In 1972 James Lockhart summarized for LARR the state of social history research on colonial Latin America and proposed far-reaching methodological innovations. The time is ripe for another assessment if only because of the prolific ongoing research. But this very luxuriance hinders an overview of the whole field. Let me therefore focus on Spanish American urban society, with its stratification and elite circulation. Where Lockhart's article led into his message, mine reviews the outcome of his and other research strategies; it also concentrates on English-language publications and excludes theory and methods not directly related to this area.

The purpose of this study is to develop an overview of the Latin American women-owned business environment. Documentary research was conducted based on the factors of the Integrated Framework Assessment for an Enabling Environment for Women-Owned Businesses developed by the International Labor Organization, including access to credit and financial services, institutionalism, associations and women entrepreneurs’ networks, legal and regulatory framework, the distribution of the use of time, citizen security and gender-based violence, and promotion of entrepreneurship. The study concludes that even though there have been important initiatives related to these factors in Latin America and these issues have become important in political agendas, there has been uneven progress in different countries.

This study examines the effect of democratization on a key education reform across three Mexican states. Previous scholarship has found a positive effect of electoral competition on social spending, as leaders seek to improve their reelection prospects by delivering services to voters. However, the evidence presented here indicates that more money has not meant better educational outcomes in Mexico. Rather, new and vulnerable elected leaders are especially susceptible to the demands of powerful interest groups at the expense of accountability to constituents. In this case, the dominant teachers' union has used its leverage to exact greater control over the country's resource-rich merit pay program for teachers. It has exploited this control to increase salaries and decrease standards for advancement up the remuneration ladder. The evidence suggests that increased electoral competition has led to the empowerment of entrenched interests rather than voters, with an overall negative effect on education.

A large historiographic tradition has studied the Brazilian state, yet we know relatively little about its internal dynamics and particularities. The role of informal, personal, and unintentional ties has remained underexplored in most policy network studies, mainly because of the pluralist origin of that tradition. It is possible to use network analysis to expand this knowledge by developing mesolevel analysis of those processes. This article proposes an analytical framework for studying networks inside policy communities. This framework considers the stable and resilient patterns that characterize state institutions, especially in contexts of low institutionalization, particularly those found in Latin America and Brazil. The article builds on research on urban policies in Brazil to suggest that networks made of institutional and personal ties structure state organizations internally and insert them into broader political scenarios. These networks, which I call state fabric, frame politics, influence public policies, and introduce more stability and predictability than the majority of the literature usually considers. They also form a specific power resource—positional power, associated with the positions that political actors occupy—that influences politics inside and around the state.

In Mexican colonial history, the night the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán massacred Cortés's troops, 30 June 1520, is known as la noche triste. In Mexican contemporary history, the night of 2 October 1968 is known as la nueva noche triste, a night that saw the deaths of numerous student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Tlatelolco) in Mexico City. It is also referred to as la noche de Tlatelolco or merely as Tlatelolco '68. Some writers contend that the events at Tlatelolco and the emergence of the student movement of 1968 leading to the confrontation are among the most important occurrences in Mexico since the revolution and that Mexico is profoundly different today because of them. It is therefore not surprising that a significant portion of the Mexican literature written since 1968 reflects in various ways the impact of these events on the Mexican national consciousness. A variety of texts, both fictional and nonfictional, appeared immediately after the incident, and others have continued to appear in contemporary Mexican literature in the ensuing years. These texts either address or refer to the dramatic occurences in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and are collectively known as “Tlatelolco literature.”

The landscapes of the Greater Caribbean have been undergoing a process of ecological globalization since the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the late fifteenth century. The character of this ecological globalization has changed over time. Models of commodity-led economic development drove, directly or indirectly, the neo-Columbian exchanges of the long nineteenth century (roughly 1720–1930). The neo-Columbian exchanges differed from the Columbian exchanges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in several key ways: They were increasingly mediated by imperial and transnational scientific institutions. The geographical scope of the exchanges grew, and the Greater Caribbean saw many new direct introductions of people, plants, and animals from Asia and the Pacific, as well as from the eastern part of the Atlantic World. A parallel movement of pathogens from Asia and the Pacific also introduced new epidemic diseases—especially crop diseases—to the Greater Caribbean. The neo-Columbian exchange drove the region's dramatic expansion in agricultural production, but this constructed abundance came at the expense of ecological impoverishment and fragility.

