Cities around the world are developing new ways of governing risks and vulnerabilities. In the new flood-governance measures, technological risk-prevention is linked to programmes of social resilience and cultural adaptation. By focusing on the catastrophic floods in the city of Villahermosa, Mexico, this article argues that new flood-governance strategies rely on complicated forms of neoliberal governance, in which flood governance is turned into a matter of adaptation and self-responsibilisation, while scant attention is paid to the socio-spatial distribution of vulnerabilities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three socially differentiated neighbourhoods of Villahermosa, this article demonstrates how flood-governance strategies and the residents' responses to them vary across the city and how the production of flood risk is connected to the uneven production of urban space. The institutional acts of governing aim to render certain population groups governable, whilst being unable to eradicate dispersed contestation efforts.

This article explores the US contribution to the illegal transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and the tensions generated by this hemispheric connection in the mid-nineteenth century. It combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, based on diplomatic records and Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in order to assess the size and variety of forms of US participation in the traffic to Brazil. More generally, the article examines the tensions caused by the rise of abolitionism and the limits to the enforcement of anti-slave trade legislation in the free trade international environment that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars. By framing the attitudes of the US government within a broader Atlantic context, this work shows why certain forms of US participation in the contraband slave trade (such as providing US-built ships) became more predominant than others (such as directly financing and organising slave voyages) by the mid-nineteenth century.

Anthropological analysis elucidates how discourses about agriculture in one North-east Brazilian community reflect relational roles of citizens and the state, the position of farmers in society, and the relationship of individuals to their work. In these discourses, farmers are positioned as moral, hard-working, autonomous citizens, justifying their participation in low-paying activities. The declining numbers of agricultural workers is explained as a result of individual laziness or government irresponsibility. In using these discourses to take stances publicly on agricultural issues, speakers assign responsibilities and moral status to agents. In constructing rural identities, such moral discourses emphasise the symbolic value of subsistence agriculture as its economic value declines.

This article analyses the background to and the content of the Peruvian prior consultation law – the only one enacted in Latin America to date – and its regulating decree. In contrast to the widespread conception that prior consultation is a means for preventing and resolving conflict, it argues that this new legislation will not help to transform conflicts as long as the normative framework itself is contested and the preconditions for participatory governance are not in place. Establishing these preconditions would result in state institutions capable of justly balancing the diverse interests at stake; measures that reduce power asymmetries within consultations; and joint decision-making processes with binding agreements.

Latin America is widely known as a low-tax region, but Brazil defies that description with a tax burden almost double the regional average. Though longstanding, Brazil’s position atop the tax burden ranking is not a historical constant. As recently as the early 1950s three other countries, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, had similar or even heavier burdens. However, by the early 1980s Brazil had emerged as the most heavily taxed country in Latin America, and subsequent decades reinforced that status. This article seeks to uncover the roots of Brazil’s heavy taxation by examining the process through which it rose to the top of the regional ranking and managed to stay there. It emphasises two variables, the social class bases of public sector growth and the degree of support for democracy among key political actors. Despite changing over time, these variables have consistently interacted in ways that favour rising taxation.

Elsa Chaney once argued that Latin American women turned to motherhood to justify their political participation. Now that Latin American women have gained unprecedented access to national-level office, we ask whether these cultural narratives of maternalism still condition female politicians’ access to political power. Using public opinion data, media analysis, and elite interviews, we conceptualise four strategic frames deployed by elite women to justify their national-level political careers: the traditional supermadre, the technocratic caretaker, the macho minimiser, and the difference denier. We argue that while today's female politicians have developed diverse responses to maternalism, their access to public office remains profoundly shaped by structural constraints and cultural narratives that privilege traditional feminine ideals of caretaking.

Based on comparative research this article analyses indigenous women's organising trajectories and the creation of spaces where they position themselves as autonomous political actors. Drawing on social movement theory and intersectionality, we present a typology of the organisational forms adopted by indigenous women in Peru, Bolivia and Mexico over the last two decades. One of the key findings of our comparative study is that indigenous women have become social movement actors through different organisational forms that in part determine the degree of autonomy they can exercise as political subjects.