This chapter explains how the Chilean right has been reconfigured due to the multidimensional crisis that has shaken Chile since the end of 2019. The authors analyze how tensions regarding competition and identity have affected relevant actors and structured their perceptions, calculations, and behaviors. They examine the ideational changes and continuities of the Chilean right’s road to moderation. They argue that the joint processes of liberalization and democratization gave rise to a gattopardista strategy of “changing so that things may remain the same.” This was characterized by the programmatic moderation of coalition candidates until the 2017 campaign, with traditional right-wing parties moving to the center to the extent that they did not threaten the pillars of the neoliberal model. However, when centrist and left-wing parties aimed to significantly reform the institutional core, the traditional right did react, and moved further to the right on the ideological continuum.

In recent decades, Latin America has experienced a resurgence of the political right after the “left turn” of the 2000s. The introduction argues that right-wing parties have adapted to social and political changes by emphasizing cultural issues, mobilizing voters along salient political cleavages, and crafting distinctive party platforms and political identities. It also introduces a typology of right-wing parties and movements that captures the diversity of the post-2000 Latin American right in both ideological and organizational terms. Looking at the demand side, the introduction sets the stage for our analysis of the changes and continuities in the attitudes of Latin American electorates. On the supply side, the introduction sets the groundwork for mapping the programmatic features that distinguish the post-2000 political right from right-wing parties created in previous eras. Finally, the introduction presents an outline of the book and summarizes its main findings.

This chapter explains why right-wing strategies of adaptation and survival had varying degrees of success during and after the left turn. It argues that right-wing parties were most likely to survive and remain competitive in national elections when they relied on strong party brands and organizations. These strong party brands and organizations depended, in turn, on when the parties were founded and whether they had roots in an authoritarian regime.

This chapter explains the performance of the Centro Democrático in Colombia and its concurrent success at the national level and underachievement at the subnational level. It argues that this disparity is linked to two interrelated variables: the security cleavage along which the Centro Democrático has developed its partisan identity, and the party’s weak subnational partisan structures. Security issues mobilize voters on the national level, but are too broad to be relevant in local elections.

Chapter 4 focuses on the early seventeenth century, when religious policy in the kingdom came to be in the hands of a determined new Audiencia president, an ambitious archbishop, and a radical group of Jesuits. With the support of a broad coalition of the kingdom’s leading settlers, these reformers took Christianisation in a new direction. The reformers focused on the promotion of the regular and frequent participation in a range of quotidian Catholic practices and institutions that their sixteenth-century predecessors had generally discouraged or withheld from Indigenous people, particularly private devotions, popular celebrations, confraternities, and public ceremony. This began in a handful of parishes entrusted to these Jesuit reformers, who had a very particular understanding of the role of ‘external’ manifestations of piety, and who used these sites as testing grounds for new approaches to Christianisation. These ultimately had the effect of affording Indigenous people space and opportunities to engage with Christianity in new – if, for the reformers, not always desirable – ways, laying the foundations for the reformation of the kingdom.

This chapter analyzes the right in Venezuela under Chavismo. It argues that the main divide of Venezuelan politics is now between democracy and autocracy rather than the ideological left and right. As authoritarianism and repression have increased and Venezuela’s socioeconomic decline has worsened, right-wing movements and factions have prioritized competitiveness through a centrist approach over an emphasis on ideological purity.

Chapter 5 focuses on the history of language policy and the treatment of Indigenous languages. In addition to refocusing Christianisation on to everyday practice, the reformers of the early seventeenth century laid to rest a long-running dispute among missionaries and administrators concerning the role that Indigenous languages should play in religious instruction. This dispute arose from efforts by the Spanish crown in the sixteenth century to impose a universal solution to the challenges of linguistic heterogeneity: First by suppressing Indigenous languages and teaching Castilian, and later by focusing on the ‘general language’ of each region. Both imperial policies not only failed to overcome the issue of linguistic heterogeneity in the New Kingdom, but were in fact radically transformed and appropriated by local authorities for their own purposes through the use of legal fictions and the selective conveyance of information across the Atlantic. The chapter examines these debates, manoeuvres, and the controversies they produced, before exploring how the seventeenth-century reformers were able to negotiate these divisions and establish a consensus around Indigenous language instruction.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an understanding of the structural constraints and opportunities for the populist radical right (PRR) in Latin America. Unlike Western Europe, material values are still of vital importance in many Latin American countries because of high levels of inequality in the region. This represents a major constraint for the emergence of the PRR, and only some parties have been able to overcome it. The author argues that the growth of the PRR relies on three factors: the appeal of the PRR’s hardline discourses, the mobilization of voters dissatisfied with sexual and reproductive rights and secularization, and a crisis of representation among the traditional parties, who are painted by PRR leaders as a corrupt elite.

The introduction reflects on the peculiar position of the New Kingdom of Granada, and the nature of colonial and scholarly writing about the region, which both developed under the shadow of the centres of Spanish colonial power in America, Mexico and Peru, showing how the expectations, assumptions, and perspectives of better studied regions have distorted our understanding of this region’s history. It outlines the book’s principal methodological arguments: the importance of an exhaustive and granular approach to colonial sources that takes into account the intellectual, institutional, and normative circumstances of their creation and transmission as a methodological imperative; the need to centre Christianisation, and the relentless challenges it posed, to understand the construction of colonial rule in the New Kingdom; and the need to overcome antiquated and counterproductive approaches to the study of religious change among Indigenous people, and instead focus on their diverse, contradictory, and complex interactions with Christianity.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

Chapter 5 turns to elite consumption of foreign luxury goods. This detour from the book’s narrative of Plebeian consumption is necessary in order to question the historiography that has equated “foreign goods” with “luxury goods.” This chapter looks at how nineteenth-century Colombian elites incorporated European luxury consumer goods – clocks, books, umbrellas, clothing, and musical instruments – into practices of social distinction and cultural expression in a reaction against ordinary people’s way of life. In this way, the chapter highlights that, when it came to their own consumption, the category of “foreign commodities” in nineteenth-century Colombia was flexible for the members of the upper classes, with particular political and social ramifications.

Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.

Chapter 6 turns to the consumption of patent medicines and toiletries and their impact on the Colombian market. By following their distribution, it explores the mechanisms and strategies employed by foreign manufacturers to infiltrate the market and gain widespread attention. It also shows how producers of patent medicines were the first to introduce modern advertising techniques to Colombians. As a result of such advertising, popular sectors were gradually incorporated into the world of foreign nostrums and toiletries, embracing the ideas that these commodities promoted and enforced. In spite of this, as the chapter demonstrates, Colombian men and women still transformed and domesticated their uses and their meanings in interesting and often unpredictable ways.

Chapter 2 explores the complex dynamics of Colombia’s post-1850 import trade. It traces how foreign objects – textiles, machetes, toiletries, food, and chinaware, among many other goods – circulated throughout the national geography: the routes they traveled and the places they visited. The chapter also explores the many places in which peasants, bogas, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders came together to give meaning to the multiple and diverse spaces of exchange.