En el presente artículo vamos a trazar un recorrido crítico a través de dos grandes corrientes de pensamiento, a saber, la teoría de la dependencia y todos los estudios vinculados al problema de la colonialidad. Esa colonialidad, que constituye la forma última de la subyugación material y de la violencia epistémica ejercidas sobre los pueblos sojuzgados, también compondrá un cuerpo de relatos hegemónicos que constituirán la matriz misma en la que se insertan los regímenes coloniales del saber y del poder. Colonialidad que, por cierto, debería ser pronunciada en plural, toda vez que múltiples son los ámbitos que ella vertebra y determina. Dependencia y colonialidad, por otro lado, constituyen dos desarrollos teóricos que evidencian un gran potencial a la hora de desentrañar las diferentes dimensiones de esos complejos procesos políticos, económicos y culturales que conforman la dominación neocolonial.

Does national media news coverage affect the behavior of legislators when deciding foreign policy matters? This article aims to disentangle the relationship between the media and legislative behavior in foreign policy, using Paraguay as a case study. We analyze the level of public debate on international affairs, measured by the frequency of news in the newspaper ABC Color in the six months before the roll-call votes on the Chamber of Deputies of Paraguay. The literature on Latin American studies finds a lack of parliamentary interest in foreign affairs due to low voter attention to this subject, and therefore a low impact on reelections. We find the relationship between parliamentary polarization and public interest in a bill to be mediated by mass media. After estimating a Tobit model, we observe a significant and positive relationship between the news coverage a law receives and the degree of polarization among parliamentarians. Thus, our empirical evidence contradicts the idea that there is a lack of electoral interest in foreign policy. We confirm this finding through qualitative data gathered from in-depth interviews.

La presente nota de investigación aborda el tema de las representaciones sociales sobre la solidaridad, basada en una investigación recientemente realizada. El estudio intenta captar la circulación social del concepto de solidaridad, observando los discursos con que éste es construido, las prácticas que reflejan y los modos de vinculación social que promueven. Esta nota presenta las diferentes representaciones actuales sobre la solidaridad en tanto aparecen en piezas publicitarias del gobierno chileno, de empresas y de organizaciones sociales. En los llamados a la ciudadanía a ejercer la solidaridad, las diferencias entre estos discursos tienden a aminorarse y priman los valores neoliberales. Ello fundamenta la observación de una neoliberalización de la solidaridad. El estudio además concluye que este sustrato neoliberal del discurso solidario que utilizan las piezas publicitarias analizadas, pasa desapercibido al ciudadano común, que se centra principalmente en la presentación del tema, sólo muy extraordinariamente en la forma de presentación, y casi nunca en los efectos sociales de dicha enunciación.

This article explores the role “whiteness” takes on in Mexico, where colonial, religious, and social heritages elevate it as an aesthetic ideal, simultaneously denying its underlying racism. It argues that skin tone is one of many physical and nonphysical features that together shape the concept of whiteness in a context of fluid, relational, and intertwined categories of class and racial classifications. Women in particular are pressured to “whiten” their bodies in adherence to beauty standards that reflect the collective aspiration of the country’s ethnically mixed society. Using empirical evidence, the article outlines Mexicans’ aesthetic perceptions and explores their attempts to approach these through bodily presentations and adjustments. It then discusses how the local beauty industry acts as a practical tool and a discursive mediator toward racialized appearances. Possessing its own historical, political, and racial background deeply entangled with whiteness, this sector reinforces the subjective basis of discriminatory practices in Mexico.

