Prior to the recent reestablishment of democracy in Brazil, much attention was paid to the sudden proliferation of a variety of collective organizations in civil society that arose in opposition to the military regime. By the end of the 1970s, vocal and widespread opposition had materialized from middle-class professional organizations, elements within the Catholic Church, a relatively independent and combative labor movement centered in the industrial suburbs of São Paulo, and a burgeoning number of neighborhood associations being organized in the major metropolitan areas around the country.

Brazil's constitution (1988) granted municipalities the responsibility of providing social services. Many observers anticipated that this newfound authority would produce policy diversity, as local governments would tailor programs to constituents' needs. Instead, many municipalities chose to replicate programs made famous elsewhere. What explains this diffusion of social policies across Brazil? In particular, what motivates policy makers to emulate “innovative” policies? This study compares three approaches that seek to explain political behavior: political self-interest, ideology, and socialized norms. It draws on two policies, Bolsa Escola, an education program, and Programa Saúde da Família, a family health program, in four exemplary cities, to uncover the mechanisms that led to diffusion. Surprisingly, political incentives, such as electoral competition, cannot explain diffusion. Rather, ideology and socialized norms, transmitted through social networks, drive policy emulation. Diffusion occurs when politicians are ideologically compelled to replicate these programs and when policy specialists seek to demonstrate that they follow professional norms.

In the Andean field, social scientists and historians have only recently begun to ask “how peasants make politics” (Montoya 1986) or how they have “engaged their political worlds” (Stern 1987, 9). In the past, Andean peasants were frequently viewed as living outside politics or as being sporadic players at best on the stage of politics—albeit as reactive or perhaps millenarian rebels aligned against the state. When peasants did make a political showing, they were inevitably represented by the tactically mobile “middle peasantry” or independent smallholders (see Wolf 1969). In contrast, “traditional” estate peasants (service tenantry) were characterized as relatively passive, “prepolitical” victims. Further along the path of historical development and social differentiation, it was generally held, these same “prepolitical” peasants were brought into the post-feudal world of “modern political movements,” where they were soon endowed with “political consciousness” (see Hobsbawm 1959). In probing the ambiguous but historically significant “middle ground” between these extreme and rather static images of “politically modern” peasants and “prepolitical victims,” this article will raise a different set of questions. The middle ground can be found at the intersection of Herrschaft (domination) and Gemeinschaft (community) on the Andean hacienda in capitalist transition. Analysis of this middle ground reveals a highly contested terrain where the idioms of peasants' everyday political agency resound. This resonance from below, however, presents interpretive as well as political ambiguities.

Do Latin American citizens admire the United States for its material wealth and the opportunities this creates for them, or do they revile the United States because of the military and economic threat it has historically posed? Both narratives have a strong presence in Latin American societies, and much scholarship on mass anti-Americanism in the region portrays the dominant narrative as one of the United States as threat. In this article, we consult surveys from contemporary Latin America and find that various forms of ongoing economic exchange with the United States—trade, aid, migration, and remittances—are the primary influence on mass perception of the northern hegemon and actually promote goodwill, rather than bitterness, toward the United States. Moreover, we demonstrate that the most powerful channel through which economic exchange does so is consumption: inflows of US imports boost pro-American sentiment more than do other forms of exchange. In contrast, the legacy of US imperialism has little resonance in mass beliefs about the colossus of the north.

In 2011, Chilean students mobilized in the largest demonstrations since the country’s return to democracy. Students in some other Latin American countries have also carried out mass demonstrations in recent years. What explains students’ participation in mobilizations in Latin America? This article argues that financial grievances generated by neoliberal education policies and the massification of higher education are major causes of student protest participation. In addition, it shows how weak organizational linkages with ruling political parties increase the likelihood of mobilization. The theory is explored through a case study of higher education policy, student-party linkages, and student mobilization in Chile from 1990 to 2011. A statistical analysis of a survey of Chilean students demonstrates that a working-class background, using debt to finance education, and weak programmatic connections to parties in power are associated with higher levels of protest participation.

