This article explores one of the earliest large-scale uses of biocidal agro-chemicals in Latin America, the United Fruit Company's hand-spraying of its banana plantations to control sigitoka disease from 1938 to 1962. After discussing the environmental context of sigatoka and the early development and implications of the spray technology, the essay focuses on the thousands of workers who applied the chemicals. Using Costa Rica as a case study, it explores workers' sense of the personal costs of their work as well as their ambiguous relationship to the larger banana workers' union movement. Because of differences in ethnicity, age, and masculine status, pesticide workers were not part of the labor movement's militant core, but their participation in strikes gave unions great power for a time. This power, along with workers' individual job actions, forced fundamental changes in the pesticide program, demonstrating the importance of integrating labor into the study of environmental change in agricultural capitalism.

Two radical revolutionary governors of Yucatán, Salvador Alvarado (1915–1918) and Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922–1923), as well as many Yucatecan men and especially women considered prohibition as the key to reform, as was the case in many other regions of Mexico. Scholars, however, have long ignored the crucial role of alcohol in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. This article examines the linkages among prohibition, gender, and politics in Yucatán from the revolution to the eve of the Cardenista era. It also considers the role of alcohol as a lubricant in machine politics.

The U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 radically altered patterns of social and economic development. Examination of census and archival data on land tenure reveals that contrary to generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years from 1898 to 1915. Instead, and despite massive agro-industrial investments by U.S. sugar corporations, more small farmers owned land in 1915 than at the end of the Spanish colonial period in 1898. This surprising revelation contradicts the findings of all previous studies, and it prompts us to research further the social and economic impact of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico in the first decades of the twentieth century.

This essay analyzes the impact of an indigenous counterpublic sphere in contemporary Bolivia, arguing that it functions as an arena of differential consciousness for Aymara intellectuals and activists. In examining the work carried out by the Aymara nongovernmental organization known as the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), the essay highlights this sphere's importance as both a discursive and territorial arena where agency is expressed in the collaborative spirit of community. THOA's work is significant in strategically formulating a methodology of decolonization based on revisionist Andean historiography, territorial demands, and collective political action.

This study discusses the responses of Mexican intellectuals to the 1968 massacre in the Plaza de Tlatelolco. Several published studies and anthologies have covered the poetry, narrative, and essays written on the subject, but no such consideration has been given to the theatrical works written and staged since 1968. Jeanette Malkin's theory on memory-theatre, Pierre Nora's “lieux de mémoire,” and Michel Foucault's concept of countermemories all shed light on how these dramatic works function in a changing Mexico, now moving toward authentic democracy and ready to revive a segment of history suppressed and distorted but never forgotten. Of the many plays commemorating the events of 1968, four that focus on the process of memory are analyzed in this essay. Because of the slow democratization of Mexico, the growing maturity of former participants and witnesses, and the postmodern craving for testimony, the repressed memories of Tlatelolco have not faded into oblivion but continue to inspire the dramatic imagination.

This essay comments on the “new cultural history” of Mexico and the debate recently conducted between critics and protagonists of the genre in the Hispanic American Historical Review. After a scene-setting preamble, the essay consists of three substantive parts. First, in considering what the new cultural history is and what degree of novelty it might claim, the essay identifies and critiques seven features of the genre: its concern for subalterns, agency, political engagement, the reinsertion of politics, mentalities, texts, and interdisciplinary influences. Second, the essay addresses the style and semantics of the new cultural history, in particular its penchant for buzzwords and jargon. Third, the article turns to the major critic of the genre, Stephen Haber, and considers his preferred alternative (so-called scientific history). The essay argues that while Haber's critique is often persuasive, it is also in places misconceived, perhaps exaggerated, and tending toward a narrow positivism. Historiography, the essay unoriginally concludes, need not be falsely polarized between narrow positivism and fashionable postmodernism.

This research note seeks to explain why a large number of Latin American countries have privatized their pension systems in recent years. It argues that the privatization schemes are a response to the severe capital shortages that have plagued their countries intermittently in recent years rather than to the financial problems facing some of the pension systems. The likelihood of pension privatization, I argue, is determined in large part by the vulnerability of countries to capital shortages as well as the influence wielded by international financial institutions, especially the World Bank. Whether such reforms are politically feasible, however, depends largely on the strength of organized labor and the president's degree of control over the legislature. A statistical examination of recent pension policy in Latin America provides support for most of these arguments.