This essay reviews the following works:

From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico. By Miruna Achim. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. ix+ 327. $30.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781496203373.

Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu. By Amy Cox Hall. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 267. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477313688.

Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology. By Lesley Green and David R. Green. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. Pp.vi + 308. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816530373.

Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas. By Jennifer Jolly. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 340. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477314203.

Nature and Antiquities: The Making of Archaeology in the Americas. Edited by Philip L. Kohl, Irina Podgorny, and Stefanie Gänger. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 246. $60.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816531127.

Our Indigenous Ancestors: A Cultural History of Museums, Science, and Identity in Argentina, 1877–1943. By Carolyne R. Larson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 221. $79.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780271066967.

Maya Cultural Heritage: How Archaeologists and Indigenous Communities Engage the Past. By Patricia A. McAnany. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. ix + 245. $85.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781442241275.

Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru. By Mark Rice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 233. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469643533.

The widespread violence in Mexico by state and nonstate actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to define has proven difficult from a bureaucratic, political, and aesthetic perspective. This article examines and contrasts three commemorative and transformative memorial interventions to show that in a context that lacks a clear transition and access to justice, memory activists respond to the state in a playing field that is not simply concerned with a politics of memory—who gets to decide how to remember the past—but with delineating the past from both the present and the future in the first place: a politics of time.

En Latinoamérica, la transición demográfica se desarrolla, en general, de la misma manera en la que se desarrolló en Europa. No obstante, los efectos demográficos del proceso de modernización son muy variados, especialmente en grupos indígenas. Desde los años treinta las poblaciones indígenas del Gran Chaco Argentino comenzaron un proceso de modernización. El objetivo de este trabajo fue analizar los cambios demográficos en una población toba del norte de Argentina. Se utilizaron los censos de los años 1985 y 2002, registros de nacimientos y defunción de agentes sanitarios toba, del centro médico, del Registro Civil y entrevistas a mujeres tobas. Se estimó la tasa de crecimiento poblacional; se analizaron pirámides poblaciones y se obtuvo el índice de masculinidad, la tasa de mortalidad infantil y la tasa global de fecundidad. El crecimiento poblacional fue similar al provincial, se evidenció un rejuvenecimiento de la población, un moderado descenso de la mortalidad infantil y un aumento de la fecundidad. Se discute la necesidad de desarrollar modelos más integradores que consideren las variaciones demográficas de estos grupos.

Trade in consumer electronics and household appliances in Bolivia operates mainly from popular marketplaces. Multinational corporations enter these once informal, now enhanced economies. This article analyses the expansion of global brands into urban street markets, together with the local branding of electronics and the advancement of popular traders along transnational commodity chains. I argue that these socio-spatial transitions offer a counterintuitive articulation between the informal and the formal. Looking at specific localities along the commodity chain from East Asia to Chile and Bolivia, one sees not mere formalization of informal economies as often expected nor a rampant informalization as attributed to current economic globalization, but piecemeal formalization of traders as much as a partial informalization of all actors involved.

These contrasting pronouncements on Christopher Columbus's transatlantic navigation in 1492 crystalize the extreme division of opinion that characterized the recent quincentennial. The five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage inspired among other things a world's fair, several replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, two feature films, and an opera. Commemoration of the event also inspired, in time-honored tradition, the publication of thousands of works dedicated to this major event. Thus although publishing technology is speeding along toward electronic rather than printed images, the fifth centennial of Columbus's voyage has been marked most significantly by the rolling of the presses.

Years before Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced a “thaw” in US-Cuba relations on December 17, 2014 (17D), Cubans were intensifying ties through the transnational circulation of popular culture. To understand Cuba and its diaspora in the twenty-first century, it is essential that we attend to the transnational networks in place before 17D that continue to shape quotidian life for people on and off the island. I begin in Miami, with the “afterlives” of a comic variety show called Sabadazo—popular on the island during the 1990s—to illustrate how what it means to be Cuban, politically and culturally, has shifted away from the exile generation that arrived in the 1960s and 1970s. I complement this analysis with attention to generational tensions within the diaspora and representations of race and sexuality. I then move to the island to examine el paquete (the package), a terabyte’s worth of mostly foreign media updated and distributed across the island weekly. I contend that the economic and cultural impact of el paquete cannot be fully understood without careful consideration of the role of the Cuban diaspora.

As in the case of Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the Organization of American States (OAS) are greatly exaggerated. Certainly it is not operating at peak performance. However, neither is it the moribund institution that the mass media would have us believe—although some recent reports of the General Assembly meeting in Santiago have given us glimmerings of hope for a rebirth. It is the purpose of this report to investigate the status of one of the major aspects of the contemporary OAS reform efforts—the peaceful settlement of disputes within the organization's structure. The indefinite postponement of this particular issue cannot belie the fact—amply demonstrated in the debates of the Special Committee to Study the Inter-American System and Propose Measures for Restructuring It, the Conference of Plenipotentiaries to Amend the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, and the Permanent Council—that the resolution of disputes is of fundamental importance to the nations of the hemisphere and that there is some degree of relative satisfaction over past OAS performance in that area. It would thus be appropriate for students of inter-American relations to take a greater scholarly interest in the OAS than is now the case.

This essay reviews the following works:

Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production. By Sarah Bowen. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xvii + 260. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520281059.

Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural History. Edited by Gretchen Pierce and Áurea Toxqui. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 306. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780816530762.

Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. By Deborah Toner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. vi + 346. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9780803274327.