finucane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 1 + 211. $45.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248128.

Guiana and the Shadows of Empire: Colonial and Cultural Negotiations at the Edge of the World. By Joshua R. Hyles. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Pp. ix + 185. $76.56 hardcover. ISBN: 9780739187791.

The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts. By Darlene J. Sadlier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 314. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477311486.

Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil. By Michiel van Groesen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xx + 272. $47.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248661.

This article works to understand what happens to women working in the public sector, especially women in traditionally male occupations, such as the police. Moreover, in Latin America and in most developing countries, it is crucial to examine the interaction between precarious jobs and gender discrimination. The article finds that gender discrimination is accentuated in organizations with precarious labor conditions. To illustrate this problem, it examines the police force in Mexico. This is a crucial case study for understanding the phenomena: Mexico is an extremely violent country, but conditions in the police force are highly precarious for workers. Moreover, this labor precariousness has an even greater impact on female police officers. In addition to working in a profession characterized by instability, they also face structural barriers to the performance of their duties and greater obstacles to entry and promotion within the organization. Furthermore, women face the glass ceiling as well as a hostile work culture that expresses itself through discrimination.