This article reviews recent neoliberal agrarian legislation in Latin America in terms of the advances and setbacks for women's and indigenous movements. Institutional reform of the agricultural sector has been heterogenous in part because of the role of these movements. In the twelve countries studied, the new legislation favors gender equity except in Mexico. The indigenous movement scored notable successes in Ecuador and Bolivia but suffered apparent setbacks in Mexico and Peru in the defense of collective land rights. The article also explores why the slightest progress toward gender equality was made in some of the countries with large indigenous populations and strong indigenous movements.

This article will provide an overview of the changes in household composition in the city of Buenos Aires during the first decades of nation building. The discussion of household structures is based on a detailed analysis of the homes of thirty-five thousand porteños (residents of the city of Buenos Aires). The quantitative data are taken from three relatively complete manuscript census returns for the years 1810, 1827, and 1855. Once certain flaws in these census tracts are taken into account, the tracts represent an ample cross-section of urban Buenos Aires society. The variations found in household structures will be used to advance a theory about an underlying dimension of the durability of caudillo rule in Argentina. The proposed thesis on the relationship between strongman leadership and popular following is also based on interpretations employing classic sociological theory. The tentative conclusions concern the nature of early nineteenth-century political culture and afford opportunities for fresh explanations of the period's caudillismo. The data are thus presented in the hope of broadening the scope of discussion about political leadership in the early stages of nation building in Spanish America.

This essay reviews the following works:

In Harm’s Way: the Dynamics of Urban Violence. By Javier Auyero and María Fernanda Berti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 239. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780691164779.

Violence at the Urban Margins. Edited by Javier Auyero, Philippe Bourgois, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 323. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780190221454.

Bruno: Conversations with a Brazilian Drug Dealer. By Robert Gay. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 219. $23.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822358497.

The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil. By Erika Robb Larkins. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 231. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520282773.

Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America. By Eduardo Moncada. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 219. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804794176.

Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life. By R. Ben Penglase. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2014. Pp. ix + 197. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780813565439.

In recent decades, the impacts of climate on society and on human well-being have attracted increasing amounts of attention, and the forecasts that predict such impacts have become more accurate. Forecasts are now distributed and used more widely than they were in the past. This article reviews three cases of such use of forecasts in Latin America. It shows that in all cases, the users are concentrated in particular sectors and regions (agriculture in the Argentine pampas, fisheries on the Peruvian coast, water resources in northeastern Brazil) and that the forecasts are distributed not by government agencies but by intermediate organizations—semistatal organizations or nongovernmental organizations. It draws on the concept of environmental citizenship to discuss these cases and assesses them for such attributes of citizenship as equity, transparency, accountability, and promotion of collective goals. It traces the implications of these cases for the current era of global warming.

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.

Although the volume of research on Latin America has increased markedly in the past decade or so, major topics remain neglected. One of these encompasses the urban working class (wage labor) and worker organizations. This situation, however, is changing. Scholars today are opening new lines of investigation and are applying fresh criteria to existing data in order to formulate working hypotheses and test older theories about organized labor and the working class in Latin America. This article presents a brief, highly selective analysis of new and traditional materials available for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. It treats the urban sectors and labor in modernized enclaves in rural areas almost exclusively; related topics such as peasant unions and rural labor in general fall outside its scope. It outlines areas and problems that future investigators might probe and also presents some hypotheses. Perhaps most important, it attempts to orient future investigators in the field.

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 analyzes the effects on employment, wages, and labor standards of the growth of non-traditional, export-oriented, high-value crops in the PetrolinaJuazeiro region in Northeast Brazil. It focuses on understanding why these crops were accompanied by job creation, upskilling of labor, and improvements in wages and labor standards among rural wage workers. These labor effects can be explained by: (1) the type of crops involved and their high demand for skilled workers to meet high quality demands from consumers; (2) the limited supply of skilled workers in the region involved; (3) the consumer concerns for the labor conditions of production; (4) the characteristics of labor institutions, including laws and regulations, government agencies, and rural workers' unions; and (5) how labor institutions, crop and technology characteristics, and consumer concerns affected the balance of power between growers and rural wage workers and their respective organizations.

