In many Latin American countries, indigenous populations have recently exhibited rapid growth. Many scholars recognize that this indigenous population resurgence is due to a combination of demographic processes, such as births, deaths, and migration, as well as changing racial-ethnic identities. However, there is little quantitative data verifying the relative importance of these two types of processes for indigenous population growth. We seek to fill this gap by quantifying the relative contribution of both mechanisms in Brazil's indigenous population resurgence. Our findings indicate that during the 1990s, race-ethnic reclassification was more important than demographic processes. This varied regionally, in that identity change was most important in northeastern and southeastern Brazil. These findings bear implications regarding indigenous movements, identity politics, and prospective indigenous population growth in Brazil and elsewhere.

The Catholic Church of Peru supported the use of oral contraceptives between 1967 and 1976, believing that doctrine was compatible with controlling one's fertility. Yet the church did not treat fertility control only as a means to limit births or as an individual prerogative. Rather, it framed distribution of the pill within an education plan to promote the duties of responsible parenting. Joseph Kerrins, a U.S. Catholic physician, began the program in a poor area of Lima. By the late 1970s, the program operated in nineteen parishes. The program thrived even after the 1968 encyclical De Humanae Vitae, thanks to the support of priests, Peruvian and U.S. government agencies, physicians, and users of the program's services. Catholic family planning has been a more pragmatic and creative enterprise than hitherto believed. This article explores these developments within the context of the cold war and the transformations of the Catholic Church in 1960s Latin America.

Rio de Janeiro's bailes funk, or funk dance parties, with their often intensely violent and aggressively sexualized nature, are fundamental expressions of the culture of the city's favelas, or squatter towns, with tremendous significance for enormous crowds of poor, young people who attend them. This article draws on ethnographic research and participant observation, conducted by the author throughout years of living in the favela of Rocinha, and close readings of funk lyrics to explore the utopian impulse at the core of the baile funk experience, especially in community dances sponsored by gangsters held in the streets of favelas. Like some other cultural expressions of African diaspora communities, these bailes conjure up and sustain a morally and politically charged musical space that joins the young people together, emotionally elevating them above the harsh conditions of their lives into a spiritual state that makes available to them the feeling of living in a better world.

What interests of Latin American women create distinctive attitudes toward justice system equality that differ from those of Latin American men? Building on recent work on general justice system bias and using 2003 Latinobarómetro data, I test this question in three Central American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) using two sets of attitudes toward justice system performance (equal punishment and equal treatment). Women are significantly more likely to believe that the criminal justice system provides unequal treatment before the law than are men, while women and men express the same level of belief that the justice system provides equal punishment. Evidence indicates that women connect unequal treatment to economic factors and follow a conflict model of criminal justice, which posits these attitudinal differences as a function of the group's subordinate position in society.

This article accounts for the role that partisan divisions played in shaping variation in mass preferences for market-oriented policies in Latin America during the 1990s. Most of the existing studies on attitudes toward market reforms have focused on issues such as the timing of reforms, the presence of economic crises, and how economic performance shaped citizens' preferences. Fewer studies have investigated whether partisan cleavages translated into divergent preferences toward market reforms. Were there systematic differences between left- and right-wing voters in their preferences toward market reforms? Did left-wing voters oppose these policies and right-wing voters favor them? Which of these structural transformations—state retrenchment or trade liberalization—witnessed greater mass polarization along partisan lines? This article answers these questions with the use of a mass survey on public opinion about market reforms conducted by Mori International in eleven Latin American countries in 1998.

Throughout the 1980s one of the Reagan administration's most contested foreign policy initiatives was that toward Central America, where it attempted to defeat the Salvadoran guerrillas and overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan's policy was challenged by civil society organizations, whose efforts to undermine support for Reagan's policy came to be known as the Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement (CAPSM). What were the origins of this movement? I argue that previous explorations of the CAPSM's emergence are inadequate because they neglect the role played by Central Americans as purposive actors in the movement's rise and development. This article documents the ways in which Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, both in Central America and in the United States, played crucial roles in this transnational movement's creation and growth.

The transvestite, as a figure that contests both heteronormativity and machismo, has remained in the cinema of Latin America, unlike its literature, a rather unexplored theme. Although some films have attempted to deal with such a figure, they have devoted very little diegetic time either to the process of physical and psychological transformation from man to woman or to showing transvestism as the externalization of the character's self-perceived gender identity. This article aims to show that the lack of on-screen transvestism in Arturo Ripstein's El lugar sin límites (1978), Miguel Barreda's Simón, el gran varón (2002), and Karim Aïnouz's Madame Satã (2002) is caused by a kind of heteronormative filmic fear to depict the fluidity of sexuality beyond the biologically oriented binary man-woman. I suggest that Latin American audiences do not respond positively to transvestitic images (i.e., the cinematic acknowledgment of transvestism) because they transgress the fixity of gender roles within heteronormativity.

Beginning in the 1930s, a new type of song entered American popular music—the so-called “latune,” that is, a tune with a Latin beat and an English-language lyric. Although latunes drew on a variety of genres, what prevailed were Cuban rhythms, and particularly the “rhumba,” an elastic term (unrelated to the Afro-Cuban rumba) that included up-tempo sones as well as languid boleros. At one time or another, many of the best-known American composers—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer—contributed to the latune songbook. In spite of their popularity, however, latunes have elicited little attention, for they have been regarded as vapid, watered-down versions of authentic Latin American music. Arguing that these songs furnish important clues about the United States' absorption of Latin American culture, this essay undertakes a study of the history, features, and principal categories of latunes.

This article treats pre-1959 Cuban cookbooks as interlocutors to see how the struggle to define Cuba's racial and national body can be found in efforts to characterize what goes into that body by setting a close textual analysis of the books alongside an account of their historical context. In examining recipes, visuals, and nonrecipe prose, this article explores how later authors attempt to represent Cuba as white and European by ignoring and trivializing the culinary contributions of nonwhite Cubans and particularly Afro-Cubans, a move that encounters resistance in the ongoing persistence and popularity of Afro-Cuban cuisine. As an interface between political economic processes and personal choice, the author argues that cookbooks act as a site for assertions of racial and national identity in which some authors embarked on a racial project to civilize the consumer by civilizing cuisine via the cookbook, thus illustrating social fissures, tensions, and contradictions that climaxed in the 1959 revolution.