This article examines medico-legal and popular interpretations of suicide in early twentieth-century Lima. In this period, often referred to as the Aristocratic Republic, physicians and lawyers interpreted suicide through the lens of modern scientific and legal thought and came to challenge the traditional interpretations of the Church, which insisted that suicide was a voluntary act. For these groups, suicide, almost invariably an act of madness, was essentially a modern phenomenon, both product and evidence of Lima's growing “modernity,” as well as a social disease that could be combated by adopting adequate policies. However, though they opposed the Church's insistence on the responsibility of the suicide, physicians and lawyers viewed the propensity to suicide as evidence of the moral and racial degeneration of Lima's population and shared the Church's condemnation of suicide as a shameful and immoral act. For ordinary people, medico-legal discourse on suicide provided an additional explanation for self-death. In particular, the idea that suicide was caused by forces over which no one had any real control, especially forces that were a product of the perceived “modernization” of Lima, such as neurasthenia (a nervous condition that became a widespread explanation for suicide at the time) helped in the need to dilute blame and guilt. But, although medico-legal and popular understandings of suicide cross-fertilized, attempts by ordinary people to apportion certain meanings to suicide, particularly those that constructed suicide as a voluntary act, were perceived by the medico-legal community, and, indeed, more broadly, as threats to society.

This article draws attention to archival research by Brazilian historians in Portugal and Brazil and the fruits of these labors in monographs, dissertations, and articles. Following a survey of historical writing in the colonial period, this essay discusses the growing movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to preserve documents in libraries, archives, and museums in Brazil. The existence of such institutions spurred divulgation of manuscript collections through journals and published transcriptions of documents. The essay then traces Brazilian historiography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as Brazilian responses to new trends in historical writing in the 1960s. A survey of archives consulted by scholars of colonial Brazil provides the background for the main section, which uses case studies to demonstrate how Brazilian historians have used these depositories. Scholarship published between 1983 and 1999 is emphasized. The intensive use of manuscript collections and the high quality of publications testify to the vitality of studies by Brazilian scholars of colonial Brazil.

In the past fifteen years, many Latin American cities have sponsored programs that promote reading through their city's public transportation systems. This article analyzes two of these programs, Libro al Viento in Bogotá, Colombia, and Santiago en 100 Palabras in Santiago, Chile, framed with examples from Buenos Aires, Argentina. These programs insert stories into public space to enhance social interaction and develop a positive sense of local belonging. Literary reading is harnessed as a socially embedded practice that can facilitate change, in response to previous periods of censorship and repression under dictatorship (in Chile) and political violence (in Colombia). Shifting the view of reading from an individual to a collective experience rather than focusing on functional literacy, these initiatives put literary reading to the service of civic and community development. The programs emerged during a period of increased investment by municipal governments in public space, including renovated subways and new bus rapid transit systems, and rely on a combination of public and private sponsorship. The intricate relationship between urban infrastructure and literary culture in these contemporary programs challenges but also perpetuates the role of the “lettered city.”

To Understand the development of research on latin america we must not overlook the present status of the social sciences throughout the world. One of the characteristics of the contemporary world is that distances hardly exist; scientists thus continually stage “invasions” from more developed into the so-called underdeveloped societies. Such phenomena, of course, existed in the past, too; the origin of anthropology is linked to the study of primitive societies in colonial times. The amount of resources available today, modern transportation facilities, and the constantly growing number of researchers make it increasingly impossible that one area or country could be without social scientists studying something.

The most prevalent criticism of U.S. policy toward Latin America is that it takes Latin America for granted or that Latin America would be better off if it did. According to this view, Latin America is either neglected or treated shabbily. The florid rhetoric that U.S. policymakers sometimes use to describe the “special relationship” with Latin America raises expectations that are never fulfilled. Abraham Lowenthal has repeatedly described this policy cycle as “a burst of interest followed by concrete decisions that contradict the very policies just announced.” He continues, “Whether calling its approach a ‘Good Neighbor Policy,’ an ‘Alliance for Progress,’ [or] a ‘Mature Partnership,’ one administration after another has promised to improve U.S.-Latin American relations,” but all have failed.

As Latin America has moved through the second half of the twentieth century, both the public and private sectors have required increasing levels of technological skills and specialized expertise. In the public sector, this necessity has occasioned the rise to prominence of a sector known in Latin America as profesionales y tcnicos. This emergent elite has assumed a significant role in shaping and implementing public policy because its members command skills critical to the functioning of modernizing technological society. As a result, participation by professionals and tcnicos has become central to bureaucratic efficiency, economic development, and the manipulation of symbols that reinforce political legitimacy. Yet the political role of professionals and tcnicos has been little explored, and direct relationships between professional elites and national parties, often central to the democratization of developing nations, have received minimal attention.