Clientelism is traditionally viewed as a mechanism through which patrons exert control over clients. Drawing on qualitative data from three municipalities in Santiago, Chile, and building on literature that emphasizes client agency, this article explores a variant of clientelism in which clients initiate and enforce clientelistic relationships. The findings suggest that these two forms of clientelism can differently impact a crucial aspect of democracy: horizontal accountability. Client-driven clientelism compels patrons to seek resources for distribution, rendering them susceptible to influence by those who can grant them access to these resources. When patrons are tasked with accountability roles and the resource providers are subject to their oversight (as in the relationship between municipal councilors and mayors), the providers can deter these accountability functions. In contrast, patrons with independent access to resources can better preserve their autonomy.

This article identifies four frames of corruption in the discourse of three leaders of Operation Lava Jato, also known in English as Operation Car Wash, a large-scale Brazilian anticorruption operation (2014–2021). These frames are inequality, hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease. The frames were identified by analyzing a wide set of press interviews, opinion articles, and books by two prosecutors and one judge whose work has revealed scandals involving the state oil company Petrobras. The operation had a major impact on politics and the economy and left a controversial legacy. We noticed a contradiction between one frame invoking judicial activism (inequality) and three frames focusing on specific techniques that appeal to a more conventional view on the judiciary’s role (hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease). Furthermore, even when scholars were still largely positive about the operation, the discourse showed signs of judicial activism. This analysis contributes to the debate on Lava Jato and judicial activism by focusing on discourse rather than action.

Este artículo analiza la inserción de investigadoras y profesoras universitarias de ciencias sociales en Chile desde 1990. Sus objetivos son indagar en la importancia de los movimientos feministas para la emergencia de la perspectiva de género y la apertura de los cuerpos académicos a la presencia femenina, y caracterizar las condiciones laborales de cientistas sociales chilenas. La metodología utilizada fue la revisión sistemática, produciéndose un análisis sociohistórico sobre la transición democrática en su vinculación con los movimientos feministas, transformaciones demográficas y rearticulación de las ciencias sociales. Analizaremos la aseveración de las lógicas neoliberales en universidades (2000–2010) y discutiremos la rearticulación entre las demandas de los movimientos feministas y las críticas al androcentrismo en las ciencias sociales chilenas (2010–2023). La contribución original del texto consiste en poner en diálogo los estudios cuantitativos, cualitativos e históricos, abriendo nuevas vetas interpretativas sobre la desigualdad de género en la ciencia y educación superior en Chile.

O presente artigo tem por objetivo demonstrar as relações transimperiais no extremo sul da América, entre os anos de 1722 e 1726, considerando as alianças das autoridades da América portuguesa, da espanhola, com as do reino e com os homens de negócio. Nessa perspectiva, como metodologia, tratou-se da análise da administração governativa de Pedro António de Vasconcelos, incluindo as indicações que fez para a ocupação de postos na alfândega criada na região, instituição da qual era autoridade máxima. Examinou-se, também, cartas, requerimentos, ordens, relação, verbetes de diversos agentes da administração, plantas e tratados, documentos que foram localizados nos arquivos brasileiros (Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro), argentino (Arquivo Nacional de La Nación Argentina), portugueses (Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino) e espanhol (Arquivo Geral das Indias). Tendo em vista os aspectos observados, a governação na Colônia do Sacramento deve ser entendida como uma forma de garantia de trânsito, circulação de informações e de contatos de diferentes grupos sociais no sul da América.

El proceso de retorno del exilio, iniciado después de la caída del poder de Juan Manuel de Rosas en la Confederación Argentina, llevó a una compleja trama de reinserción profesional. Este artículo examina la incorporación de los proscriptos en los cargos asociados a la formación de las instituciones políticas argentinas. Para ello, recurrimos a una base de datos de 891 casos que utilizamos para seguir los recorridos socioprofesionales antes, durante y después de la emigración. En los principales sitios de asilo en Bolivia, Chile y Uruguay, los emigrados integraron las ocupaciones asociadas a la construcción institucional: desde cargos públicos, en el ejército y hasta profesiones liberales como la abogacía y el periodismo. Postulamos el exilio como experiencia fundadora que permitió la adquisición del saber gubernamental necesario para el desarrollo de las instituciones políticas argentinas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Nuestro estudio es un ejemplo de cómo los fenómenos transnacionales jugaron un papel determinante en la formación de los Estados nación contemporáneos.

