Based on a national survey of women and the creation of a ‘conservatism-liberalism index’, this study shows that conservatism in Chile has deep religious roots and continues to be the most significant symbolic reference point in women's lives. The study concludes also that the female population is drawn more towards a ‘liberal’ vision, but liberal attitudes are not able to provide an alternative symbolic reference point to conservatism. This is because liberalism seems to be the result of popular exposure to the requirements of modern life rather than a discourse or ideology. For this reason, the opinions and attitudes of women are highly contradictory and heterogeneous and do not find their form, for the most part, in a clearly liberal discourse or in one which is wholly conservative. We are thus dealing with a kind of ‘liberalism through exposure’, the limits of which are to be found in the conservative ideology which underlies the liberal opinions expressed and is clearly visible in the proportion of the population which is highly educated and deeply religious.

Brazil's left, especially the Workers' Party (PT), largely views civil society participation as a means of correcting the shortcomings of liberal democracy, and to break clientelistic politics. This article questions the underlying assumptions that civil society is inherently a pro-democratic force and that participatory arrangements enjoy sufficient autonomy from local power dynamics to democratise state action. Effective participation requires a positive interplay between government commitment, civic virtues, and supportive institutional design. Participatory democracy presupposes a well-functioning representative democracy rather than curing its ills. The article compares four municipal health councils in towns with varying combinations of government commitment and civicness, which highlights a complex interaction of political, civic, and institutional factors that shaped deliberative participation.

Most commentaries on the development of chicle (natural chewing gum) in the Yucatán Peninsula have emphasised the connections that were maintained between the chicle entrepreneurs and the companies, like William Wrigley's, which bought the raw gum for processing. The Mexican state is usually depicted as seeking to protect vulnerable forest workers from exploitation by foreign entrepreneurs and the vicissitudes of the free market. Our research, which uses archive material from Mexico City and Chetumal, interviews with former chicleros and entrepreneurs, as well as field research in Quintana Roo, suggests a slightly different interpretation. The Mexican state, far from contributing to the demise of personalistic relations (coyotaje) actually used these forms of mediation to manage and control the producers. The vulnerability of the chicleros to the full effect of market forces, their lack of physical and financial security, as well as corruption among some of the leaders of the cooperative movement, have all contributed to the continuance of coyotaje, often tacitly supported by state institutions. The article goes on to show that the need to meet demanding product and environmental standards, to achieve ‘certification’ as producers of a natural forest product, have compounded the problems of chicle producers today.

Richard Vowell was a British mercenary who served in the Wars of Independence in Hispanic America. A study of his writings offers a new perspective from which to reconsider the influential arguments of the section of Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992) that deals with European travel in the region in the period. The analysis centres on the ways in which Vowell depicted Hispanic American masculinities, indigenous peoples, collective identities and the diverse groups that made up society during the wars of independence. Vowell's writings suggest that further sources might be read against the traditional canon of commercial travel literature generally used by historians for the period 1800–1850.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century Tucumán's sugar industry experienced unprecedented growth. Tucumán's mills relied on their lands as well as on outside growers for the supply of the cane. By 1895 cañeros and colonos were cultivating two-thirds of the cane processed in the province. This practice resulted in the incorporation of thousands of small and medium farmers into sugar production, a rather exceptional case among Latin American sugar economies. This article sheds light on this peculiar aspect of Tucumán's sugar industry by focusing on the diversity that characterised the group of cane planters, the circumstances under which they were incorporated into cane agriculture, the tensions that materialised in sugar-growing areas, and the strategies developed by planters to settle their conflicts with mill owners.

This article examines the experiences of the Afro-Brazilian coffee transport workers of Rio de Janeiro's port district in the generation following the abolition of slavery in 1888. While they have been condemned by some scholars as reformist and placatory, this article argues that these Afro-Brazilians aggressively contested the new ‘free labour’ regime and the thousands of immigrant labourers who arrived to compete with them. Indeed, far from marking them as passive recipients of state paternalism, the subsequent decision of the port workers to seek an alliance with the state points to the importance of nativism as a middle-ground upon which successive Brazilian governments and Afro-Brazilians could meet.