Mexico achieved food self-sufficiency and raised rural living standards in the thirty years prior to the mid-sixties, yet the country is now plagued by a profound agricultural crisis that is manifesting itself in serious natural resource disequilibria, unemployment and underemployment, and inadequate food production. This seemingly contradictory outcome has resulted from an agricultural growth strategy that reoriented production toward agroexports and animal feeds. Understanding the effects of this strategy is essential because these same trends are the most important phenomena in the agricultural sector of many developing countries today (Barr 1981; Winrock International 1981; DeWalt 1983).

This article examines two cases of folklorization led by teachers in Peru between 1939 and 1971, and characterized by the participation of the indigenous and mestizo subjects whose local cultures were transformed into folklore. These cases show teachers as active agents of cultural change in Andean schools, who were responding to de-Indianization by promoting a serrano (pertaining to the Sierra) regional identity among their students. In this fashion, teachers were reinventing “local traditions” to produce a new popular identity based on a common regional bond, through which indigenous and mestizo populations could negotiate new waves of cultural interaction with modernity and national society. The first case analyzes the projects of José María Arguedas and Emilio Barrantes to bring local folklore to the school curriculum and to promote an Andean popular culture. The second case explores school folklore competitions organized autonomously by provincial teachers, in which traditional dances were folklorized and turned into a popular spectacle. While framing both folklorization cases within the study of teachers as local intellectuals, the article also highlights the importance of a magisterial culture in Peru that, drawing from the progressive education movement, viewed teachers as agents of sociocultural change and nationalism.

In the aftermath of the 1959 revolutionary triumph there began a massive impelled migration to the United States, paralleled in Cuban history only by the great exodus during the nineteenth-century wars of independence. Close to 500,000 Cubans had migrated to the United States by 1972.

The migration has shifted in size and has occurred intermittently since 1959, a consequence of the turbulent relations between the United States and Cuban governments. From January 1959 to October 1962, regular commercial flights existed between the United States and Cuba. During much of this period, American visas could be obtained in the United States embassy in Havana and in the Santiago de Cuba consulate. However, after diplomatic relations were severed (3 January 1961), the United States government generally waived the visa requirements for Cubans desiring to migrate. During this period, 153,534 Cubans registered with the Miami Cuban Refugee Center arld close to 200,000 had arrived in the United States by the time of the 1962 October missile crisis.

The historiography of the nineteenth-century political process in latin America is in trouble. With the burgeoning of Latin American history as a professional activity, historians are increasingly “moving beyond” past politics to study social and economic themes. The traditional treatments of the nineteenth century, dedicated to glorifying or debunking heroic leaders, to perpetuating old partisan and ideological struggles, or even to presenting in a more detached way a minutely-detailed political narrative, have lost their allure. It is true, to the obvious consternation of the editors of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, that items in the traditional mold still abound. In Mexico, for example, the celebration of the centennial and sesquicentennial of the two heroic ages of liberalism, the Revolution for Independence and the Reforma, gave great impetus to political writing. Analogous historiographical stimulants can be found in other countries, sometimes where the heroism of the anniversaries is less clear. Yet the value of even the best of such work is increasingly called into question by professional historians.

Domestic workers, as essentially black women in highly precarious conditions, lacking social protection, and often not recognized as proper workers, are considered particularly hard, or even impossible, to organize compared to the “standard” male industrial worker. Yet they have been mobilizing for decades in several countries, including Brazil, where they won new labor rights in 2015. Through an ethnographic study of domestic workers’ unions in Brazil, I argue that what has made their mobilization possible is precisely the intersectional dimension of their oppression. While gender, race, and class have produced multiple forms of exclusion, these vectors of oppression have also enabled domestic workers to build alliances with women’s, black, and workers’ movements, thus giving domestic workers more visibility and more resources to organize their members. I have identified three forms of alliance building, each determined by domestic workers’ unions’ particular framing of gender, race, and class issues: rigid autonomy, critical alliance, and encompassing unionism.

The striking development of Chilean public primary education during the nineteenth century has often been noted. Existing explanations emphasize industrialization and social change in shaping societal demand for schooling, and elite consensus, the role of individual leaders, and low levels of inequality and social heterogeneity in shaping the state's educational provision. This article complements existing state-centered arguments by showing that the institutions of local and regional administration were also crucial in transforming policy changes into real progress in primary education. As Chilean schooling spread and became systematized over the course of the nineteenth century, local state officials not only effectively carried out the state's educational policies but also refined it independently and even pushed for the deepening of educational development, and particularly the systematic control of schooling.

From the mid-1990s, devotion to Santa Muerte (Saint Death) became highly visible, not only in Mexico but also in the United States. Its evolution has coincided with the expansion of organized crime, creating the impression that the icon belongs to a coherent “narco-culture.” This article contextualizes ritual practices at a single altar in Tepito, a Mexico City neighborhood historically specialized in informal and illegal commerce. Its monthly prayer service, which dates to September 2001, now balances the needs of its congregation with a kind of response to accusations against devotees in the mass media. Ironically, the range of gestures that share Santa Muerte iconography encompasses laments and high-minded indignation over blanket attribution of violent intentions to a population, but also a language for making threats. The average devotee is always affected by the likelihood that new acts of violence will be styled as religious.

