This essay comments on the “new cultural history” of Mexico and the debate recently conducted between critics and protagonists of the genre in the Hispanic American Historical Review. After a scene-setting preamble, the essay consists of three substantive parts. First, in considering what the new cultural history is and what degree of novelty it might claim, the essay identifies and critiques seven features of the genre: its concern for subalterns, agency, political engagement, the reinsertion of politics, mentalities, texts, and interdisciplinary influences. Second, the essay addresses the style and semantics of the new cultural history, in particular its penchant for buzzwords and jargon. Third, the article turns to the major critic of the genre, Stephen Haber, and considers his preferred alternative (so-called scientific history). The essay argues that while Haber's critique is often persuasive, it is also in places misconceived, perhaps exaggerated, and tending toward a narrow positivism. Historiography, the essay unoriginally concludes, need not be falsely polarized between narrow positivism and fashionable postmodernism.

Increasing exclusion and inequality in Honduras have posed escalating security risks for women in their homes and on the streets. In this article, we examine gender-based violence against women, including gender-motivated murders (feminicides), the everyday acts that can result in their deaths, and impunity for these crimes. Rather than analyzing these murders as interpersonal acts or linking them to economic deprivation, we examine the actions and inactions of the state that have amplified violence in the lives of Honduran women. We distinguish between the state’s acts of omission and acts of commission in order to identify the political responsibility and failures that create a fertile ground for these killings. A context of multisided violence that facilitates extreme violence in the lives of women is present in Honduras, especially considering the diminishing power of civil society groups and increased political repression after the 2009 coup. We identify root causes of the wide (and widening) gap between laws on the books—which have been passed mostly to satisfy international and domestic organizations pushing for change—and laws in action, that is, implementation on the ground. Although we focus on Honduras, we note similar experiences of extreme violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and in other countries in the Latin American region.

This article examines the political interactions in Nicaragua between the NGO-based feminist movement and government institutions on the issue of women's health in the mid-1990s. Analysis of the Nicaraguan feminist movement yields insight into the ability of NGO-based movements to influence state policy and into the strengths and limits of using NGOs as an institutional base on which to build a social movement. By defining the mechanisms of state-NGO interactions and analyzing the democratic potential of an NGO-based social movement, this article contributes to understanding of both NGOs and social movements in the context of newly democratic governments.

Se ha dado en llamar “novela de la violencia” en la literatura colombiana, a toda aquella producción novelística que refleja la situación sociopolítica de Colombia durante las décadas del cuarenta y del cincuenta. En este período el país se vio envuelto en una serie de luchas internas que afectaron profundamente la situación socioeconómica de Colombia, especialmente en lo que se refiere a la población campesina.

The economic crisis of the 1980s and the shift to outward-looking development strategies ignited interest in promoting agricultural exports throughout Latin America. In the 1990s, export strategies continue to dominate discussion on agricultural development in the region. Especially for smaller developing countries in Latin America, agricultural and natural-resource exports appear likely to lead efforts to stimulate export growth. Extraordinarily rapid agro-export growth has already been achieved in many countries. From the middle to late 1980s, nontraditional agricultural exports grew at rates of 222 percent in Chile, 78 percent in Guatemala, and 348 percent in Costa Rica. In Paraguay, the most agrarian country in Latin America, agricultural exports nearly tripled during the otherwise difficult decade of the 1980s.

Despite the increasing sensitivity of researchers to historical and contemporary landscape manipulations in the Amazon basin, there is still a powerful consensus in both popular and scholarly literatures that, with the exception of predatory deforestation, the physical environment of the region is largely unmodified by human intervention. An emerging body of scholarship has challenged this view by describing ways that Amazonian populations have managed terrestrial ecosystems on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In this research report, we present both new and previously published data showing that Amazonians also intervene in fluvial systems, manipulating rivers and streams to modify the landscape. We argue that these practices, occurring in many different forms, are widespread and commonplace throughout the region, and that, taken together with the emerging evidence for terrestrial manipulation, provide compelling reason for a fundamental reassessment of conventional views of Amazonian nature.

