Although the knotted cord texts known as khipus have been created in the Andes for over a millennium (ca. AD 950–1950), their historical philology has been little understood. This study, based on original archival and ethnographic research, analyzes hybrid khipu/alphabetic texts known as “khipu boards,” examining their development in colonial Peru, and their role in twentieth-century Andean rituals. Particular attention is paid to a previously unknown sacred manuscript, the Entablo, from the community of San Pedro de Casta, Peru, which describes how villagers used khipu boards in their annual religious ceremonies until the 1950s. This study reveals new insights into the social and symbolic nature of post-Inka khipus as texts, particularly with reference to gender, place, and knowledge.

In 1926, the Fox Film Corporation held a “Masculine and Feminine Photogenic Beauty Contest” to find Hollywood’s newest “Latin” star in Brazil and other countries. North American film representatives asked for contestants who were “white with Latin blood.” The exotic allure of this racialized category contradicted Brazilian elites’ preference for eugenic, chaste, white beauty. Brazilian film critics, advertisers, and beauty contestants negotiated transnational standards of beauty as they sought faces, bodies, and sexual appeal that would conquer Hollywood. Ultimately, Brazilian films intellectuals forged their own meanings of “white with Latin blood” even as they upheld the supremacy of white beauty. However, the contest demonstrates how the transnational contours of cinema offered a liminal space for competing standards of racialized beauty in Brazil.

This article traces the origins of María Elena Velasco’s comic character “la India María” through what Fatimah Tobing Rony has labeled ethnographic film. It explores how Velasco’s first film, Tonta, tonta, pero no tanto (dir. Fernando Cortés, Mexico, 1972), borrows conventional linguistic and performative representations from the so-called Indigenista films of Emilio “Indio” Fernández and Benito Alazraki. The essay also studies how popular discourses regarding Indigenous intelligence and the trope of illiterate Natives as “burros” coincide with the state ideologies behind comic representations of Indigenous characters.

Although the study of international relations is among the oldest fields of Latin American history, historians have not fully exploited the diplomatic archives of that region. No doubt the main obstacle has been the restrictive policies of the Latin American chancelleries, which have tended to view all diplomatic correspondence as inherently sensitive, particularly since boundary disputes have survived in many cases until the present moment. For this and other reasons, the study of Latin American foreign relations has lagged far behind that of Europe and the United States. Among Latin Americans, ex-ambassadors seem more prolific than professional historians in the field of diplomatic history; their works vary tremendously in quality, from the valuable studies of Cardozo (1961) and Herrera (1908-1927, 1930) to a host of mediocre treatments. European and North American historians have tended to focus on diplomatic contacts with the Great Powers, whose archives are more easily accessible, and to see Latin American foreign relations from the vantage point of the Great Powers. Such products include the classic works of Manchester (1933) and Robertson (1939) and the more recent studies of Burns (1966) and Wood (1966). Some works dealing with inter-American relations—e.g., Tulchin (1971) and Wood (1961, 1966)—define their topics so as to use no Latin American archival materials at all; others, such as Parks (1935) define their topics more broadly but still use United States or British archives exclusively.

El artículo examina la relación entre institucionalización del movimiento indígena boliviano y su dinámica en el sentido de su actividad de protesta y su cohesión interna durante el período 1997–2014, para capturar el posible cambio en la institucionalización del movimiento con la llegada de Evo Morales al poder en 2006. En base al estudio hemerográfico de la prensa boliviana, el análisis concluye que el movimiento indígena pasó por la institucionalización bajo el gobierno de Morales, el hecho que está reflejado en la creciente representación indígena en las estructuras del poder estatal. Sin embargo, la institucionalización era un proceso selectivo y prefirió organizaciones campesinas antes que el sector indígena originario, que al contrario experimentó más bien cooptación que institucionalización. La selectividad del proceso produjo diferentes efectos en la movilización de las organizaciones individuales. La política favorable y el acceso a la estructura estatal moderó al sector campesino, mientras las organizaciones indígenas originarias afrontaron las estrategias gubernamentales de división.

