The ethnic-cultural (re)naissance in Chile is currently undergoing an expansion as well as a diversification along lines of minority cultures and gender differentiations. Since the explosion onto the Chilean literary landscape of the bilingual poet Leonel Lienlaf in 1989, Mapuche-Huilliche writers have come into the spotlight of academia, state, and popular culture critics. Younger generations of Huilliche poets are distinguishing themselves through a hybrid, reflexive, and literary expressiveness. In opposition to the poetry that is tied to indigenous cultural institutions, orality, and traditional rural forms of existence, these poets thrive and strive for a pluricultural and complex way of living and expressing themselves. This work explores a selection of poets and their individual circumstances in an attempt to delineate the differences within and between these poets and the more traditional ones, and suggest a greater cultural change that is coming about in south Chile.

There is variation among the Latin American sending countries in the timing, sequence, and form by which they have approved retention-of-nationality laws (dual-citizenship laws) and have extended political rights to their migrants abroad. This variation is the product not only of the characteristics of the migration in each country but also of the specificity of their political and electoral systems and of the historical relationship between the state and its citizens. I focus my analysis on Latin American migration to the United States, which, although not the only destination, has attracted the majority of Latin American migrants and has significantly influenced, with its immigration policies, the policies of Latin American sending countries towards their émigrés.

Interest in defense issues among Latin American politicians has faded with the advent of widespread democratization in the region and the retreat of the armed forces to their barracks. Defense policy is rarely subject to the same level of public scrutiny and debate as other major policy issues faced by the region, such as health, education, and public safety. This is puzzling because by ignoring defense policy, civilian leaders in the region risk ceding authority to their militaries, allowing them a degree of self-management and undermining the consolidation of democratic civilian control of the armed forces. This article explains civilian politicians' inattention to defense as a function of three factors: a historical path that has produced armed forces with limited capabilities that are more often a threat to their own governments than their neighbors; a relatively benign international threat environment in Latin America that makes neglect of defense policy a low-risk proposition; and the low importance that voters assign to the provision of the national defense as either a public or a private good. Under these circumstances, it is rational for most civilian politicians to ignore defense policy and focus their attention instead on coup avoidance.

This essay argues that in the early Porfiriato Mexican officials deftly negotiated the pace and sequencing of the country's reinsertion in the world economy. Despite the government's financial weakness, officials flouted international conventions and obtained the foreign capital necessary to spark growth before settling the foreign debt, in default for more than fifty years. Rather than simply accommodating powerful private financial interests, the government's plans and policies often provoked conflict with its bankers and creditors. However, by employing a wide set of strategies that ranged from manipulating competitors to selectively not enforcing agreements to exploiting nationalist sentiment among local elites, Mexican policymakers preserved their autonomy and advanced a coherent set of policies. In addition to successfully exploiting international capital markets, the Mexican government also successfully maneuvered to establish a more competitive local market. The government's ability to exploit these capital flows, without undermining domestic support, helps explain the regime's early economic growth and political resilience. The findings of this essay extend to the financial realm previous historical scholarship that has noted that the early Porfirian regime enjoyed a surprising degree of autonomy from its economic partners.

I discuss how the chorographic view of landscape in Spanish cartography was at variance with the perspective of terrain represented in Andean mapping media when both traditions converged upon the implementation of the Crown-mandated surveys known as the “Relaciones Geográficas del Peru” (1577–1586). These surveys were collected and transcribed by modern editors for publication. The sole map included in the Relaciones may have been due to the self-interest of the Spanish author. The continued use of Andean media and the art of “memory mapping,” both of precontact origin, may explain why indigenous mappings did not enter the Relaciones record. This memory activity was, and is still, manifested during the ritualized traversing of community-held land boundaries. Therefore, the few extant paper-like mappings had been appended to land-litigation documents. I examine how the visualized route and the naming of topographical features underlie three sixteenth-century mappings and their accompanying judicial accounts (relaciones). These mappings and accounts display the native Andeans' adaptation of precontact place identification practices to Spanish boundary-marking methods. The mappings demonstrate a hybrid cartographic art, which combines manuscript and block print within the pictorial format. In one of the maps the artist-scribes include a relación in Quechua (and its Spanish version), a rare example of this genre in Andean letters. Indigenous cabildo authorities, exemplified by Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, adopted writing practices by recording place names. This activity led to a pan-Andean lexicon of toponymns for judicial purposes. Contemporary ethnographic research on current walkabout customs could further elucidate the genesis of these Colonial Andean mappings and lead to the recovery of other specimens.

This article reports the results of a pioneering and in-depth survey of the research and information-seeking behavior of the student members of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) living in the United States and Puerto Rico. The results suggest that the new generation of Latin Americanists in the universities surveyed are confident in their abilities to carry out research on the region within their respective disciplines. However, most of these students have not received formal instruction by course instructors or librarians on how to carry out their research on Latin America. Use of the Internet as a research resource is popular but has not replaced the use of the library and long-standing research strategies such as footnote-chasing. While the reported use of library electronic resources is very high, awareness of Latin America-specific and electronically-available research tools such as HLAS, HAPI, and LAPTOC is low. The survey is the first step in reassessing the ever-changing needs and research patterns of this cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary group of academic library users and future leaders in Latin American studies.

Though much scholarly attention has been paid to the emergence of female-headed households in Latin America, there is debate over where to place these households within discussions of poverty and resource deprivation. Two issues complicate this debate: first, the lack of multi-resource models in quantitative analyses to fully assess types of resource accumulation, and second, the broad failure for analyses of female-headed households to differentiate between different kinds of female-heads of household.