As the recent decade of violence and tyranny slowly recedes into the past, few signs have yet emerged that Argentines are making headway in coming to terms with this troubled heritage. Although the memory of these years is less omnipresent, it still evokes a repulsion as intense—and as fascinated—as when these matters were first allowed to come out into the open. Some reasons for the exceptional depth and scope of the Argentine crisis have become clearer in retrospect, but this clarity does not make the remembering any less painful. The extreme savagery of the country's turn toward violence makes even the most insightful historical exploration of its causes pale in comparison with the memory of having experienced the consequences.

Some historians and political scientists have probably passed each other on their way to incorporate the paraphernalia of their respective disciplines. The historians are showing greater interest in theoretical questions and a growing methodological sophistication. The political scientists have begun to test their models against well-known events which have been previously researched by the historians. Obviously, this trend is no harbinger of disciplinary convergence although it underlines the similarity of interests between quantitatively oriented historians and developmentally oriented political scientists.

El presente artículo reflexiona sobre una de las maneras a través de las cuales la sociedad boliviana contemporánea ha intentado resolver el brusco vaciamiento de la concepción de lo nacional en la era neoliberal. El artículo argumenta que la hoja de coca ha sido uno de los elementos más importantes en llenar este vacío. Su poder simbólico ha hecho posible bajo determinadas circunstancias (políticas, sociales y culturales) pasar de ser un elemento clave de representación local a otro nacional. Asimismo, la hoja de coca contiene la siempre problemática relación entre lo local y la política global de su erradicación. Precisamente, uno de los aspectos que contribuye al fortalecimiento de la hoja de coca como símbolo en determinado momento es la lucha de los productores de coca en contra de tales políticas. Como marco de referencia de la argumentación se utiliza la noción de sistema-mundo de Immanuel Wallerstein, la idea de globalización de Thomas Barnett y la concepción de representación de Ernesto Laclau.

This essay reviews the following works:

Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. By Martín Arboleda. New York: Verso, 2020. Pp. xiv + 288. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781788732963.

Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America: The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship. Edited by Manuel Balán and Françoise Montambeault. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. xxvii + 472. $60.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780268106577.

Growth without Development: Peru in Comparative Perspective. By Rubén Berríos. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. Pp. ix + 156. $90.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781498550734.

Who Speaks for Nature? Indigenous Movements, Public Opinion, and the Petro-State in Ecuador. By Todd A. Eisenstadt and Karleen Jones West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, Pp. x + 288. $19.53 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190908959.

Latin America’s Pink Tide: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings. Edited by Steve Ellner. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Pp. vi + 364. $39.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781538125632.

The Myth of Economic Development. By Celso Furtado. Translated by Jordan B. Jones. Newark: Polity Press, 2020. Pp. xxx + 90. $19.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781509540143.

After the Pink Tide: Corporate State Formation and New Egalitarianisms in Latin America. Edited by Marina Gold and Alessandro Zagato. Oxford: Berghahn, 2020. Pp. 218. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781789208764.

Bolivia in the Age of Gas. By Bret Gustafson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii + 328. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478010999.

Resource Radicals: From Petro-nationalism to Post-extractivism in Ecuador. By Thea Riofrancos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 264. $26.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478008484.

Los ciclos políticos y económicos de América Latina y el boom de materias primas. Edited by Francisco Sánchez and Mercedes García Montero. Madrid: Tecnos, 2019. Pp. 376. $24.75 paperback. ISBN: 9788430975495.

Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina: Conflictos socioambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias. By Maristella Svampa. Beilefeld: Beilefeld University Press, an imprint of Transcript Verlag, 2019. Pp. 142. Open access e-book. ISBN: 9783839445266. DOI: 10.14361/9783839445266-003.

The recent release of over four hundred telephone conversations recorded in the Lyndon Baines Johnson White House from April to December 1965 provide historians with exciting new evidence on the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. The role of the president in that civil conflict has been up to now mysterious since Johnson rarely committed himself to paper. Critics and scholars since have somewhat exonerated him as simply another decision maker misled by a panicky country team spreading rumors of an imminent communist takeover. The tapes suggest, however, that Johnson was both aware that evidence of a takeover was insufficient and perhaps more concerned with domestic politics than with the situation in Santo Domingo. Repeatedly, close advisors attempted to dissuade him from overplaying an anti-communist rationale. But everywhere he looked in Washington Johnson saw enemies who would exploit any hesitation on his part. Soon after committing 23,000 troops, he admitted his lapses in judgment while he simultaneously sought scapegoats for them. The tapes place Johnson once and for all at the center of one of the most serious crises in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations and reveal the darker side of his foreign policy instincts.