La conformación de uniones mixtas entre personas inmigrantes y nativas se ha considerado un elemento central en el proceso de integración social, sobre todo cuando intervienen atributos como la nacionalidad y la identidad étnica. Aunque este tema ha sido ampliamente investigado en otros contextos, ha recibido menos atención en México. Este artículo busca analizar las dimensiones relacionadas con el proyecto migratorio, los discursos sobre la diferencia en México y el efecto del mestizaje sobre la formación de uniones y dinámicas de socialización de las personas. A partir de un acercamiento cualitativo que comprende el análisis de treinta y dos relatos de vida de inmigrantes latinoamericanos residentes en México, se encontró que este tipo de arreglos sociales no se traducen de manera directa en el debilitamiento de fronteras sociales, sino que pueden constituirse, en algunos casos, en elementos de reforzamiento de las barreras que dificultan la integración en distintas esferas de reproducción social.

This essay reviews the following documentaries:

Años luz. Dir. Manuel Abramovich. Prod. Rei Cine, El Deseo, Bananeira Filmes. Argentina-Spain-Brazil, 2017. 72 minutes. Distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Como el cielo después de llover. Dir. Mercedes Gaviria. Prod. Gentil, Invasión Cine. Colombia-Argentina, 2020. 73 minutes. Distributed by Pragda.

El Father como sí mismo. Dir. Mo Scarpelli. Prod. Ardimages, Rake Films, La Faena Films. Venezuela-Italy-United Kingdom-United States, 2020. 105 minutes. Distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Rodaje. Dir. Samuel Moreno Álvarez. Prod. Monociclo Cine, Trópico Atómico Films. Colombia, 2023. 42 minutes.

This article examines questions pertaining to Indigenous people’s citizenship status, the problematic definition of orphanhood, rule of law, and structural racism in Brazilian society. The definition of orphanhood was articulated in a way that allowed for the extralegal abuse and racialized exploitation of labor to continue long past the legal end of Indigenous slavery (1755). Indigenous persons’ legal status, the definition of orphanhood, and guardianship laws worked together to legitimate the permanence of child separation as a means for wealthier Brazilians to get free child labor. The article uncovers the ambiguities in defining Indigenous people’s legal status, making citizenship status a subjective determination contested on a case-by-case basis. With this foreground understanding, the article presents the practice of child separation and the created discourse to legitimize Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race children as unpaid criadas de casa (housemaids).

This article studies a theoretical term for diasporic cultural production proposed by the contemporary Black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. Evaristo’s first novel, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017)—semiautobiographical remembrances of a midcentury favela community during its eviction—exemplifies escrevivência as a theory of the transmission of a culture of resistance to imposed dispossession. The term has been cited in a proliferation of antiracist critiques and studies on marginal subjects in Brazil. My argument is that escrevivência is crucial for Brazilian decolonial thought, given the temporally recursive frame it enunciates, which opens the present and future to prior articulations of Black culture in Brazil. I make three approaches to Becos within escrevivência’s temporal frame, examining literary anteriority (the influence of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s works), narrated marginality (polyphony, embodiment, domestic labor, minor literature), and cultural heritage (the instantiation and circulation of Black language).

This essay reviews the following works:

The Pinochet Generation: The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century. By John R. Bawden. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. Pp. x + 304. US$29.95 paperback. ISBN: 978–0817319281.

La Unidad Popular y la revolución en Chile. By Mario Garcés. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2020. Pp. 340. CL$45,000 cloth. ISBN: 978–956–00–1382–8.

Pinochet desclasificado: Los archivos secretos de Estados Unidos sobre Chile. By Peter Kornbluh. Santiago: Catalonia, 2023. Pp. 529. CL$25,900 paperback. ISBN: 978–956–415–039–0.

Historia de la Unidad Popular: Tiempos de preparación: De los orígenes al 3 de septiembre de 1970, vol. 1. By Jorge Magasich Airola. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2020. Pp. 346. CL$20,000 paperback. ISBN: 978–956–00–1367–5.

Historia de la Unidad Popular: De la elección a la asunción: Los algidos 60 días del 4 de septiembre al 3 de noviembre de 1970, vol. 2. By Jorge Magasich Airola. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2020. Pp. 201. CL$14,400 paperback. ISBN: 978–956–00–1368–2.

Historia de la Unidad Popular: La primavera de la Unidad Popular, vol. 3. By Jorge Magasich Airola. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2023. Pp. 397. CL$42,000 paperback. ISBN: 978–956–00–1725–3.

Historia de la Unidad Popular: De tres a dos bloques, vol. 4. By Jorge Magasich Airola. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2023. Pp. 257. CL$42,000 paperback. ISBN: 978–956–00–1732–1.

El proceso populista: Momento, fenómeno, régimen: El caso de Chile que no fue: Chile (1932–73). By Claudio Riveros Ferrada. Raleigh, NC: Editorial A Contracorriente, 2018. Pp. xii + 364. US$30.00 paperback. ISBN: 978–0990919193.

