En este trabajo se analizan los procesos económicos en las dos principales unidades económicas y demográficas del territorio argentino en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Se emplea para ello la abundante información historiográfica disponible y se analizan en detalle dos censos económicos de Córdoba en 1838 y de Buenos Aires en 1839. Por un lado se observa la divergencia creciente en esta etapa entre estas dos economías luego de la independencia, comparando sus dinámicas y sus tamaños relativos. Seguidamente se analiza la relación entre estos desempeños con los niveles de distribución de riqueza, con la intención de ponerlos en discusión con los modelos analíticos vigentes.

This essay reviews the following works:

The Achilles Heel of Democracy: Judicial Autonomy and the Rule of Law in Central America. By Rachel E. Bowen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 302. $35.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316630907.

Manipulating Courts in New Democracies: Forcing Judges off the Bench in Argentina. By Andrea Castagnola. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp + 184. $54.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780367372033.

Judicial Politics in Mexico: The Supreme Court and the Transition to Democracy. Edited by Andrea Castagnola and Saúl López Noriega. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xiv + 190. $48.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781138697829.

Courts and Social Transformation in New Democracies: An Institutional Voice for the Poor? Edited by Roberto Gargarella, Pilar Domingo, and Theunis Roux. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xiv + 328. $59.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781138264540.

Shifting Legal Visions: Judicial Change and Human Rights Trials in Latin America. By Ezequiel A. González-Ocantos. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 342. $36.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316508800.

Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America. Edited by Matthew C. Ingram and Diana Kapiszewski. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 359. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780268102814.

Clearly the winds of change sweep over latin america today. everyhing one observes, reads, and hears about this vast culture area points to vital (often radical) social, cultural, and economic transformations which are resulting in new ways of life for these millions of Americans whose ways of life derive from Spanish, Portuguese, American Indian, and African sources. Changes in customary patterns of thought and behavior are taking place more slowly in some countries than others, and even within a nation some areas respond much more quickly to innovative efforts than do others.

Comparative analysis of two Salvadoran towns with similar patterns of international migration but different historical land-tenure patterns reveals the emergence of radically different development strategies. Whereas in one case, mostly landed households with a history of farming commercially have been selling land and abandoning agriculture, in the other case, previously landless households whose members worked as sharecroppers before the onset of migration have been acquiring land and farming as much as possible. The opposite processes at work in these two cases raise important theoretical questions for both migration and development studies. Using ethnographic, census, and historical data, I examine how and why land ownership, under particular historical circumstances, conditions the impact of migration on development.

This essay contributes to a fuller understanding of the history and future of area studies by tracing Latin American studies back to the early twentieth century, when it took form within academic disciplines that sought to contribute to state policy-making. The essay focuses on a set of intellectual exchanges between the United States and Mexico around Native American affairs. In an era in which new inter-American scientific venues and the Good Neighbor policy attenuated the inevitable and ever present intellectual hierarchies that divided the United States from Mexico and the rest of Latin America, some scholars found resemblances and parallels between North and South America. These scholars envisioned a cosmopolitan Americanist intellectual sphere based on horizontal forms of sharing, and they looked for novel ways of reconciling the avowed need for generalization with the particulars that they confronted at home and abroad. They found themselves unable to fully escape epistemological binds that positioned the North as a model of modern nationhood and a locus of universal knowledge, and that relegated non-Western nations like Mexico to the category of the particular. They could not overcome the difficulties spawned by hierarchies among nations and, concomitantly, among their own scholarly communities.

Weberian sociological approaches dominate the contemporary study of inequality in Latin America. Theoretically, the major works in the area suffer from a conflation of liberalism and democracy and offer flawed conceptions of capitalism, class, and other social relations of oppression. This article offers an exegesis and critique of several recent influential texts written within the Weberian tradition. It then proposes as an alternative a Marxian-decolonial theoretical framework for understanding inequality and the totalizing power of capital. It demonstrates how such a framework can better account for the complexity of class relations and other internally related forms of social oppression—such as gender, sexuality, and race—in Latin America today. Finally, the article shows the utility of the Marxist-decolonial framework by way, first, of a concrete investigation into the highly contested dynamics of twenty-first-century extractive capitalism in the region, and, second, through an exposition of the life story and activism of Luis Macas, an indigenous activist and intellectual in Ecuador. The core element of Macas’s political subjectivity is an underlying utopian-revolutionary dialectic through which he draws on elements of a precapitalist past in looking forward to an anticolonial and socialist future.

This research note provides historical context for the creation of Brazil's labor judiciary and tells the story of an innovative partnership forged between the archive of Pernambuco's regional labor tribunal and the Federal University of Pernambuco. It also engages methodological questions about the use of these labor court cases, reviewing some of the scholarly literature based on these sources and describing some research projects under way. Pernambuco has powerful historical links to the sugarcane industry, and because the history of labor in this industry is the terrain of our work, this note pays particular attention to the relevance of labor court cases for studying Pernambuco's sugarcane region.

Latin American global cities have embraced international tourism as a pillar of economic development. Even as tourism has recently grown dramatically, some cities have succeeded and others have failed at capturing international tourists and delivering benefits to the population. This article examines the role of new public institutions (tourism ministries) and social structure from 2000 to 2010 in Buenos Aires, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, the evidence shows that both policy choices and social structure shape the composition of international tourism. Prospect theory and economic crisis help explain the emergence of entrepreneurial and innovative bureaucracies. Buenos Aires is an example of innovative inclusive tourism, Havana exhibits innovative disarticulated tourism, and Rio de Janeiro features stagnant urban enclave tourism.

