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.

This article examines black criminal agency in the context of drug trafficking and territorial control by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, PCC), a self-identified criminal organisation in São Paulo's favelas. It argues that black youth's racialised encounters with the police shape their political praxis in the city. Since in the racial imaginary, they are constantly linked to crime and violence, and since their criminalised status justifies mass incarceration and death by the police, criminality appears as a valid category to better understand not only their fate but also their agency. Ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2009 and 2010 in a hyper-impoverished, predominately black slum community, along with weekly visits to a local detention centre in São Paulo, informs the author's analysis of the PCC's controversial languages of resistance and the gendered and racialised outcomes that emerge from their attempts to fend off the state in such topographies of domination.

This article examines attempts to modernise navigation of the Doce River in Brazil during the early nineteenth century. It focuses primarily on the development of a joint Anglo-Brazilian business venture, The Rio Doce Company (1832–49). The failure of the Rio Doce Company cannot be attributed to a single overarching cause, but reflects numerous barriers to economic development including a cumbersome regulatory bureaucracy, capital scarcity, poor technological integration, challenging topography, and Brazilian political resistance to British investment and corporate oversight. This article contributes to the field of business history in the immediate post-independence era, a topic that has received relatively little scholarly attention.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Latin American countries lost a substantial part of their importance in worldwide exports of agricultural and food products. Given this context, the objective of this article is to analyse the determinants of the evolution of agricultural exports from Latin America, paying special attention to the influence of regional processes of economic integration on exports and to their degree of participation in intra-industrial trade. We propose a gravity model with a data panel of total exports and product groups for six Latin American countries towards 39 destinations between 1963 and 2000.

This review essay critically examines the evolution of scholarly literature on Brazil's Partido dos Trabalhadores since the PT's founding in 1980. We periodise the relevant literature into four phases, examining the foundation of the PT, the party's early experience in subnational government, its transformation and moderation in the late 1990s, and finally its experiences in national government since capturing the presidency in 2002. After detailing strengths and weaknesses of this research, we also examine the trajectory of the PT in light of recent comparative work on the so-called ‘left turn’ in Latin America. We conclude by offering an agenda for future research on the PT.