This study analyzes variations in the incidence of state involvement in investment treaty arbitration in Latin America and the Caribbean over the 1987–2014 period. Its main contributions are fourfold. First, by focusing on the balance of incentives and opportunities facing political leaders and foreign investors, the study establishes a new basis for understanding the reasons actors opt for the risks and uncertainties of international arbitration instead of resolving international investment disputes via alternative means. Second, by restricting the focus of research to the Latin American region, the study is able to move beyond the analysis of relatively time-invariant structural and institutional conditions and crude indicators to address the role played by the preferences of political actors. Third, by disaggregating disputes by sector of investment, the analysis documents the variable role of ideology and electoral incentives in investment treaty arbitration. Finally, by underlining the distinctiveness of the Latin American experience with investment treaty arbitration, the study offers new insights into the global backlash against investment treaty arbitration, which has gone farther in the region than anywhere else. Overall, the results underline the potential payoffs of breaking down the international experience with investment treaty arbitration into regional patterns to obtain a deeper and more granular understanding of the political economy of investor-state dispute settlement.

This essay reviews the following works:

• Anatomía de la derecha chilena: Estado, mercado y valores en tiempos de cambio. Edited by Stéphanie Alenda. Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica and Universidad Andrés Bello, 2020. Pp. 380. $19.04 paperback. ISBN: 9789562892025.

• Presidencialismo a la chilena: Coaliciones y cooperación política, 1990–2018. By Mireya Dávila Avendaño. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2020. Pp. 312. $20.36 paperback. ISBN: 9789561126923.

• La transición inacabada: El proceso político chileno 1990–2020. By Claudio Fuentes S. Santiago: Catalonia, 2021. Pp. 392. $22.64 paperback. ISBN: 9789563248388.

• Política y movimientos sociales en Chile: Antecedentes y proyecciones del estallido social de octubre 2019. Edited by Manuel Antonio Garretón. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2021. Pp. 308. $17.97 paperback. ISBN: 9789560014061.

• La democracia semisoberana: Chile después de Pinochet. By Carlos Huneeus. Santiago: Taurus, 2014. Pp. 614. $32.34 paperback. ISBN: 9789563477832.

• The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile. By Fernando Ignacio Leiva. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 391. $33.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781438483610.

• En vez del optimismo: Crisis de representación política en el Chile actual. By Juan Pablo Luna. Santiago: Catalonia, 2017. Pp. 151. $12.58 paperback. ISBN: 9789563245431.

• La chusma inconsciente: La crisis de un país atendido por sus propios dueños. By Juan Pablo Luna. Santiago: Catalonia, 2021. Pp. 377. $14.02 paperback. ISBN: 9789563248999.

• Neoliberal Resilience: Lessons in Democracy and Development from Latin America and Eastern Europe. By Aldo Madariaga. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 348. $43.81 hardcover. ISBN: 9780691182599.

• Octubre chileno: La irrupción de un nuevo pueblo. By Carlos Ruiz Encina. Santiago: Penguin Random House, 2020. Pp. 117. $10.78. ISBN: 9789566042259.

Este artigo é uma análise histórica das relações entre nacionalismo, biogeografia, internacionalismo e conservação da natureza no Brasil nas décadas de 1930 e 1940. A produção e a divulgação do conhecimento biológico mostraram-se repletas de conteúdos políticos e se ligaram a diversas ações intelectuais e políticas mais amplas para a construção de uma identidade nacional. Privilegiando a obra do zoólogo Cândido de Mello Leitão, argumento que o estudo da zoogeografía permitiu-lhe adotar uma abordagem inovadora e complexa sobre a fauna brasileira. Suas análises evidenciavam o caráter ínfimo da história humana e das fronteiras políticas, no âmbito maior das eras geológicas e da vida na Terra. Nesse processo, Mello Leitão relativizou o tempo e o espaço da nação brasileira, aproximandose das tendências crescentemente internacionalistas do conservacionismo.

Increasingly, historians of and in the Latin American countries are turning to quantitative data and analysis. TePaske (1972, 1975), Smith (1973), and McGreevey (1972, 1974) comment on work that has been and is being done and on problems inherent in quantification. The problems that students face as quantifiers of the past may be summarized under the rubrics: (1) sources, (2) methodology, (3) training, and (4) financing. It is with the first of these that this article is concerned, especially with sources for quantifying the nineteenth century after independence, a period neglected almost as much as the seventeenth century used to be, at least insofar as the smaller countries are concerned, except for their politics and personages.

Shortly after the coup of 11 September 1973 in Chile, nine people came together in the Los Angeles area to express their outrage on film: Seven were students and teachers who had been in Chile, two were politically committed filmmakers. The product of this union was the fifty-five-minute documentary “Chile with Poems and Guns” which reached several thousand international viewers during the first year after its release. Twice aired on Los Angeles television, the film was selected for distribution by Tricontinental Film Center. It also received scholarly notice, being included on the October 1974 program of the Pacific Coast Council of Latin American Studies at UCLA and the November meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in San Francisco.