This essay seeks to categorize and assess works published since the 1950s on the activities of the tribunal of the Santo Oficio de la Inquisición of Lima and their repercussions on the social history of the viceroyalty of Peru. The studies made of the Inquisition in recent decades, in going beyond a merely descriptive focus or one biased by the old prejudices of the “Black Legend,” have highlighted the exceptional value of the records of the Lima Inquisition for acquainting researchers with interesting dimensions on the level of mentalities, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors—that is to say, in the expressions of the deepest impulses of the human soul. This trend has allowed historians to modify their image of the Inquisition in the Spanish metropolis and in its former colonies in America.

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.

They arrived first in July 1898 in scattered numbers, in the company of an army of conquest, and subsequently in successive waves during the military occupation. By the time U.S. military rule over Cuba came to an end in May 1902, no less than a score of Protestant denominations had inaugurated evangelical activities in Cuba, including Northern and Southern Baptists, Southern Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, the Disciples of Christ, Quakers, Pentecostalists, and Congregationalists. In fact, so many missionaries arrived in Cuba at one time that denominational competition quickly got out of hand. In February 1902, an interdenominational conference convened in Cienfuegos to impose order on the U.S. evangelical enterprise. The resulting comity plan established spheres of influence for the principal Protestant denominations in Cuba: Northern and Southern Baptists divided the island between them, with Northern Baptists in the two eastern provinces and Southern Baptists assigned to the four western ones; Quakers and Methodists divided eastern Cuba between them; Presbyterians and Congregationalists located their missions in the western zones; and Episcopalians concentrated in Matanzas and Santiago de Cuba.

This article examines patterns of change and continuity in Latin American foreign policies. It asks two interrelated questions: How can we conceptually and empirically account for foreign policy change? And why do states change their foreign policies in Latin America? To answer these questions, we used the results of a new expert survey on foreign policy preferences in the region between 1980 and 2014. The results we obtained using both linear and nonparametric specifications are very clear and consistent: presidential ideology is what matters the most. Simply put, a change in the ideology of the president produces a change in foreign policy that is almost equivalent in magnitude, all other theoretically relevant factors set to their means.

Like the precarious colonial state demeaningly referred to as “España la Boba,” the Dominican Catholic Church of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries endured the Caribbean ramifications of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. This onslaught included the cession of Santo Domingo to France in 1795, the protracted and bloody revolution in St. Domingue, disruptions in international trade, and invasions by Haiti in 1801 and 1805. Both the colonial state and the colonial church were further undermined by the declaration of Dominican independence in December 1821. Only weeks into Dominican independence, twelve thousand troops under the command of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the island, fulfilling the long-held Haitian goal of unifying the island under Haitian rule. Although considerably weakened, the Dominican church survived as the single truly national institution in the sense that it retained influence throughout the Dominican territory. The church was also national in providing a central element in Dominican elite culture: fervent Catholicism. Thus it was not coincidental that clerics gravitated to the heart of the Dominican struggle for liberation and that the church continued to play a major role in defining political alignments during the forty years following Dominican independence.

This article studies the evolution of literacy in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1900 to 1950. A methodology is developed to overcome the lack of census data for half of the countries in the region for 1900, as well as the lack of comparability of the existing census data. Combining census data and literacy data gathered from marriage registrations, military recruits, crime statistics, and urban censuses, adult literacy estimates for twenty-two countries of the region are provided for 1900, which offer a new and more complete portrait of human capital formation from 1900 to 1950. There are wide variations across the region in literacy rates in 1900, as well as in the increase of literacy from 1900 to 1950, the latter being associated with variations in the expansion of primary education enrollment in different Latin American countries. However, countries also differ in their success in transforming school enrollment into adult literacy, which is partly associated with the prevalence of Amerindian populations.