The 1970s witnessed an outpouring of research on the Andean cultural tradition sufficient to place Andean studies among the well-established regional subspecialties of anthropology. Among the historic factors converging to produce this abundance was the emergence of a generation of fieldworkers trained by ethnohistorians such as John Murra, John Rowe, Herman Trimborn, and R. T. Zuidema. Their understanding of historical and intellectual activity in past Andean communities made it possible, even in the heyday of development theories, to appreciate the modern Andean tradition as an active and creative rather than merely resistant presence. At the same time, events within the Andean republics called forth new interest in the indigenous tradition. In Peru the Velasco regime (1968–75), with its far-reaching intervention into rural institutions, received both support and criticism from those whose knowledge of the Quechua countryside seemed suddenly valuable. In Ecuador the post-1974 oil boom awakened hope for a more “integrated” national state, thereby provoking debate (as yet inconclusive) between pluralist and assimilationist approaches to the problems of the multiethnic highlands. In all the Andean countries regional and national research institutions with periodicals and monographs of their own took form. Generally outside universities, and sometimes with support from sectors of the Catholic Church increasingly open to the study of local belief, they produced distinctive schools of thought fruitfully different from the academic tradition proper. Regional meetings such as the Congresos del Hombre Andino indicated the coalescence of an Andean field of study across national boundaries. In some places, self-mobilization of Andean communities and experimentation with bilingual media and institutions raised hopes for a definition of the Andean situation from the Andean side, a definition not precast in terms familiar to the Hispanic-oriented outsider.

Political parties are crucial for democratic politics; thus, the growing incidence of party and party system failure raises questions about the health of representative democracy the world over. This article examines the collapse of the Venezuelan party system, arguably one of the most institutionalized party systems in Latin America, by examining the individual-level basis behind the exodus of partisans from the traditional parties. Multinomial logit analysis of partisan identification in 1998, the pivotal moment of the system’s complete collapse, indicates that people left the old system and began to support new parties because the traditional parties failed to incorporate and give voice to important ideas and interests in society while viable alternatives emerged to fill this void in representation.

For more than a century, the Dominican sugar industry has hosted seasonal immigrations of neighboring Caribbean islanders as harvest laborers (most recently, Haitians). This migrant labor system is fully comparable to systems of labor control after slavery in other parts of the Caribbean. But the regional historical trend toward more liberal labor relations in commercial agriculture seems largely to have been reversed in the case of Dominican sugar. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the recruitment and employment of harvest labor changed from something resembling free wage labor into a government-managed system of semicoerced exploitation. Processes of state formation in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are crucial in explaining this transformation. Fuller understanding of historical change in the case at hand is afforded by broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the direct confrontation between labor and estate owners and by recognizing that governments and their agents have not always acted in accordance with private agro-industrial interests.

A decade ago, the study of pidgin and creole languages was highly compartmentalized. Very few linguists dealt with both pidgins and creoles. Few students of creole English were aware of current studies in other widely separated geographical areas, even of studies of the same language (e.g., Chinese pidgin English, Hawaiian English, Jamaican creole, and West African Krio). This compartmentalization is now rapidly breaking down. Linguists now view pidgins and creoles as two phases, perhaps even as only two aspects, of the same linguistic process. The geographical and interlingual barriers have so eroded that although a linguist may think of himself as primarily a Caribbeanist or a French creolist, he can no longer ignore work in other areas and other languages. Students of Haitian French and of Trinidadian English realize that they are dealing not with similar linguistic problems, but with the same linguistic problem. There is an increasing tendency to speak not of creoles but of creole.

To what extent has the Argentine party system been polarized along class lines? The political historiography gives mixed and contradictory answers to this question. We explore the social bases of Argentina's political parties using an original database, the most comprehensive database of Argentine elections yet assembled, and new methods of ecological inference that yield more reliable results than previous analyses. We identify two distinct party systems, one in place between 1912 and 1940, the other emerging after 1946. The first party system was not consistently class based, but the second was, with the Radical Party representing the middle classes and the Peronists, workers and the poor. Still, there were important exceptions. Lower-class support for the Peronists, as proxied by literacy rates, declined during Perón's exile, which implies that the party had trouble mobilizing lower-class illiterate voters. Since the return to democracy in 1983, class polarization has again found some expression in the party system.

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.