In literary terms, the new novel did not emerge until 1976 in Guatemala, which represented a ten-to-fifteen-year lag behind most of the other Latin American countries. Since 1976, however, four Guatemalan novels have been published that merit consideration in the same rank with Hijo de hombre (1960), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Gestos (1963), Rayuela (1963), La casa verde (1966), Cien años de soledad (1967), and Tres tristes tigres (1967). The explanation for the earlier paucity of high-quality, structurally and linguistically experimental novels is simple. The blatant violation of human rights by the autocratic governments of Carlos Castillo Armas (1954-57) and his successors has led to the exodus of the best-known authors and the self-censorship or silence of others. In this political climate, the birth of a Guatemalan literary generation of 1954 was almost completely aborted. With the exception of some new works published abroad by Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) and Mario Monteforte Toledo (b. 1911), Guatemala's two most important twentieth-century novelists, the novels published between 1954 and 1975 were generally undistinguished, as is suggested by the annotated bibliography accompanying this essay.

Democratization studies initially focused on processes at the national level, but in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the spatially uneven nature of democracy at, the subnational level This article draws on examples from Argentina and develops an analytical framework of closed games to analyze the functioning of subnational democracy. It argues that the less democratic provinces or states of nationally democratic countries are not necessarily authoritarian and that the concept of subnational authoritarianism prevents us from seeing political dynamics that may arise in the context of a reasonably well-functioning electoral democracy and may result in subnational closed games. The article takes into account the role of political families, media ownership, control of access to business opportunities, and control of the provincial state.

This article analyzes the persistence of an official discourse of mestizo nationalism in Nicaragua in spite of the adoption of multicultural citizenship rights for black and indigenous costeños in 1986. These reforms appeared to directly contradict key premises of previously dominant nationalist ideologies, particularly the idea that Nicaragua was a uniformly mestizo nation. Instead of a radical break with the past, however, what we find in contemporary Nicaragua is a continuous process of negotiation and contestation among three variants of official mestizo nationalism: vanguardismo, Sandinismo, and “mestizo multiculturalism” that emerged in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s respectively. This article traces the continuities among these disparate but intimately related accounts of national history and identity and the way they all operate to limit the political inclusion of black and indigenous costeños as such.

The subject of Central American migration encompasses a broad range of experiences that challenge traditional approaches to migration studies. Past interpretations of migration have tended to be based on mutually exclusive typologies or to focus on certain dimensions of migration while excluding others. Thus migration could be internal or international, cyclical, temporary, or permanent, voluntary or involuntary, economically or politically motivated (the latter issue often treated in a separate literature on refugees and exiles), motivated by “push” factors in the country of origin or “pull” factors in the receiving country, or the result of individual decisions or underlying structural conditions.

Due to the interest in the Latin American short story generated by writers such as Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez, Fuentes, and many others, there is a need for more information on the development of this genre in Latin America and compilations of the information already available. Good sources of material on both authors and stories are often short story anthologies. There are a number of anthologies that deal with various themes, periods, authors, countries, and stories, and offer teacher, student, or aficionado a kaleidoscopic view of the cuento in Latin America.

Mexican immigration figures have reached their lowest point since 2000. Yet, even if as a whole the United States is receiving fewer Mexican migrants, the opposite is true for cities at the border. In this article, I present evidence to show that this sui generis migration pattern cannot be understood using traditional explanations of migration dynamics. Instead, Mexicans are migrating because of security issues, in fear of drug-related violence and extortion that has spiked since 2008. I provide the first estimate of this migration pattern, showing that 264,692 Mexicans have migrated in fear of organized crime activities. In doing so, I combine the literature on migration dynamics with that on violence and crime, pointing toward ways in which nonstate actors shape actions of state members.