The history of the Argentine interior during the nineteenth century has often escaped the attention of researchers attracted to the dramatic economic and political growth of the eastern riverine provinces. Included in this oversight has been the plight of the rural laboring classes, unless associated with studies of immigrants. It has been easier to trace the impact and lifestyles of coastal elites—the estanciero, the merchant, the caudillo, and the politician—and the urban working class, than to reconstruct the life of the provincial peon. The study of the lower classes in general has been further impeded by the dramatic but stereotyped visions of the gaucho and other rural characters immortalized by writers such as Sarmiento, Hernández, Güiraldes, and Martínez Estrada. Finally, the illteracy of creole workers has left us with limited personal records of their existence. Yet despite all the inconveniences involved in the study of the rural working class, it is still possible to reconstruct aspects of its social, political, and economic conditions.

This essay examines the influence that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru (TRC, 2001-2003) had in the recent novels Abril rojo (2006) by Santiago Roncagliolo, La hora azul (2005) by Alonso Cueto, and El camino de regreso (2007) by José de Piérola. In particular, I focus on how the TRC's treatment of mental health issues have provided these writers with new ways to approach violence and social justice after the twenty years of terrorist and state violence (1980-2000) that cloud Peruvian history. As part of its investigations, the TRC paid close attention to the mental health of the victims and the psychosocial effects of violence. Its investigation influenced the writers I study, who use representations of mental illnesses to allegorize the country's situation after the years of violence and to imagine processes of justice and reconciliation that will reestablish a healthy national community.

“For Long it has Been the Conventional Wisdom—Repeated ad nauseum without ever an attempt at careful empirical demonstration—that the quality of Latin American studies is the lowest of all area scholarship. This judgment is clearly false for anthropology, history, and language and literature. How true is it for political science, one of the most maligned of the disciplines?” Thus, the question posed by a leading political scientist during the disciplinary soul-searching which followed in the wake of the Camelot affair. Perhaps none of the disciplines concerned with Latin American studies have been so subjected to self-conscious evaluations and assessments in recent years. While much has represented professional cocktail-gossip and conventioneering punditry, it has generally reflected the less than edifying overview of Merle Kling in the early 1960's. Countless political science graduate students with Latin American interests have read his assessment:

Analysts of social movements have done a great deal to extend our understanding of how resistance groups frame injustices. They often assume that some form of collective (discursive) action is necessary to frame common understandings, but in many authoritarian regimes collective action is not tolerated. Instead, opposition is expressed in messages embedded in comics, films, and other images generated by popular culture. In this article we connect the literature on social movements and framing to the psychological and cultural understandings of humor, and specifically how text and images in humorous comics form a response to official frames of social peace, modernization, and development. Even when no one dares to write a letter of protest, or take to the streets, or set up a website, the political content of comics establishes understandings about group identity and justice. In more open and democratic regimes, dissident leaders are permitted to manipulate images and understandings. In closed authoritarian regimes, comics are “ready meals” for dissidents. We examine humorous comics in Mexico from 1970 to 1976 to show how text and images spoke of injustices such as torture, poverty, and marginalization.

For eight years I was associated with one of the most quixotic efforts in academic publishing—a journal concerned comprehensively with research about an area of the world. I must admit that when the Latin American Research Review (LARR) was about to move to Chapel Hill, I thought the original idea that had given birth to the journal had lost its vitality. The notion of reviewing research seemed restrictive and either excessively specialized or hopelessly protean. The dramatic increase in the training of Latin Americanists and the resulting explosion of publications about the region by the end of the 1960s seemed to threaten with extinction the rara avis that had been the journal's stock in trade, the review of the literature. In 1974, when John Martz and I assumed control of LARR, it was hard to imagine anyone repeating Richard Morse's feat in the two-part article on urban studies, “Trends and Issues in Latin American Urban Research, 1965-1970” (LARR volume 6, numbers 1 and 2 [1971]). The mere suggestion of surveying the field of colonial history in three articles, as James Lockhart, Karen Spalding, and Frederick Bowser had done in 1972, would have brought an incredulous curl to the nether lip of a student of that field just two years later. The fact that we received virtually no backlog of manuscripts from our predecessors appeared symbolic of the well having run dry.

Historiographical advances in recent decades have emphasized increasingly the twentieth-century sources of American hegemony in Cuba. Two specific periods have served as the focus of these arguments: the years of the military occupation (1899-1902) and the decades of the Plattist republic, namely those years when Cuba was linked to the United States by virtue of the Permanent and Reciprocity treaties (1903-34). During these years, Cuban dependency certainly deepened and the character of the island acquired its definitive features as a client state. These twentieth-century developments, however, originated in nineteenth-century antecedents that contributed decisively to shaping events after 1895.

This article takes a governance perspective to examine the contemporary revitalization of Guaraní, a “repressed” language that is spoken by a majority of the population in Paraguay. A historical overview highlights the striking endurance of the language in spite of two centuries of official subjugation. The article traces the positive impact of political democratization since 1989 on the revitalization of Guaraní by examining four interrelated areas that are closely linked to the governance agenda: the education system, the media, the political system, and popular culture. However, the absence of a comprehensive language policy continues to limit progress in improving governance, as the weak impact of the official poverty reduction program exemplifies. The case of Guaraní demonstrates the need for wider recognition of the importance of language policy in promoting good governance through citizen empowerment and accountability of the state.