This article examines the symbolic transformations and material consequences of an irrigation development project designed to empower indigenous peoples in Cañar, Ecuador. It argues that the project deepened market society and reproduced colonialism more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but indigenous people found ways to appropriate project resources and embed the market in alternative principles of social life. Market society deepened through the neoliberal hegemony of international development policy and through the indigenous movement's incorporation of market rationalities. Colonialism recurred through hierarchical representations of knowledge and skills reminiscent of long-standing stereotypes of natives, which local indigenous leaders internalized. Both processes unfolded through constructions of value and acts of evaluation. The gap between the market ideal communicated in the irrigation development project and the conditions of actually existing markets that local indigenous people engaged after project closure limited the concrete empowerment of indigenous peoples.

Latin America has long provided most of the world's coffee. At the same time, dependence on coffee exports has profoundly affected many Latin American countries. This research note will analyze the relationship between primary-commodity exporting and development by means of a case study of attempts by Latin American countries to industrialize their exports by exporting instant coffee rather than green coffee beans. A commodity-chain approach will be used to explain how the initiatives of Latin American states and private firms have responded to and changed the structure of the global system of producing instant coffee. Three Latin American countries—Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador—have become significant exporters of instant coffee, but the benefits they have realized from this effort have been limited by the control exercised by transnational corporations over the global production system.

Although there exists a significant body of literature documenting the under-representation of black Cubans in the island's most important governing institutions throughout the forty-four years of Fidel Castro's rule, these analyses have emphasized limited access to political power as the sole factor responsible for this state of affairs. However, this comprehensive analysis contends that with the aging of the Cuban Revolution, other factors such as low holdover and high replacement rates for blacks during periodic reshuffling of the political elite have become crucial, albeit unacknowledged, explanatory variables for the paucity of blacks among the country's leadership. An important determinant for this pattern is the existence of inter- and intra-institutional stratification among blacks, the reasons for which remain unknown. Nonetheless, the presence of this factor increases the vulnerability of nonwhites as decisions are made about which individuals should be retained or replaced in key government institutions.

This Paper Analyzes Family and Kinship Patterns in Latin America Among distinct socio-economic groups in urban and rural settings. The literature on which the analysis rests is also critically examined. Much of the focus is on those aspects of the material which deal with extended family (parentesco) relations and with fictive kinship (compadrazgo) ties; less attention is given to studies and components of the nuclear family. The central theme developed in the essay is that familial ties and the institution of fictive kinship are not breaking down under the impact of modernization, despite theories and interpretations of urbanization and industrialization which maintain that the opposite is true. Our position and findings on his matter are summarized in the conclusion.

Chile es uno de los países con mayor concentración del ingreso a nivel mundial. Dada la relación entre alta desigualdad económica y patrones de estratificación social, en tal contexto se esperaría una alta dispersión de las percepciones respecto del propio estatus o estatus social subjetivo. Sin embargo, la evidencia internacional señala una marcada tendencia hacia la media del estatus subjetivo, es decir, existirían distorsiones del estatus subjetivo respecto del estatus objetivo. La presente investigación intenta profundizar en este aspecto para el caso de Chile, particularmente en la relación entre estatus socioeconómico, clase social y estatus subjetivo. Los datos a analizar corresponden al módulo de desigualdad económica de la encuesta International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), en su versión del año 2009 para Chile. Los resultados indican una marcada tendencia en la población hacia la media del estatus subjetivo, principalmente de parte de aquellos con mayor estatus objetivo.

This article uses an interdisciplinary approach to present and analyze information on the smallest manifestations of popular culture in Latin American countries: postage stamps. The disciplines involved are semiotics (the linguistic study of signs), history, politics (internal and international), and popular culture. The project studies how these postage stamps carry significant messages, including expressions of nationalism, politics (national and international), propaganda, and cultural identity. The article begins with an overview of Latin American postage stamps, with an emphasis on internal and international politics. The latter category focuses on several cases of inter-country tension in which postage stamps have played a role.

Most studies of civil society in Latin America have focused on urban social and political actors. In the Ecuadorian Andes, however, civil society has crystallized around the institutions of indigenous rural community that developed historically in opposition to white-meztizo urban administrative centers. This article explores the evolution of indigenous communal institutions in relation to local government and national politics by focusing on the canton of Otavalo in northern Ecuador. It is argued here that over the past thirty years, Andean communities in Ecuador have played an important role in the national processes of democratization and decentralization.