Ideally, the study of the political economy of Afro-Latin America should be part and parcel of that of the political economy of Latin America as a whole. Unfortunately, true to the tendency toward fragmentation and specialization in the human as well as in the physical sciences, that has not generally been the case. The problem has been made worse by the low salience of the nonwhite races in the Americas, due to their low socioeconomic and political status. It is further compounded by the ambiguity and evasiveness of the Latin American racial ideology, especially in its Brazilian form, which leads both local and foreign observers and social scientists to conclude first that there is no racial problem (though such a position is no longer seriously held by scholars) and then that race is irrelevant to the study of the region's political economy.

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.

Although Latin America is home to 8 percent of the world's population, only 1.7 percent of scholarly knowledge about Latin America is produced there. The limited voice of Latin American scholars in Latin American studies constitutes the loss of a valuable and unique cultural perspective. To address this issue, we interviewed Latin American studies scholars residing in Latin America as well as those residing in the United States and United Kingdom to reveal how and to what extent these scholars participate in the international academic community. Our findings show that the two groups were markedly different. Latin American scholars identify themselves as agents of change, motivated by a desire to solve problems and fulfill social needs in the region, whereas US/UK-based scholars see themselves mainly as experts in the field, driven by a desire to impact the knowledge about the region.

This paper is a survey of Maya archaeology of the last ten years. A brief historical examination of the years prior to 1958 is made. There follows an intensive look at fieldwork from 1958 to 1968. An examination is made of the state of the field with respect to research design and analytical techniques along with a consideration of data contributed by collateral fields. On the level of explanation and synthesis, there is an examination of the major problems of Maya culture-history to the solution of which recent research has contributed. The concluding sections summarize the characteristics of recent work and attempt to sketch the critical areas for future investigation. I may have unfairly slighted some investigations and workers because much recent work is still in unpublished form. I have depended not only on preliminary reports and the standard publication sources, but also to some degree on the “bush telegraph” of anthropology in assessing the field. Thus the following can only be regarded as one (albeit active) worker's perception of his own specialty.

Theories on the relationship between religion and social change over the past decade have received significant new empirical inputs from developments in Latin America where religious symbols and institutions have undergone some dramatic alterations under the influence of various modernization processes. Sociologists and anthropologists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe stressed the basically conservative effect of religion on society, and concluded that religious institutions are normally obstacles to change as a result of their traditionalistic orientation and association with established social structures. However, there is a growing uneasiness with the conclusions of these major theorists (Spencer, Malinowski, Durkheim, Marx, Weber) in the light of developments in major religions in some areas of the Third World, particularly Roman Catholicism in Latin America. Popular reporting as well as recent scholarly research have noted significant shifts to the left in parts of the Latin American Church, exemplified by strong episcopal condemnations of social injustice, growing political activism of militant clergy groups, and the emergence of new pastoral and social programs aimed at religious and societal reform. The conclusion in much of this literature is that the Church is undergoing a major transformation and this new phenomenon will provide a powerful stimulus for social change throughout the continent.

Displays of wealth and opulence in the face of dire need and poverty have become commonplace as the rich and the poor increasingly share city spaces around the globe. Research shows that it is the perception of inequality, more than raw measures of inequality, that has important political consequences and that is most concerning for social well-being. In this article, I propose a theoretical move from a general, statistically driven conceptualization of inequality to a spatially informed concept that recognizes how people experience inequality. Relying on findings that show that the perception of inequality is most important for life chances, I suggest that it is key to understand not only where inequality is located but how it is spatially distributed. Using the Mall of San Juan as an example of a spatially polarized landscape in Puerto Rico, and referring to other cases in Latin America, the article shows how the spatial distribution of inequality highlights the perceptual fields of citizens who may celebrate, succumb to, respond to, attune to, and/or challenge the inequalities accordingly. To shift from an accounting of inequality through the concept of segregation to recognizing the experience and perception of inequality through spatial polarization shifts the scholarly and policy frames of inequality research and policy.

Although Brazil remains severely affected by civil violence, the state of São Paulo has made significant inroads into fighting criminality. In the last decade, São Paulo has witnessed a 70 percent decline in homicide rates, a result that policy-makers attribute to a series of crime-reducing measures implemented by the state government. While recent academic studies seem to confirm this downward trend, no estimation of the total impact of state policies on homicide rates currently exists. The present article fills this gap by employing the synthetic control method to compare these measures against an artificial São Paulo. The results indicate a large drop in homicide rates in actual São Paulo when contrasted with the synthetic counterfactual, with about 20,000 lives saved during the period. The theoretical usefulness of the synthetic control method for public policy analysis, the role of the Primeiro Comando da Capital as a moderating variable, and the practical implications of the security measures taken by the São Paulo State government are also discussed.