This article argues that one of the most important contributions of Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra is its rewriting of the modern subject. Through its metafictional dimension, the novel seeks to change the legacy of the recoding of subjectivities begun in the Spanish Golden Age. More specifically, it is through the construction of its characters and the way in which the latter depend on, and grow out of, the structure of the novel that Fuentes revises modern individualist conceptions of the subject. Although critics have tended to privilege the novel's realm of myth (understood as transcendent and timeless), this reading depends on the novel's evocation of a Marxist narrative of culture as struggle driven that Carlos Fuentes never loses from sight. The novel's structure arguably promotes a diachronic understanding of history into which both the mythic and material strands feed. Myth, in this reading, is a consciously embraced worldview that grounds, and dialectically informs, this vision of history rather than shying away from it.

The article aims to identify the factors behind a series of center-left electoral victories in the 2002 and 2006 state elections, which indicate the decay of state political machines in Brazil's poorest regions. It is argued that vertical competition between the federal and state governments in the provision of public policies works as a constraint on state bosses' strategies of political control. The withering of state political machines may be understood as an indirect consequence of the national political shifts represented by the rise of Brazil's most important left-wing organization—the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores)—to the presidency in 2002 and 2006. Social and economic policies implemented by the federal government under PT rule undermined subnational patron-client networks by improving the life conditions of the poorest sections of the electorate. The article explores the interlinking of national and subnational electoral dynamics by developing statistical models for state- and municipal-level data.

O índice de volatilidade eleitoral tem sido usado como um dos principais indicadores de institucionalização dos sistemas partidários em países de democracia recente. Contudo, os estudos comparados usualmente analisam esse índice num nível de agregação dos dados muito elevado, avaliando sua variação com base nas médias nacionais. Sob tal perspectiva, nosso objetivo é analisar a volatilidade eleitoral brasileira tomando os 27 entes federativos como unidade de agregação dos dados eleitorais para a Câmara dos Deputados. Na primeira parte do artigo, mostramos que há grande variabilidade no índice entre os estados e entre as sucessivas eleições; na segunda parte, realizamos um teste estatístico do impacto explicativo de variáveis políticas, econômicas e sociais na variação da volatilidade eleitoral em duas dimensões: a temporal (entre as eleições) e a espacial (entre os estados). Os resultados mostram a importância de algumas variáveis políticas na explicação da variação da volatilidade eleitoral brasileira.

El intenso proceso de descentralización de algunas políticas sociales observado en Brasil desde la década de 1980 no ha dado lugar a la disminución de las desigualdades regionales en términos de la atención de las necesidades locales por dichas políticas. Por otra parte, en los últimos años, el éxito del programa Bolsa Familía—de gestión centralizada y cobertura focalizada en los mas pobres—ha despertado el interés por valorar qué estrategia de suministro resulta capaz de ofrecer los resultados más eficientes en términos de la relación gasto-necesidad. El examen de las políticas sociales con base en dos dimensiones centrales (centralización-descentralización y universalización-focalización) ha revelado que tanto la centralización como lafocalización presentan mejores resultados que la descentralización y universalización.

Global health-care models for developing countries urge integration of traditional medicine with Western biomedicine. This article shows how residents of a remote Peruvian village negotiate among biomedicine, traditional medicine, lay indigenous medicine, and local knowledge of medicinal plants. Villagers' health-care choices reveal that they often resort to medicinal plants before modern pharmaceuticals. Their discourses show that these choices reflect social and cultural processes beyond the medical: the revitalization of Andean identity, the conflictual relationship that villagers have with modernity, and the desire to evade or subvert the power that Western medicine has over them. This article elaborates the concept of the healthscape as an individual's subjective vision of a landscape's medical resources and institutions, limited by cost and accessibility and shaped by the uneasy coexistence of Western and indigenous medical systems.

Although much has been written on civil society participation in the formulation and monitoring of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), very little systematic and scientific evidence exists on the kind of organizations that participate and the elements that explain their involvement in these processes. This article considers one country case, Honduras, for which survey data were gathered from 101 civil society organizations (CSOs) in 2006. This study examines the characteristics these organizations display which explain (non)participation in the next participatory round of the PRSPs. The findings challenge some of the by now widely accepted ideas relating to the kinds of organizations involved in PRSP processes. The idea that predominantly urban-based, highly professional, well-funded, donor-bred-and-fed nongovernmental organizations participate is too blunt. The Honduran case shows that the players in participative processes are more diversified than much of the current literature on PRSPs suggests.

In-depth interviews and a three-wave longitudinal study of workers in international export-processing plants (maquiladoras, referred to here as maquilas) of the central highlands of Guatemala were conducted to explore the effects of labor turnover on individuals and households. The data suggest a framework in which labor conditions and sources of support at home are linked to turnover of youths working in the maquila. Turnover in the study is associated with decreased input into important household decisions and a lowered sense of adjustment and life satisfaction. Despite this, turnover is often volitional, representing a form of resistance and response on the part of workers to adverse working conditions in the factories. The study reveals the complex dynamics underlying both involuntary and voluntary turnover in the maquilas.

This article discusses the sustained and increasingly institutionalized transnational practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their hometowns in Mexico. Far from being a strictly private transnational practice, migrants' desire for a posthumous return and burial in their homelands is popularly expressed in the memories, music, and everyday exchanges of the Mexican diaspora. Drawing on transnational ethnographic research in Los Angeles, California, and Zacatecas, Mexico, this article documents how the Mexican state has institutionalized this process at the transnational, national, state, and municipal levels of governance. Last, the article discusses the role of migrant family and social networks in these repatriations. The goals of this article are to provide a preliminary cultural and institutional understanding of the practice of repatriating cadavers from the United States to Mexico and to discuss the implications of this process for the scholarly debate on migrant transnationalism.