In the early hours of 1994, a few hundred men and women of the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN) blocked the Pan American Highway between Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital of Chiapas, and San Cristóbal de las Casas and the road to Ocosingo, declaring war on Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This move signaled to the world that indigenous populations intended to make themselves heard at home and abroad as Mexico restructures its economy according to the neoliberal model promoted by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The rebels captured and briefly held the municipal buildings in San Cristóbal, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, and Ocosingo. Speaking for the rebels, Subcomandante Marcos declared that their war was “a final but justified measure”: “We have nothing, absolutely nothing. Not a decent roof, nor work, nor land, nor health care, nor education.”

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares “marginality” as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called “new poverty” today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.

This article analyzes the recent constituent assembly in Bolivia as a political context in which the indigenous movement and the feminist movement presented different platforms to influence the content of the new constitution. The representation of indigenous women's gender-specific claims is examined through a study of their forms of organizing at the intersection of both social movements and content analysis of the movements' constitutional reform proposals. The success of both movements and the capacity of indigenous women to position themselves as a central actor in the process are explained through reference to the strength of the indigenous movement in national politics, the history of indigenous women's mobilization, and the collaboration between indigenous women and the feminist movement. Indigenous women's collective agency has benefited from this political context to develop new organizations and spaces to claim their rights and perspectives.

Populism is one of those terms (democracy is another) that is frequently employed in the study of politics and varies in meaning from context to context and from author to author. Thus the term has been invoked in studies of such agrarian-based movements as nineteenth-century agrarian unrest in the United States and the narodniki of prerevolutionary Russia as well as being applied to the largely urban-based populism of Latin America. Moreover, most of those who have sought to characterize the populist parties in Latin America have done so in broad terms that encompass any party or political movement that has both a mass base and a cross-class composition. Torcuato DiTella's well-known definition characterized populism (in Latin America or elsewhere) as “a political movement which enjoys the support of the mass of the working class and/or the peasantry, but which does not result from the autonomous organizational power of either of these two sectors. It is also supported by non-working class sectors upholding an anti-status quo ideology.” Other Latin American students of populism such as Francisco Weffort and Ernesto Laclau, along with most others who have studied the phenomenon, have similarly broad conceptions of it.

What is the impact of exposure to criminal violence on support for political institutions in Latin America? The increase in criminal violence in the region since the return to democratic rule makes this a timely question. Several scholars have demonstrated the impact of a series of variables (political performance, economic performance, interpersonal trust, perception of corruption) on citizens' support for political institutions (system support). The goal of this study is to assess the impact of two additional variables (victimization and perception of violence) that have been neglected in the literature. I test the impact of exposure to violence on system support by using survey data from the 2004 edition of the Latin American Public Opinion Project. My findings demonstrate that both victimization and high perception of violence have a negative impact on system support in Latin America.

Observers have argued that as indigenous peoples become more acculturated and their reserves more populous, they begin to exploit tropical rain forests much as colonists and other outsiders do. The history of changes in land use between 1950 and 1980 among the Shuar, an indigenous group in the Ecuadorian Amazon, would appear to support this convergence thesis. The Shuar began to clear land, plant pastures, and acquire cattle, much like their mestizo competitors for land. Using survey and remote-sensing data for a later period, from 1987 to 1997, we demonstrate that convergence has given way to divergence in land-use trends among the two groups. While mestizo smallholders throughout the region continue to rely on cattle ranching, Shuar smallholders close to roads have begun to reforest their lands and cultivate former garden crops like coffee and cacao as cash crops. These recent trends in Shuar land use suggest that even when Amerindians become more acculturated, they still maintain more biologically diverse landscapes than their mestizo neighbors.

Major social and economic changes in Latin America brought about by adoption of the neoliberal model of development have been documented in the recent research literature. We ask to what extent such changes have affected the character of popular collective mobilizations in major cities of the region. We present data from six recent field studies in major Latin American cities that identify goals pursued by contemporary popular movements and organizations and the strategies they adopt to achieve them. These studies provide an overview of how urban society has reacted to the constraints, crises, and opportunities brought about by the new model of development and cast light on what has changed and what remains the same in determinants of popular collective demand-making in major metropolitan areas. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.