Since 2008, numerous Argentine documentary films have explored the complexities of prison education. Prison education documentaries from other countries usually focus overwhelmingly on the possible success of “rehabilitation.” In contrast, this article argues that contemporary Argentine prison education documentaries encourage critical, at times quasi-abolitionist, perspectives on imprisonment by challenging both punitive attitudes and liberal beliefs in the reinserción (reintegration) of prisoners into society. Analyzing the documentaries El almafuerte (dir. Roberto Sebastián Persano, Santiago Nacif Cabrera, and Andrés Martínez Cantó, Argentina, 2009), 13 puertas (dir. David Rubio, Argentina, 2014), Lunas cautivas (dir. Marcia Paradiso, Argentina, 2012), and Pabellón 4 (dir. Diego Gachassin, Argentina, 2017), it draws on insights from film studies and criminology to show how these films provide intersectional and structural critiques of imprisonment. “Touristic” and affective encounters between incarcerated and non-incarcerated people serve to challenge comfortable viewing positions predicated on internal-external carceral and cinematic divides. These films teach spectators that outside spaces, people, and institutions are all central to the meaning, problems, and incoherence of incarceration in Argentina.

This study identifies evidence of the influence of diversification and leverage on the financial performance of Brazilian and Mexican family businesses. It analyzes 102 Brazilian and 71 Mexican publicly traded family companies. Data analysis uses ordinary least squares regression in Stata. The results indicate that Brazilian family businesses have a higher return on assets when diversifying their products or services. When diversifying international markets, Brazilian companies present a lower return on assets and return on equity. For Mexican companies, international diversification derives a higher return on assets and return on equity. In addition, results show that leverage moderates the relationship between diversification and performance both for Brazilian and Mexican family businesses. The study contributes to the current literature by investigating that diversification improves business performance and that leverage is a significant element in intensifying the benefits of this strategy in the performance of family businesses. The study also emphasizes that diversification can be useful to address market difficulties and imperfections in unstable scenarios, such as when it is targeted to planned performance and considers financial conservatism in family companies.

The study of history in Ecuador is still in its infancy. Too few foreign scholars have ventured into the country's past and most Ecuadorean historians have failed to produce well-researched studies. Consequently, generalization and bias have passed for scholarship. Although there are many reasons for the backward state of Educadorean historiography, perhaps the most important has been the poor condition of the nation's archives. During the last decade, however, libraries and repositories in the country have improved tremendously. While not yet the equal of research facilities in many other Latin American nations, still it is now possible to do historical research with relative ease in Ecuador.

In 1949 the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress published A Guide to the Art of Latin America (gala), an annotated bibliography of the literature on Latin America since the Conquest; it covered the years up to 1942, when the Handbook of Latin American Studies (hlas) had begun its annual bibliographies. “It is a startling fact” the Introduction begins, “that no single work deals comprehensively with the history of art in the Latin American countries.”

Este trabajo analiza tres momentos entre las décadas de 1930 y 1940 que permiten comprender el proceso por el cual el Estado, los empresarios cinematográficos y el clero y el laicado católico se consolidaron como los actores más influyentes del cine en Argentina. Se abordan la redefinición de los vínculos entre las ramas del empresariado y el surgimiento de una producción cinematográfica industrial en el marco de las transformaciones provocadas por la implementación del sonoro y el impacto de la crisis económica mundial; el desarrollo de oficinas de moralidad católicas en el marco de la experiencia de imbricación institucional de Estado e Iglesia católica; y la elaboración de una política estatal de protección y fomento cinematográfico que produjo una identificación de intereses de empresarios productores y Estado, en el contexto de las sanciones de Estados Unidos a Argentina durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El trabajo discute el concepto de autonomía relativa relacionada a la teoría de los campos de Bourdieu y la problematización de este concepto a la luz de un arte industrial como la cinematografía, proponiendo entender la participación de estos actores en el campo cinematográfico a partir del análisis de modos concretos de reestructuraciones internas de influencias externas.

Almost a century ago, long before biodiversity expressed a scientific value for nature, Latin American countries began establishing national parks. Today, they represent over 6 percent of Latin America’s landmass. By considering national park creation across a broad regional span and six crucial decades, this article explains a mode of state formation focused on caring for nature instead of just exploiting it. It examines how national parks expanded in the region by identifying three consequent trajectories: the use of these conservation units for frontier development in Argentina and as part of a broader project seeking social justice in Mexico; the formation of more haphazard park initiatives in various countries, taking Brazil and Chile as main examples; and the development of ecologically coherent park systems through the cases of Peru and Colombia. The article also addresses the role of science (especially forestry) and international cooperation in shaping national parks. In this manner, it uncovers the paths that faded from view after the idea that parks intend to protect biodiversity took hold and illustrates a rarely acknowledged aspect of state expansion.

La cifra de desaparecidos en Argentina motiva debates recurrentes. Durante la última dictadura militar (1976–1983) sus denunciantes elaboraron diversas cifras y estimaciones pero el número de 30 mil desaparecidos adquirió un carácter canónico. Tras retornar la democracia, la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas registró 8.960 casos. En los años noventa, en un contexto de impunidad, grupos de la sociedad civil elaboraron sus propias cifras y en los dos mil el Estado ofreció nuevos registros. El resurgimiento del negacionismo y la relativización del crimen revitalizaron este debate. Este trabajo historiza las cifras de desaparecidos y víctimas de desaparición forzada elaboradas por diversos actores y propone una aproximación académica sobre el tema. Comprende a estas cifras en su doble dimensión: como fruto de la elaboración de conocimiento sobre las desapariciones y como expresión de los combates por la memoria sobre las violaciones a los derechos humanos sucedidas en el país.