Will the denouement of the current Latin American debt crisis be unilateral default or preemptive concessionary write-downs of the debt? If either outcome occurs, what are the implications for the U.S.–centered world trade and financial system and, in particular, for the trade and financial links between Latin America and the United States? The crisis containment strategy instituted by the United States in 1982 presumed a negative answer to the first question, thereby ruling out the second as irrelevant. But by 1986, fading confidence in that strategy has reopened both questions.

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.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination and to maintain their distinct institutions. This article investigates how those rights are being exercised in Charagua, which became Bolivia’s first “Indigenous autonomous government” when the municipality’s Guaraní majority approved conversion in 2015. We explore the construction of novel institutions of self-government to assess how local Guaraní leaders are negotiating autonomy, both externally and internally. The result of those negotiations is a hybrid political system in which power is balanced between an executive organ (as required by Bolivian law) and a deliberative assembly (the Ñemboati Guasu, which operates according to Indigenous custom). The prominence of the assembly expresses a significant form of autonomy that promotes intercultural political participation and enacts Indigenous self-government in ways that are important to Guaraní people. Yet, because the new political unit does not control subsoil rights and thus cannot determine the sorts of development that take place in its territory, we cannot yet say the Guaranís are exercising full and robust autonomy as expressed by the UN Declaration’s provisions for self-determination.

The population census of 1725–1740 was one of the few general censuses to occur in Peru during the colonial period. The census left a mass of detailed demographic data recording a unique moment when the population of the viceroyalty stood at its lowest historical level. It was the centerpiece of a major body of viceregal reform that affected levels of Indian tribute and the mita labor draft and permanently changed the base population subject to both levies, incorporating a large new sector previously partially or wholly exempt. It strongly influenced Peru's Indian and mestizo peoples throughout its execution and provoked the first major wave of popular unrest under the Bourbons. Yet despite the significance of the census, it remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed introduction to the census as a major administrative reform and a source for demographic and other history.

Abordamos aquí los discursos y prácticas de hombres, mujeres e instituciones respecto a las mujeres afrocolombianas, que conforman un fenómeno migratorio reciente en el mercado del sexo de las ciudades mineras del norte de Chile. Veremos cómo la irrupción e instalación de estas mujeres generan tensiones no resueltas en la configuración de las relaciones de género en los enclaves productivos, al ser percibidas contradictoriamente como amenaza y como oportunidad en relación a los acomodos tradicionales de las relaciones de género en la región, en sus dimensiones económicas, laborales, matrimoniales y familiares. Planteamos que la estigmatización y la discriminación de la condición racial, nacional, sexual y laboral de estas mujeres se articula y contradice con experiencias heterogéneas del deseo afectivo y sexual que afecta intensamente la conformación y reproducción de las masculinidades mineras y sus contratos socio-sexuales.

This article seeks to examine empirically several recent hypotheses on the evolution of Latin American urbanization based on data from five countries in the Caribbean Basin. The hypotheses were advanced by the senior author in an earlier article in this journal (Portes 1989). They concern three major aspects discussed in the literature on Latin American cities: changes in urban primacy, spatial polarization within the largest cities, and the urban informal economy as a countercyclical mechanism. The hypotheses contradict much of the scholarly consensus on the character of Latin American urbanization as summarized in a number of publications (Beyer 1967; Hardoy 1975; Portes and Walton 1976; Roberts 1978; Portes and Johns 1989).

“What I suffer is pleasant because it shows that I am putting myself above the run of common men, that I am worthy of my Patria and of you…”

Insurgent officer to his wife, 1893

The appeal of sacrifice so frequently encountered in expressions of nationalism is an equally familiar theme in the rhetoric of political warfare in Latin America. Stories of political warfare take up a considerable part of Latin American historiography. The intent of this exploratory article is to suggest how the rhetoric and narrative written about nineteenth-century insurgency can be read to illuminate the political history of Latin America. Two South American civil wars of the 1890s constitute the empirical starting point for my speculations, although they are scarcely a convincing sample of the hundreds of insurgencies that have occurred since independence. Consequently, these observations on a Latin American discourse of insurgency must largely be content to ask questions, raise issues, and suggest hypotheses.

One of the most urgent issues in contemporary Latin America is the popular struggle against rural poverty. Because Latin American states have failed to alleviate rural impoverishment, the poor have undertaken to solve their own problems. One fruitful way of improving their conditions has proved to be forming grass-roots peasant organizations outside state auspices. This approach, however, can bear fruit only under a democratic regime or in states that provide some political space in which peasants can act without being crushed.

The problem of squatter settlements in Latin American cities has received far greater attention than any other theme in Latin American urban studies in the last fifteen years. The issues and debates at the heart of the field—the definition of the culture of poverty, the question of the marginality of the poor, and the concept of the urban informal sector—all have evolved out of and centered on discussing the plight of urban squatters. The sheer magnitude of the phenomenon of squatting in urban Latin America no doubt justifies this degree of attention. In addition, pursuit of the topic has provided a rich source of data for theorists interested in reinterpreting Latin American urban development from a Marxist perspective. The emphasis on squatting has also had some negative consequences, however. One result is that other important themes and other areas outside the urban periphery have received only superficial treatment; another is that the general applicability of the insights derived from the analysis of squatting has remained in doubt.