This article shows how vulnerable communities use Mexico's Day of the Dead for social justice activism. Activists sustain what I call the ‘political afterlives’ of their victims through street altars and dark humour. I analyse this as a ‘necrosocial repertoire of contention’. The Day of the Dead can play an important role in human rights advocacy by insisting that the marginalised dead be honoured and cared for. However, disappeared people pose a challenge to Mexico's horizontal, or popular, ethics of commemoration and illustrate what I call ‘necrotaboos’, with new problems for the nation's inclusive spirit of commemorating the dead.

This article draws on an international assemblage of sources to recover the history of the involvement of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN) in the Cuban missile crisis. It argues that, through the mechanisms of the OAS and the UN, Latin American citizens and officials helped shape the peaceful outcome of the crisis. This article challenges dismissive portrayals of both Latin American countries and multilateral organisations and, in so doing, joins the growing literature on how supposedly weak Latin American countries have used international organisations to influence world affairs.

Across Latin America, there continues to be strong resistance to the claim that racism plays a role in the production of urban space. Deemed antipatriotic, this issue remains widely unaddressed in urban planning and geography. Based on qualitative research in Bogotá and secondary literature on other Latin American cities, this article explores the afterlife of mestizaje (racial mixture) as a racial–colonial project from the viewpoint of its materialisation in the city and society–space relations. In particular, it illustrates how racism in the city is transfigured as ‘always something else’ (e.g., culture, class, regionalism, displacement) through a variety of normative, discursive and operational devices. Thus, the article confronts the need to divest from the racial hegemony of mestizaje in urban planning and geography, suggesting that it is hindering the path towards more equitable urban futures.

Southern and central regions of Argentina moved from being relatively poor in the sixteenth century to being the richest in the country today. Although there is some evidence of this reversal, the process of regional growth in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century is, in the main, unknown. In this paper, we present an estimation of the GDPs of Argentina's 25 provinces in 1914: this is the first consistent estimation of this variable for any period before the 1950s. Our results confirm that in 1914 the city of Buenos Aires and some districts in Patagonia had the highest per capita GDP, and a comparison with the available data for 1953 shows strong persistence in incomes per capita in this period; sectoral analysis of provincial GDPs suggests that growth in the leading districts was driven by economies of agglomeration in some cases and land abundance in others.

Controversy and intrigue greeted Charlie Chaplin's new film, The Great Dictator, when it arrived in Latin American theatres in early 1941. With tear gas, Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic insults, pro-Axis factions from Mexico to Argentina protested against the Hollywood star's ridicule of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. At an important Good Neighbour moment, the film's tumultuous Latin American circulation and exhibition exposed fault lines in hemispheric solidarity by subverting US efforts to recruit allies in the region and threatened President Roosevelt's support for European intervention at home. Down south, heated public debates over the film trained a harsh light on Latin American leaders’ own anti-democratic impulses and raised questions about constitutionality within unequal societies. This article moves beyond film as text to examine the Chaplin picture as a cultural object and agent that exposed the limits of US imperialism and Latin American resistance strategies more broadly.

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 article provides an analysis of royalist strategy in the viceroyalty of Peru during the four years between the arrival of José de San Martín's invasion force in September 1820 and the battle of Ayacucho of December 1824. It pays particular attention to royalist policy from July 1821, when viceroy José de la Serna evacuated Lima, the viceregal capital, leaving the city open to San Martín, who declared independence there on 28 July. Its focus differs, therefore, from that of most previous commentators on Peru's transition to independence, who have tended to neglect royalist policy and activity during these crucial final years in favour of a concentration upon the activities of San Martín, Antonio José de Sucre, Simón Bolívar and their Peruvian allies. The article begins with a brief contextual discussion of the historiography of Peruvian independence and subsequently analyses the main features of historical developments in the viceroyalty in the period 1810–20. Following substantive discussion of the period 1820–4, it concludes with observations on the historical legacy in Peru of the royalists' elevation of the city of Cusco to the status of viceregal capital in 1822–4.

Whilst much illuminating research has been conducted into early British diplomatic and commercial activity in the River Plate, few scholars have yet focused upon the lives of individual settlers in any detail. The present article moves some way towards redressing this imbalance through the study of the Gibsons, a prominent Argentine-Scottish family with pioneering interests in commerce and sheep breeding. The analysis gives special weight to letters exchanged by the brothers Robert and George Gibson during the late 1830s, casting light upon the incomers' perspective of political turbulence as dissident forces fought to depose the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas.

Rescates (ransoms) consisted of the repurchase by Spanish and Spanish American merchants of ships and cargoes taken as prizes during wartime and sold in the British West Indies. This is the first detailed study of the subject, drawing on archives in Britain, Spain and the Americas. It is argued that rescates typified a broader range of legal ruses designed to protect Anglo-Spanish trade in the Americas from both wartime disruption and customs interference. As a mechanism for the legal protection of commerce promoted by both the British and the Spaniards, rescates enjoyed considerable success during the war that commenced in 1796, especially with respect to trade between the British ports in the Caribbean, Cuba and Mexico. They thus played a key role in the strong and sustained growth which characterised trade between the British and Spanish empires during these years.