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.

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.

Since the mid-1990s, some rightist governments in Latin America have adhered to a strict market orientation while others have shown less attachment to doctrinaire neoliberal policies, a puzzle as rightists are expected to favor minimal government intervention in the economy. In an environment over the past two decades in which market-oriented policies, in general, have grown increasingly unpopular with many Latin Americans, we contend that rightists have less political cover to endorse neoliberal policies. Using panel data for eighteen Latin American countries from 1995 to 2015, we find that, because of the clarity of responsibility that occurs under political mandates and the unpopularity of market reforms, mandate-holding rightist governments will tend to go against their ideological preferences and decrease neoliberal policies. Our findings indicate that as presidential vote margins increase and responsibility for unpopular economic policies becomes clearer, rightist executives will be less willing to support such policies, but only to a point. The results suggest that clarity of responsibility can influence presidential decision-making concerning unpopular policies, especially microeconomic policies, but this influence diminishes as presidents become more electorally secure.

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.

This article examines one formative moment in the making of a working class in Brazil to show how workers refashioned multiple identities in response to interlocking structural transformations from artisanal to factory production, from homogeneous to heterogeneous ethnic communities, and from a male labor force to one that was increasingly female. Anarchist labor organizers contested the myth of the happy artisan and conflated the exploitation of artisans and factory workers to advance class consciousness. Ethnic ties that had initially fostered organization began to hamper class solidarity, now strained under new ideological conflicts, and facilitated effective resistance from employers. As appeals to ethnicity became problematic, appeals to gender emerged: women workers made themselves visible and audible and played an important role in the evolution of the movement. The ways in which they were seen and heard in the streets, however, contrasted with their representations in elite discourse, which sought to use gender to manipulate divisions within the emerging working class.

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.

This article seeks to understand the relationship between populism and participatory democracy through analysis of Rafael Correa’s left populist regime in Ecuador (2007–2017). It argues that rather than adhering to its own standard for participatory democracy, what the Correa regime referred to as the “Socialism of Buen Vivir,” it employed the rhetoric of participatory democracy in the service of populist rule. As a result, the Correa regime failed to promote the participatory form of democracy and citizenship promised in Buen Vivir, its version of twenty-first-century socialism. Accordingly, analysis of the Correa regime demonstrates how the concentration of top-down executive power characteristic of populism in general, and rentier populism in particular, impedes the egalitarian and solidaristic mission of participatory democracy. Thus, inductive analysis of the Correa regime reinforces the conceptual understanding that populism is antagonistic and antithetical to participatory democracy.

As the Secretary of State looks out over the Potomac River, pondering reports from his embassies to the south, the fundamental question: “What is it?” comes to him again and again. Is a new regime in a Latin American country controlled by “agrarian reformers,” “moderate socialists,” “malleable leftists,” “Christian Democrats,” “safe militarists,” or—others?