The ideology of mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America has frequently been seen as involving a process of national homogenisation and of hiding a reality of racist exclusion behind a mask of inclusiveness. This view is challenged here through the argument that mestizaje inherently implies a permanent dimension of national differentiation and that, while exclusion undoubtedly exists in practice, inclusion is more than simply a mask. Case studies drawn from Colombian popular music, Venezuelan popular religion and Brazilian popular Christianity are used to illustrate these arguments, wherein inclusion is understood as a process linked to embodied identities and kinship relations. In a coda, approaches to hybridity that highlight its potential for destabilising essentialisms are analysed.

Through a genealogical analysis of the terms mestizo and mestizaje, this article reveals that these voices are doubly hybrid. On the one hand they house an empirical hybridity, built upon eighteenth and nineteenth century racial taxonomies and according to which ‘mestizos’ are non-indigenous individuals, the result of biological or cultural mixtures. Yet, mestizos’ genealogy starts earlier, when ‘mixture’ denoted transgression of the rule of faith, and its statutes of purity. Within this taxonomic regime mestizos could be, at the same time, indigenous. Apparently dominant, racial theories sustained by scientific knowledge mixed with, (rather than cancel) previous faith based racial taxonomies. ‘Mestizo’ thus houses a conceptual hybridity – the mixture of two classificatory regimes – which reveals subordinate alternatives for mestizo subject positions, including forms of indigeneity.

This article analyses the causes of the disparity in collective rights gained by indigenous and Afro-Latin groups in recent rounds of multicultural citizenship reform in Latin America. Instead of attributing the greater success of indians in winning collective rights to differences in population size, higher levels of indigenous group identity or higher levels of organisation of the indigenous movement, it is argued that the main cause of the disparity is the fact that collective rights are adjudicated on the basis of possessing a distinct group identity defined in cultural or ethnic terms. Indians are generally better positioned than most Afro-Latinos to claim ethnic group identities separate from the national culture and have therefore been more successful in winning collective rights. It is suggested that one of the potentially negative consequences of basing group rights on the assertion of cultural difference is that it might lead indigenous groups and Afro-Latinos to privilege issues of cultural recognition over questions of racial discrimination as bases for political mobilisation in the era of multicultural politics.

In the struggle against racism in Brazil there is a new political actor on the scene: the evangelical black movement. Since the mid-1990s, groups committed to uniting black identity, anti-racism and evangelical theology have rapidly proliferated. This article, applying the analytical terms of political process theory, identifies several key social and political forces that have combined in the past decade to help foster the growth of the movement. The article concludes that the movement has risen on the back of deep and enduring social forces, and argues that it will therefore be increasingly important in the years to come to pay attention to the role evangelical activists play in anti-racist politics in Brazil.

In recent years an ‘ethno-economic’ interpretation of politics in the coffee state of São Paulo in the early twentieth century, associated particularly with the work of Mauricio Font, has gained widespread acceptance. Its claim that state politics in the period was increasingly shaped by a cleavage between a declining traditional coffee aristocracy on the one hand, and a rising, mostly immigrant, smallholding and industrial economy on the other, is challenged here. It is argued, in part on the basis of a re-examination of the sources used by Font, that ideological rather than economic concerns motivated the Liga Nacional, while at county level, in Araras and elsewhere, personal and clientelistic motives continued to shape political loyalties. Finally, the argument that the Partido Democrático was driven primarily by ‘Big Coffee’ reaction to the PRP is shown to be unfounded.

During the last military dictatorship in Argentina, between 350 and 400 citizens who feared for their life managed to find shelter in Israel. This article traces the evolving procedures, institutional mechanisms and routes of escape operated by the Israeli diplomats and representatives stationed in Argentina and the neighbouring countries, against the contradictory background of lack of clear-cut official policies in Israel, the latter's cordial relationships with the military government, and an ethos of helping persecuted Jews evinced by some of those Israelis stationed in Argentina. In parallel, the article presents the social and political background of those who chose to appeal for Israeli help and finds – on the basis of a specially designed database covering between fifty-seven and sixty-five per cent of the fleeing individuals – that many were not associated with Israel or Zionism and a minority were not Jews, as defined by religious criteria or even by broader criteria. The broader significance of these contradictory trends is discussed.