A History of Chile 1808–2018, 3rd ed. By William F. Sater and Simon Collier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii + 560. US$120.00 cloth and US$39.99 paperback. ISBN: 978–1009170215.

This article examines one of the most violent episodes in Mexico’s recent history—the Corpus Thursday massacre orchestrated by the Mexican government against young students on June 10, 1971. The event marked the beginning of a period known as the guerra sucia (dirty war), marked by the systematic repression of students and dissenting political groups by government forces. The present work advocates for “making history with photographs,” urging readers to explore the historical moment through the narratives presented by three distinct historical actors: the press, independent photographers, and the perspective of power from governmental organizations.

This essay reviews the following works:

Indigenous Struggles for Autonomy: The Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. Edited by Luciano Baracco. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. Pp. vi + 239. $105.00 hardcover, $99.50 e-book. ISBN: 9781498558815.

Aprendizajes del movimiento zapatista: De la insurgencia armada a la autonomía popular. By Lia Pinheiro Barbosa and Peter Michael Rosset. Buenos Aires: CLACSO (Colección En Movimiento); San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), 2023. Pp. 152. Paperback, digital. ISBN: 9789878135694.

Colonialismo, comunidad, y capital: Pensar el despojo, pensar América Latina. Edited by Santiago Bastos Amigo and Edgars Martínez Navarrete. Quito: Religación Press, 2023. Pp. 419. paperback, digital. ISBN: 9789942708007.

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico. By A. S. Dillingham. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 254. $30.00 paperback, $90.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781503627840.

Autonomías y autogobierno en la América diversa. Edited by Miguel González, Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor, José Marimán, Pablo Ortiz-T., and Ritsuko Funako. Quito: Editorial Universitaria Abya-Yala, 2021. Pp. 692. Paperback, digital. ISBN: 9789978105504.

Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash. By Juliet Hooker. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Pp. x + 330. $42.99 paperback; $121.00 hardcover; $40.50 e-book. ISBN: 9781793615527.

Pensar las autonomías: Experiencias de autogestión, poder popular y autonomía. Edited by Alicia Hopkins and César Enrique Pineda. Mexico City: Bajo Tierra, 2021. Pp. 458. Paperback, digital. ISBN: 9786079675172.

El presente artículo aborda los alcances y limitaciones del reconocimiento obtenido por el Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente Chileno en el proceso constituyente iniciado en Chile luego de la revuelta social de 2019 y, particularmente, en las deliberaciones de la Convención Constitucional que sesionó entre 2021 y 2022. Además de analizar la presentación y votación de normas relacionadas con el Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente, el principal foco está puesto en los discursos de los/as convencionales constituyentes relacionados con dichas normas. Mediante un análisis crítico del discurso, se identifican tres ejes discursivos que enmarcaron el apoyo o rechazo de iniciativas en torno al reconocimiento afrodescendiente, vinculados al significado de la categoría jurídica de “pueblo tribal”, a la cuestión de la preexistencia y a la extranjerización. El artículo concluye con una discusión de las posturas adoptadas por diferentes sectores de la Convención, identificando algunos imaginarios que comportaron límites para la inclusión del pueblo afrochileno en la propuesta constitucional.

Este artículo teoriza las relaciones entre la ciudadanía y el Estado ecuatoriano durante el primer año y medio de la pandemia COVID-19. Basado en una metodología cualitativa de entrevistas, las perspectivas de los participantes revelan relaciones contradictorias con el gobierno características de los estados de seguridad neoliberales, pero también de patrones (pos)coloniales persistentes de exclusión racista y clasista: por un lado, un sentido de abandono del Estado, particularmente en salud pública y educación; y por otro lado, la fuerza represiva del Estado en su uso de medidas militares y policiales y de estados de excepción. Proponemos el término estado disperso para referirnos a estas tendencias opuestas de simultánea ausencia y presencia estatal. Argumentamos que las respuestas ciudadanas a la ausencia estatal incluyen cierta aceptación del retorno de las funciones educativas y sanitarias a comunidades, hogares e individuos, provocando de todas maneras nuevas formas de adaptación y creatividad cultural. En cuanto a la presencia represiva del Estado, los participantes expresaron apoyo considerable hacia medidas estatales autoritarias, frecuentemente justificadas por discursos esencialistas sobre el carácter de la ciudadanía nacional.