From the coloniality of power to the decolonial swerve, US-centered decolonial academics concur with the foundational points introduced by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Nevertheless, they seldom cite Latin American Indigenous or Native American intellectuals’ decolonial perspectives, or examine specific bodies of critical thinking emerging in hemispheric Indigenous communities. In turn, a diversity of Indigenous paradigms and methods are appearing in the Americas, either as literary texts or critical works. Indigenous or Native American writers and theorists are often political actors, working within their respective grassroots movements, or writing to advance specific goals of their own communities. This article will emphasize Native American and Indigenous decolonial issues framed from a critique of contemporary Indigenous narratives. Their views both enrich and complicate Western decolonial theorists’ assumptions. Examining their production provides continuity to the political and epistemological searches of both, while also contributing to breaking down those invisible walls separating them.

Female participation in the Latin American paid labor force is increasing dramatically. Building upon Portes and Hoffman's (2003) model, we use occupational data to measure gendered changes in Latin America's class structure over the last two decades of economic restructuring and adjustment and to investigate the causes and consequences of these regional patterns. Our results suggest two important conclusions. First, economic adjustment and restructuring is increasing women's parity with men in terms of class position largely as a consequence of the deterioration of men's once-privileged location in the class structure. Second, recent economic adjustment and restructuring has altered power relations between social classes in Latin America in part because it has inspired both qualitative and quantitative changes in the gendered composition of Latin American labor. The number of women entering the work force, and the labor conditions suffered particularly by women workers, has resulted in both the literal and figurative “emasculation” of the Formal Proletariat. These preliminary findings make clear the explanatory benefits of including gender in analyses of changes in the Latin American class structure.

This article explores the sources of Ecuador's boom in flower exports since the late 1980s. In that boom, fresh cut flower exports rose from almost nothing to 9 percent of the country's nonpetroleum export earnings. This research addresses whether trade liberalization and macroeconomic reforms played a decisive role in stimulating the export boom or whether changes in the global flower market created Ecuador's comparative advantage in flower exports independent of the policy regime. The article surveys the many changes in economic policy toward agriculture in general, flower cultivation, nontraditional exports, international trade, and macroeconomic stability. Growth rates in traditional and non-traditional exports are examined to see if they correlate with changes in key policies. The article also examines how the restructuring of the global flower market affected Ecuador's floriculture industry.

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.

In 2014, Chile introduced a tax reform on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that began to be collected in 2017; the reform is restricted to large industrial and power generation sources with thermal power greater than 50 megawatts (MW). Therefore, this study evaluates each industrial source’s option to reduce its taxes by switching to cleaner fuels (investing in new combustion equipment, such as boilers and dual burners). The results show that a tax of US$5 per ton of CO2 for industrial sources of more than 50 MW of thermal power is wholly ineffective in reducing emissions. If a carbon tax is applied to all independent sources of power, only a few industrial sources are predicted to change their current fuel, mainly changing coal to biomass. The conclusion is that the carbon tax serves to raise tax revenues rather than reduce emissions.

Since Mexico declared its independence from Spanish rule, the country has experienced two extended periods of political stability that are atypical of Latin American societies. The first, known as the Porfiriato, extended from 1875 to 1910. The second, which was heralded by the Revolution of 1910 and consolidated in the 1920s, still holds sway in the last decade of the twentieth century. The weaknesses of the Porfiriato have been analyzed amply, thanks in great part to the hindsight provided by the revolution that ended the era. Until recently, however, most works on twentieth-century Mexico have focused on the exceptional stability of the postrevolutionary regime. This approach has left largely unresearched (Knight 1989) or merely labeled as “crises” (Needier 1987) the recurrent episodes of union insurgency, popular protest, electoral opposition, and other signs of pressure for political change that have punctuated Mexican history since the Revolution. Consequently, analysts who have recently undertaken the arduous task of diagnosing at what points this imposing edifice might “give” have been unable to benefit from insights of work carried out in previous decades.