Historical research on Chilean population has been thwarted for some time by intractable sources and rudimentary methods. Nevertheless, within the past two decades researchers have begun to achieve some successes. Attention has turned from simply ascertaining gross population totals and growth rates to a much wider range of topics. Significant examples include: the relationship between population growth, illegitimacy, vagrancy, and labor supply; the social context of marriage, family formation, and kin ties; the nature, frequency, and intensity of mortality crises; demographic responses to population pressure; the social and economic repercussions of European immigration; and the determinants and consequences of rapid growth and redistribution of population in the twentieth century (Góngora, 1965; Bauer, 1975; Hurtado, 1966; Solberg, 1969; Young, 1974; Sadie, 1969). To study these topics satisfactorily we must both maintain the healthy skepticism of our distant precursors (e.g., Barros Arana, 1880–1900; Palacios, 1904; and Vergara L., 1900) and integrate the demographer's analytical tools with the historian's skill in finding, selecting, and interpreting a whole range of quantitative and qualitative documents. Demographers have demonstrated that even post-1920 data collected by the Chilean Statistical Bureau have substantial and varying degrees of error, notwithstanding the considerable advances in data collection techniques, improvements in the educational levels of the population, and economic inducements to insure the public's cooperation (Somoza and Tacla, 1969; Gutiérrez, 1969). In the not too distant past, civil administrators and priests received crude, if any, instructions, administered several hundred square kilometers of poorly defined territory, and faced an almost insurmountable task of enticing information from a widely dispersed, highly mobile, poor, and uneducated populus. Consequently, historical studies with exclusively demographic ends, using narrowly defined data bases and relying principally on arithmetical or statistical techniques, may prove to be extremely frustrating to carry out and somewhat barren in their findings. Attempts to replicate European studies with Chilean materials, whether simple aggregations of annual totals or tediously reconstructed family life histories, will run a high risk of failure unless researchers incorporate broader questions of social history, exploit an extensive range of documentation, and integrate historical, demographic, and statistical reasoning. While little mathematical sophistication may be necessary—elementary measures may prove the most powerful—a mature, sensitive understanding of the logic of these disciplines, which comes only with considerable study and experience, is essential. The slavish application of demographic formulae and the invention of ill-considered measures are direct pathways to embarrassing nonsense.

This article looks into the factors that explain foreign direct investment (FDI) in Brazil by country of origin. We collected a sample of 180 countries with and without FDI in Brazil. We use multiple estimation techniques and controls to isolate the effect of country political risk on outward foreign direct investment and show that countries with lower levels of political risk undertake more FDI in Brazil, and that features of the policy environment of home countries drive the negative relationship between risk and FDI. Furthermore, we show that the aspect of the political and institutional environment that is most likely to drive this negative relation between risk and investment into Brazil is related to the effectiveness of national governments. Our findings broaden the understanding of the puzzling influence of political risk on FDI observed in previous studies, correct for sampling and selection biases, and have substantive implications for policy design to attract FDI.

On 28 February 1986, the Brazilian government announced a “heterodox” inflation stabilization program that rapidly came to be called the Plano Cruzado. It was intended to halt an inflation that appeared to be escaping control and untamable through orthodox stabilization policies. Although at first the Plano Cruzado seemed to succeed dramatically in eliminating inflation without recessionary side effects, it failed by the end of 1986, as inflation revived, external accounts collapsed, and real growth sagged.

The authors discuss the various ways in which liberationist Catholicism and the Catholic charismatic movement in Brazil take positions in the overall globalizing and homogenizing cultural forces in universal Catholicism and wider society. They argue that in their discourses and practices, these two contemporary Catholic movements refer to notions of both local and global and identify with specific parts of global Catholicism by confronting processes of syncretism, acculturation, and inculturation. Through an analysis of the meaning of tradition and roots, the use of music, and the practice of pilgrimage, the authors show how both movements manage the construction of distinctive religious cultures and forms of inculturation in the context of tension between the local and the global.

We analyze class structures in Latin America from a sociological perspective, defining social classes as labor market positions. We propose an adaptation of the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP) class schema, which has become a standard in advanced industrialized countries but presents some limitations in accounting for labor relations in Latin America. Then, we use recent survey data for nine Latin American countries to delineate a map of current class structures and explore the association between social class and social/economic conditions. Our results indicate that class structures differ significantly not only between Latin America and advanced industrialized nations but also among Latin American countries. There is also a close association between class membership and socioeconomic conditions, including social protection and the risk of poverty. These results suggest that a sociological approach to social class is still pertinent to understanding the relationships among productive structures, labor markets, and living conditions in Latin America.