Fuel subsidies have been an enduring policy in Ecuador’s political and economic history. Given their lack of targeting and high opportunity cost, they have been amply criticized. As of 2017, the Ecuadorian government started a budget consolidation plan that so far has involved seven reforms to subsidies policy in less than seven years. In late 2019, in response to social unrest motivated by a temporal elimination of fuel subsidies, the government pledged to study new targeting mechanisms for this policy to mitigate the impact on the most vulnerable sectors. This work seeks to contribute to that effort by evaluating the macroeconomic effects of these subsidies and serving as a guideline for targeting. A computable general equilibrium model is used to assess counterfactual scenarios. The results suggest that by implementing progressiveness and productive linkage criteria, targeting household final consumption and intermediate consumption is a feasible way to reduce the reforms’ negative effects.

This article analyzes the urbanization and privatization of communal lands (ejidos) in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, via a computer vision model that utilizes Google Street View (GSV) and Geographic Information System (GIS) imagery. Our innovative methodology reveals how processes of ejidal urbanization in Mexico’s northern borderlands contributed to the rise of multinational factories (maquiladoras) and geographies of inequality and violence. Past scholarship on the (d)evolution of ejidal land tenure details how periurban ejidal lands throughout Mexico were often sites of impoverishment and a lack of investment, featuring informal settlement and rapid or chaotic urbanization following the country’s 1960 urban turn. Through its use of novel sources and methods, this article demonstrates that the urbanization process in Juárez’s principal periurban ejidos diverged from this classic model in specific ways. By combining conventional historical sources with visual data like GSV and GIS imagery, Juárez’s former and current ejidal landscapes reveal high levels of investment, formal planning, and infrastructure. We argue that Juárez’s distinctive physical, political, and economic geographies shaped the overwhelmingly industrial, private, and invested character of the city’s (former and current) periurban ejidal lands. This process occurred via a globalized modernization regime that forged disparate landscapes of investment and inequality beginning in the 1950s.

This essay reviews the following works:

The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico Revisited. By Amílcar Antonio Barreto. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020, Pp. xii + 248. $80.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781683401131.

Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the US Constitution, and Empire. By Sam Erman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, Pp. xv + 275. $30.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781108233866.

Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms. By Ismael García-Colón. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020, Pp. xvii + 326. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520325791.

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building: National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897–1940. By Naida García-Crespo. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University, 2019, Pp. ix + 226. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781684481170.

Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. By Marisol Lebrón. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019, Pp. xv + 301. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520300170.

Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism. By Margaret M. Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023, Pp. vii + 298. $32.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469674056.

Studies of fatherhood in Latin America demonstrate an uneven shift from traditional, patriarchal fatherhood to a more reflexive version that incorporates elements of active, relational fatherhood. This hybrid fatherhood emerged from the transition of Fordism to flexible accumulation, a transformation that coincided with massive migration from Central Mexico to the United States. Migration scholars have demonstrated the fluidity of masculine identities, men’s strategies to father across borders, and how US immigration enforcement shapes gendered subjectivities and power relations in transnational families. Building off these insights, we examine how return migrant men in rural central Mexico navigated changing meanings and practices of fatherhood. Their hybrid strategies reflect the inherent contradictions of a border regime that limited circular migration to the United States and their interest in maintaining close emotional attachments to children. Transnational fathers’ connections to reproduction reveal another way that affect articulates with capital accumulation and borders.

In 2013, people in Michoacán and Guerrero, especially from rural areas, armed themselves against criminal cartels. Although their movements emerged from comparable contexts, their leaders and organizational forms differed in ways that affected their tactics and targets, as well as the timing of de-escalation. Whereas Guerrero’s leaders understood their struggle as defensive, Michoacán’s leaders were businessmen who saw themselves engaged in an offensive campaign. This partly explains why fatalities were greater there than in Guerrero. I further demonstrate that movement fragmentation led to lethal violence, and their organizational forms also contributed to dynamics of escalation or de-escalation in ways not fully appreciated by scholars. Specifically, the organizational form of Michoacán’s patron-sponsored autodefensas made them more vulnerable to lethal violence than were Guerrero’s community-sponsored organizations.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a literary revival in the Indigenous languages of the region known canonically as “Latin America.” Across this varied corpus, a major theme is the cultural significance of maize. This article compares the depiction of maize in four bilingual poems, each written in a different Indigenous language alongside Spanish: Nahuatl (Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez), Yucatec Maya (María Dolores Dzul Barboza), Central Quechua (César Vargas Arce), and Southern Quechua (Emilio Corrales). Through close textual analysis and by recourse to theoretical perspectives such as “literary cartography,” the “textual continuum,” “deep mapping,” and “trans-indigeneity,” the article argues that each poem communicates culturally specific ways of understanding geography that, when set in dialogue, challenge hegemonic definitions of the Western Hemisphere such as North, South, or Latin “America.” Rather, the poems in combination weave an interconnected yet multiperspectival cartographic tapestry with maize as the common thread.