This essay reviews the following films:

Aborto en Colombia / Abortion in Colombia. Dir. Nicolás Cuenca Rodríguez and Ángela Amaya Aguirre. Prod. Nicolás Cuenca Rodríguez and Ángela Amaya Aguirre. Colombia, 2021,16 min. Film is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahjO46Hwokw.

Fly so Far. Dir. Celina Escher. Prod. Women Make Movies and Prämfilm. El Salvador and Sweden, 2021, 88 min. Film is available on Vimeo and DVD.

Las Libres: La historia después de … / Las Libres: The Story Continues. Dir. Gustavo Montaña in collaboration with Centro Las Libres. Prod. At Dusk Media. Mexico, 2014, 94 min. Film is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpW7KJblkbc.

Que sea ley / Let It Be Law. Dir. Juan Solanas. Prod. Cinesur, Les Films du Sud, and Gameland. Argentina, France, and Uruguay, 2019, 86 min.

This essay reviews the following works:

The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Anthony Knivet: An English Pirate in Sixteenth-Century Brazil. Edited by Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 230. $25.19 paper. ISBN: 9781107463004.

Privateering, Piracy, and British Policy in Spanish America, 1810–1830. By Matthew McCarthy. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2013. Pp. vi + 184. $115.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781843838616.

Monsters by Trade: Slave Traffickers in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture. By Lisa Surwillo. Stanford, CA: Sanford University Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 251. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804788793.

Amistad: A Hidden Network of Slavers and Merchants. By Michael Zeuske. Translated from the German by Steven Rendall. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2015. Pp. vii + 267. $24.10 paper. ISBN: 9781558765931.

Roberto González Echevarría's recent article in LARR, “The Dictatorship of Rhetoric/The Rhetoric of Dictatorship: Carpentier, García Márquez and Roa Bastos,” though elegantly written and full of ideas, seems to me to have confused almost every issue it raises and to have evaded other equally important issues rather than confront them. The persistent, largely unspoken promise of his text is that it will illuminate both history and literature by separating and contrasting them, whereas in fact it surrenders completely to the latest version of the literary critic's traditional means of escape. Where previously it used to be said that history was the realm of mundane reality and literature the realm of the imagination, critics now tell us that the twentieth century has proved that all reality is fictive and that the borders between reality and what used to be called fiction are impossible to draw, all men's actions and reactions forming and being formed from a seamless web of invisibly structured discourse. This is evidently RGE's view, and the influence of French structuralism is apparent in his text.

This article studies how the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and, more generally, neoliberalism rearticulate the opposition between civilization and barbarism, and the vision of the world that underlies it. During a time in which many intellectuals have embraced a relativistic notion of culture that makes judgment problematic, neoliberals embrace this clear-cut value hierarchy with complete abandonment. In fact, one cannot but be surprised by the ease with which Vargas Llosa makes pronouncements based on the identification of individuals, groups, and political movements with either civilization or barbarism. However, the fact is that his reference to this dichotomy differs substantially from its nineteenth-century version and its colonial precedents. The implicitly racial hierarchization proposed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other nineteenth-century thinkers has been replaced in Vargas Llosa's writings by one based on cultural and social values.

From 1908 until 1973, unknown to most of his countrymen and to Latin Americanists, a Peruvian photographer with an artist's eye compiled a remarkable visual and artistic record of the Peruvian highlands, a record that is just being brought to light. During these years, Martin Chambi, a professional, creative photographer, took more than sixteen thousand photographs, all of which have been retained by his family. Through the efforts of Edward Ranney and the photographer's oldest son, Victor Chambi, this invaluable resource will soon become available for use by authors, artists, and scholars of Latin America. Ranney, a free-lance photographer and a student of archeology, first became aware of Chambi's work during his field trips to Cuzco, Peru, where he spent many months producing his own work, including a forthcoming photographic document on Inca architecture. As he became more familiar with the elder Chambi's work, Ranney soon realized the early artistic eye of this photographer and the superb documentary record he left behind of people, places, and historical events in Cuzco and its surrounding archeological sites and indigenous cultures.

La comunidad indígena Dojura (Emberá-Chamí) en Colombia está olvidando su iconografía tradicional, debido a que perdieron el contacto con sus territorios ancestrales por diferentes eventos de desplazamiento forzado. Por ello, se propuso construir una metodología de recuperación de símbolos a partir del modelo SECI (Socialización, Exteriorización, Combinación e Interiorización) de Nonaka, con lo cual, se espera lograr una sistematización de signos y a su vez una resignificación en la comunidad de modo que su cosmogonía en los territorios que habitan actualmente, les permita obtener sentido de pertenencia con su entorno. El trabajo llevado a cabo permite mostrar cómo a través de la sistematización de esta experiencia y con distintos ejercicios de generación de conocimiento, es posible recuperar los símbolos y permitir que haya un proceso de aprendizaje en la comunidad, como parte de los procesos de salvaguarda de la práctica cultural del tejido en chaquira.