This article examines the connections between financing, reputation, and industrial development in Argentina. It analyzes five leading merchant finance groups through a newly created data set of 1,282 directors and shareholders of fifty-nine manufacturing companies across ten sectors from 1890 to 1930. Merchant finance groups formed to pool capital for manufacturing investment in the absence of developed domestic banking institutions and equity markets. The leading five groups under study secured access to diverse sources of capital by developing personal connections and by their reputations. Although these five groups successfully adapted to an environment that lacked efficient credit markets, most manufacturers' companies were capital-starved due to the lack of industrial credit. Insufficient industrial credit resulted in dominant firms owned by a few merchant finance groups controlling the noncompetitive manufacturing sector.

Asking who “really” speaks and acts for indigenous people is an increasingly important political question in Latin America. This article explores how an “unlikely” Evangelical Protestant Indian organization (FEINE, the Ecuadorian Evangelical Indigenous Federation) and a seemingly more “authentic” Bolivian indigenous federation of communities claiming pre-Columbian authority structures (CONAMAQ, the National Council of Markas and Ayllus of Qollasuyo) have grown in representational strength, or the ability to convince others that they speak for specific constituencies. Through this historically and ethnographically based comparative political study, I argue that indigenous representation is produced across scales, both from “below” (as communities and leaders organize and mobilize) as well as from “above” (as elites and opportunity structures favor some groups over others). FEINE and CONAMAQ present mirror images of the ways in which indigenous people negotiate local-global networks and discourses: FEINE Indianized Protestant Evangelicalism while CONAMAQ transnationalized local ayllu authority structures. This multi-scale analysis suggests that how Indians are spoken about transnationally shapes who gets to speak for Indians locally.

Major social and economic changes in Latin America brought about by adoption of the neoliberal model of development have been documented in the recent research literature. We ask to what extent such changes have affected the character of popular collective mobilizations in major cities of the region. We present data from six recent field studies in major Latin American cities that identify goals pursued by contemporary popular movements and organizations and the strategies they adopt to achieve them. These studies provide an overview of how urban society has reacted to the constraints, crises, and opportunities brought about by the new model of development and cast light on what has changed and what remains the same in determinants of popular collective demand-making in major metropolitan areas. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

Women make upadisproportionate shareoftheworld's poor, andLatin America is noexception to this trend. Nevertheless, veryfew studiesofsocial policy intheregion haveinvestigated whythegendered character ofwelfare provisionvariesacrosscountries. Thisarticleaddresses thatquestion throughacomparativehistoricalanalysisofChileandUruguayandconcludes thatvariation in thegendered natureofeach state's social policy regime resultedfromatwo-step process. Inthefirst stage,female laborforce participation, themobilizing capacityofwomen, andpolicy legacies differentiated thet7.UO countries, placing Chile onaless equitable trajectory thanUruguay. These differences were thenmagnifiedduringeach state's experience underauthoritarian rule.

Real wages describe changes in the material standard of living of wage earners. This article reviews the national experience of Mexico through the twentieth century, surveying more than thirty studies from the late Porfiriato to the opening of the twenty-first century. The data suggest that real wages follow a long-term cyclical pattern of alternate periods of declining and rising wages. As a consequence, twentieth-century Mexico was not kind to workers because the gains of one period seem to be offset by falls in the next. Wage trends in Mexico and the rest of Latin America seemed to follow similar paths, except during the years following Mexico's revolution, when a new labor regime especially benefited the country's wage earners. Following a significant downturn in the 1940s, workers in Mexico and Latin America experienced a favorable period of income growth during the postwar boom. The debt crisis of the 1980s induced a long decline that continued through the early years of globalization.

In the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution sparked great interest in Latin America throughout the United States. Not coincidentally, the promotion and translation of literature from Latin America increased dramatically during this period. This essay explores the interplay of market and political forces in the promotion of Latin American literature in the United States through an examination of two programs funded by Rockefeller family philanthropies during the 1960s and 1970s: a translation subsidy program supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Association of American University Presses; and the Translation Program of the Center for Inter-American Relations, which was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. I trace both programs' efforts at working the U.S. market to promote works and authors. I also study the political motivations fostering these efforts, exploring the extent to which these programs both sought to promote cross-cultural understanding and tried to further U.S. foreign policy interests.

La reforma del servicio civil de 1991/92 creó en Argentina una burocracia profesional (en el clásico sentido “weberiano”) a escala relativamente masiva para países de América Latina. En la presente nota se exponen resultados de una investigación empírica que conciernen a la situación del servicio público federal argentino, diez años después de la reforma. Basada en entrevistas con informantes claves, así como también en estadísticas y documentos oficiales, esta nota de investigación describe, en primer lugar, la muy baja influencia de los nuevos funcionarios de carrera sobre decisiones de política pública. En segundo lugar, se examinan las dificultades que tienen los designados políticos de alto nivel para trabajar con funcionarios profesionales permanentes, y se incluye una breve retrospectiva de la problemática relación entre los dos grupos desde la democratización de 1983. Se presenta, finalmente, un análisis estadístico de la burocracia federal argentina, con el propósito de medir el impacto numérico del nuevo servicio civil de carrera sobre la estructura burocrática general, esto es, el nivel de profesionalismo global alcanzado mediante la reforma de 1991/92.

Biglaiser and DeRouen (2006)1 have provided a thorough examination of the effects of different types of economic reforms on flows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Their main finding—that economic reforms were generally unsuccessful in generating inflows of FDI during the time series—will undoubtedly generate further discussion about neoliberalism in Latin America. Although the authors' focus is on economic reform, they also devote considerable attention to the significance of “good governance” variables, including the effects of political regime type. Biglaiser and DeRouen's (2006) paper adds to a growing number of studies that have produced conflicting findings regarding the effects of regime type and/or rights and liberties on FDI.2 Given the conflicting results in the literature, and the policy significance of the issue, a brief commentary on the question of regime type, rights, and FDI in Latin America (and in other developing areas) is warranted.