Editors’ foreword to the special issue.

This article analyzes student mobilization and public discourse on higher education during the June 2013 protests in Brazil in an effort to situate the protests historically. I argue that higher education was a major, yet overlooked, component of the 2013 protests, and that concerns over the failings and shortcomings of Brazil’s university system had deeper roots in institutional problems and student discourses on education, society, and democracy. These historical inequalities combined with institutional memories that offered students models and examples of past mobilization and allowed them to tie their present-day concerns to past examples of student politics. I consider the ways in which the often-overlooked question of educational reform offers insights into ongoing social inequalities in Brazil, the failure of various regimes to address structural issues, and how students in 2013 looked to the past while simultaneously drawing on their own particular educational contingencies. This article situates 2013 historically while exploring the ways in which higher education in the twenty-first century has transformed, even as it remains an important part of political and social struggles between society and the state. Finally, this article explores how the 2013 protests in Brazil reflect ongoing struggles to define the role of the state in society, not just in Brazil but in the Americas more generally.

Displays of wealth and opulence in the face of dire need and poverty have become commonplace as the rich and the poor increasingly share city spaces around the globe. Research shows that it is the perception of inequality, more than raw measures of inequality, that has important political consequences and that is most concerning for social well-being. In this article, I propose a theoretical move from a general, statistically driven conceptualization of inequality to a spatially informed concept that recognizes how people experience inequality. Relying on findings that show that the perception of inequality is most important for life chances, I suggest that it is key to understand not only where inequality is located but how it is spatially distributed. Using the Mall of San Juan as an example of a spatially polarized landscape in Puerto Rico, and referring to other cases in Latin America, the article shows how the spatial distribution of inequality highlights the perceptual fields of citizens who may celebrate, succumb to, respond to, attune to, and/or challenge the inequalities accordingly. To shift from an accounting of inequality through the concept of segregation to recognizing the experience and perception of inequality through spatial polarization shifts the scholarly and policy frames of inequality research and policy.

Increasing exclusion and inequality in Honduras have posed escalating security risks for women in their homes and on the streets. In this article, we examine gender-based violence against women, including gender-motivated murders (feminicides), the everyday acts that can result in their deaths, and impunity for these crimes. Rather than analyzing these murders as interpersonal acts or linking them to economic deprivation, we examine the actions and inactions of the state that have amplified violence in the lives of Honduran women. We distinguish between the state’s acts of omission and acts of commission in order to identify the political responsibility and failures that create a fertile ground for these killings. A context of multisided violence that facilitates extreme violence in the lives of women is present in Honduras, especially considering the diminishing power of civil society groups and increased political repression after the 2009 coup. We identify root causes of the wide (and widening) gap between laws on the books—which have been passed mostly to satisfy international and domestic organizations pushing for change—and laws in action, that is, implementation on the ground. Although we focus on Honduras, we note similar experiences of extreme violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and in other countries in the Latin American region.

Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples in Latin America face higher poverty rates and are disproportionately represented among the poor. The probability of being poor is between two and three times higher for indigenous and Afro-descendants than whites. Using comparable fiscal incidence analyses for Bolivia, Brazil, and Guatemala, I analyze how much poverty and inequality change in the ethnoracial space after fiscal interventions. Although taxes and transfers tend to reduce the ethnoracial gaps, the change is very small. While per capita cash transfers tend to be higher for the nonwhite population, spending on these programs is too low, especially when compared with the disproportionate number of poor people among nonwhites.

Weberian sociological approaches dominate the contemporary study of inequality in Latin America. Theoretically, the major works in the area suffer from a conflation of liberalism and democracy and offer flawed conceptions of capitalism, class, and other social relations of oppression. This article offers an exegesis and critique of several recent influential texts written within the Weberian tradition. It then proposes as an alternative a Marxian-decolonial theoretical framework for understanding inequality and the totalizing power of capital. It demonstrates how such a framework can better account for the complexity of class relations and other internally related forms of social oppression—such as gender, sexuality, and race—in Latin America today. Finally, the article shows the utility of the Marxist-decolonial framework by way, first, of a concrete investigation into the highly contested dynamics of twenty-first-century extractive capitalism in the region, and, second, through an exposition of the life story and activism of Luis Macas, an indigenous activist and intellectual in Ecuador. The core element of Macas’s political subjectivity is an underlying utopian-revolutionary dialectic through which he draws on elements of a precapitalist past in looking forward to an anticolonial and socialist future.

Attempts to use schools to assimilate the Huichols into the Revolutionary nation-state prompted the development of divergent partnerships and conflicts in their patria chica, involving rival Huichol communities and factions, local mestizos, government officials and Cristero rebels. The provocations of teachers, the cupidity of mestizo caciques, rebel violence and Huichol commitment to preserving communal autonomy undermined alliances between Huichol leaders and federal officials, and led to the ultimate failure of the government's project. If anything, the short-lived Revolutionary education programme equipped a new generation of Huichol leaders with the tools to better resist external assimilatory pressures into the 1940s and beyond.

This paper uses corruption in Mexico City's markets as a lens to examine state–society relations and the construction of the PRI's hegemony in post-1946 Mexico. It presents three case studies that show how some ostensibly corrupt practices supported state functioning, while others contributed to the process of party building. It demonstrates that these practices were driven by shifting social dynamics and conflicts among vendors, which operated through networks of formal and informal power. Historicising corruption illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the Mexican state as well as the balance between co-optation and popular demands that lay behind it in this period.

This article focuses on census policy-making by analysing the decision-making processes behind the apparent stability of Brazilian racial categories within a context of multiple changes in racial politics and policies over the last four decades (1970–2010). Empirically, we rely on archival material, survey and census data, as well as key informant interviews with senior technocrats from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, IBGE). Our findings show the central role of technocratic actors in shaping and giving meaning to these categories in a context of uncertainty about the most valid approach to measurement. Their role is particularly evident in IBGE's early application of the negro category to the non-white population and repeated rejection of the moreno category. Beyond technical expertise, these census officials navigated various professional, political and ideological motivations. We develop the concept of technocratic compromise to capture census officials’ decision-making process and underscore its importance to explaining census policy outcomes.