Paid domestic workers represent a historically discriminated-against group comprising mostly ethnically marginalized, resource-poor migrant women. In twenty-first-century Peru, social and labor rights have not improved significantly for those in the sector despite more than a decade of sustained economic growth that took off in 2002 and lasted until 2014. Though the present national trend suggests that the absolute number of workers in this sector is dropping and that the tendency of workers to “live in” with their employers is reversing (trends that might signal improved working conditions for those in the sector), significant gaps still exist between the rights of domestic workers as compared to other workers. This article analyzes the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity and/or migration status, and class as one possible explanation for the continued vulnerability of paid domestic workers. We examine statistical information on the present situation in Peru, including a trends analysis of the National Household Survey from 2004 to 2013, and share the results of our qualitative research on the sector for the same period. We conclude with recommendations for future studies.

Latin America, more than other regions of the capitalist world, has been characterized by persistently high concentration of income and wealth and by limited trickling-down of the material gains from output growth. This situation was an enduring characteristic of “modern economic growth” in Latin America during its era of crecimiento hacia afuera, from the mid-nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has remained so, with some modification, during the subsequent half-century, despite industrialization, rapid urbanization, the spread of education, and other conquistas sociales in many of the countries, and despite the faster economic-growth rates since World War II. Indeed, a further rise of income concentration accompanying that postwar growth is statistically detectable in many of the countries. By combining pre-World War II data with plausible inference, one can also deduce a still longer-run rising-concentration trend from the mid-nineteenth century, with oscillations downward in periods of slow growth and upward during fast growth periods. The result in most countries has been a slow improvement at best for the lowest 60 percent of the population in the more measurable and less ethnocentric dimensions of that amorphous concept, the quality of life.

Does race influence political behavior in Brazil? Using data from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, we explore whether an individual's propensity to take part in a political association is affected by race, independent of socioeconomic position and of the availability of resources derived from this position. We found that white individuals participate more in political associations than do black individuals; however, after taking into account the differences in all types of resources, we found no difference in participation by racial groups. Nevertheless, by interacting race, skills, and income, it turns out that different racial groups use the same resources differently. A white individual's propensity to participate politically is significantly more affected by income than a similar black individual's propensity. Therefore, we argue that race mediates the effect of resources on political participation, which means that either different groups may use different resources or different groups can differ in how intensively they use resources.

Since 1993 to the present, a group of Mapuche activists has aired the bilingual radio show Wixage anai! in Santiago, Chile; on the other side of the Andes, another Mapuche collective, the Equipo de Comunicación Mapurbe, produced and broadcast a series of brief radio programs between 2003 and 2005 in Bariloche, southern Argentina. In this article, I argue that these radio programs constitute an exercise of Mapuche agency that challenges what I call the acoustic colonialism of corporate and criollo mass media in both countries. This article illustrates how Mapuche activists creatively use radio as a connective medium among Mapuche communities and a space for the public audibility of their own voices, sounds, and modes of speech. I analyze the history, cultural politics, and performative features of these two initiatives, engaging theoretical and critical views on sound media, state cultural policies, and politics of indigenous agency.

The last half-dozen years have witnessed an outpouring of Brazilian publications, both rigorous academic studies and popular essays, on women and their roles and activities within Brazilian society. Since the late 1970s, publishers and educated audiences have demonstrated an active interest in works on women that contrasts sharply with the hostile reception accorded Betty Friedan and the Brazilian translation of her Feminine Mystique in 1971. What was once a subject for ridicule has become a timely topic. In 1980 a compendium of the year's nonfiction titles revealed more books listed under the heading of feminism than under biology or botany, and almost as many as under anthropology or cooking.1 The expanding publications on socially determined sex roles have accompanied the development of a small, but active, feminist movement and a general increase in publishing activities in Brazil as the “redemocratization” process gains strength and readers seek more information on previously forbidden topics.

No one with even a passing acquaintance with the literature on Mexican society, not to mention the rest of Spanish America, can fail to be impressed by the frequent use of the term mestizo. Despite its ubiquity in the writings of social scientists, however, the concept of the mestizo is customarily employed in a vague fashion and usually left undefined. This is especially evident in the work of anthropologists, who for many years have been preoccupied with defining the Mexican Indian but have rarely focused their analytical powers on the mestizo. The term itself has been used rather loosely to refer to a certain group of people who presumably comprise a majority of the Mexican population, a cultural pattern shared by these people and other Latin Americans, and even a personality type.