Do Latin American citizens admire the United States for its material wealth and the opportunities this creates for them, or do they revile the United States because of the military and economic threat it has historically posed? Both narratives have a strong presence in Latin American societies, and much scholarship on mass anti-Americanism in the region portrays the dominant narrative as one of the United States as threat. In this article, we consult surveys from contemporary Latin America and find that various forms of ongoing economic exchange with the United States—trade, aid, migration, and remittances—are the primary influence on mass perception of the northern hegemon and actually promote goodwill, rather than bitterness, toward the United States. Moreover, we demonstrate that the most powerful channel through which economic exchange does so is consumption: inflows of US imports boost pro-American sentiment more than do other forms of exchange. In contrast, the legacy of US imperialism has little resonance in mass beliefs about the colossus of the north.

In an era of increasing economic liberalization, much has been written on the challenges facing alternative trade movements. Religion is often overlooked in such research, and I examine how the faith identity of one set of actors influenced their involvement in the Central American coffee trade. On the basis of ethnographic research in Nicaragua, I examine how religious networks, ethics, and values shaped the economic behaviors of an evangelical Christian coffee network. Ultimately, I find religion had a mixed impact. Local networks brought actors together in a common mission for economic justice, although transnational connections mattered little beyond providing aid. Although religious' ethics promoted a sense of fairness, more radical was a focus on transparency, which altered economic relationships among those in the coffee chain. Finally, actors leveraged their spiritual vision to challenge market dynamics and redefine the coffee product, although this vision both constrained and advanced efforts toward true empowerment of farmers.

This study employs an original, nationally representative survey of citizens in Argentina to understand the economic and political factors that shape individual-level preferences for social insurance. In the past two decades, Latin American democracies have undergone significant changes in their social welfare institutions, in some cases dramatically reversing course from previous policies. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how and when citizens shift their preferences for competing social policy proposals. We emphasize the role of dissatisfaction with prevailing policies in creating political opportunities for the introduction of sweeping reforms. Our survey capitalizes on the 2008 pension reform in Argentina to test competing hypotheses regarding preferences for different policies of old-age insurance. We find that dissatisfaction with existing private policies increases individual-level support for policy reform across all citizens, whereas partisanship has a more restricted effect, shaping preferences only among middle- and low-income respondents.

En este artículo describimos algunas de las transformaciones culturales acaecidas en Buenos Aires en las últimas décadas con el desarrollo de una economía simbólica de la ciudad. Desde una perspectiva de políticas culturales analizamos el enfoque de las autoridades locales hacia la creatividad y la deriva de una noción de industrias culturales hacia otra de industrias creativas. Nos centramos en la raigambre y las implicaciones de esa mutación, señalando algunos problemas teóricos y metodológicos irresueltos tanto en el marco de la ciudad como en las propuestas nacionales e internacionales de las que abreva. Consideramos particularmente las derivaciones de iniciativas de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (UNESCO, por sus siglas en inglés) y de la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas para el Comercio y el Desarrollo (UNCTAD, por sus siglas en inglés). Sostenemos que los nuevos enfoques hacia las industrias creativas difuminan las políticas culturales de promoción de la diversidad cultural y los derechos culturales.

Latin American elites authored and disseminated ideologies of mestizaje or race mixture, but does the general population value them today? Using the 2010 Americas Barometer, we examined public opinion about mestizaje in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using survey questions that modeled mestizaje both as a principle of national development and as tolerance for intermarriage with black or indigenous people. We found that most Latin Americans support mestizaje, although support varies by country and ethnicity. Across countries, we find partial evidence that the strength of earlier nation-making mestizaje ideas is related to support for mestizaje today, and that strong multicultural policies may have actually strengthened such support. Ethnoracial minorities showed particular support for the national principle of mestizaje. Finally, we discovered that the national principle of mestizaje is associated with more tolerant attitudes about intermarriage, especially in countries with large Afro-descendant populations.

El presente artículo combina la reflexión académica con la propuesta política. Retoma la pregunta sobre la importancia de las políticas culturales e intenta fundamentar una nueva respuesta. Sostiene que las políticas culturales no pueden concentrarse únicamente en la pura organización de eventos. Más allá del fomento a la producción cultural, del establecimiento de mejores mecanismos para su circulación y de dirigirse a públicos diferenciados, el ensayo apuesta por una política cultural que apunte a la deconstrucción de los imaginarios hegemónicos, vale decir, al intento por intervenir en aquellos sentidos comunes que se encuentran hondamente afianzados en los habitus sociales. Si el capitalismo contemporáneo basa buena parte de su poder en la dominación simbólica, este ensayo entiende que los símbolos y la cultura en general son igualmente un lugar de respuesta.

In this article I consider the temporality of postapocalyptic narrative and use a contemporary postapocalyptic novel, Plop (2004), by the Argentine author Rafael Pinedo, to open up new considerations of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's classic Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845). Following the method proposed by Jorge Luis Borges (1966) in “Kafka and His Precursors,” it is my position that Pinedos novel invents a new, postapocalyptic Facundo, thus converting Sarmiento into one of the American continent's first postapocalyptic authors. Furthermore, Pinedos novel reframes the “civilization or barbarism” debate under the contemporary sign of ecological catastrophe, allowing the reader to arrive at new and startling conclusions about language, the environment, and disaster.

Comparative analysis of two Salvadoran towns with similar patterns of international migration but different historical land-tenure patterns reveals the emergence of radically different development strategies. Whereas in one case, mostly landed households with a history of farming commercially have been selling land and abandoning agriculture, in the other case, previously landless households whose members worked as sharecroppers before the onset of migration have been acquiring land and farming as much as possible. The opposite processes at work in these two cases raise important theoretical questions for both migration and development studies. Using ethnographic, census, and historical data, I examine how and why land ownership, under particular historical circumstances, conditions the impact of migration on development.

Chile es uno de los países con mayor concentración del ingreso a nivel mundial. Dada la relación entre alta desigualdad económica y patrones de estratificación social, en tal contexto se esperaría una alta dispersión de las percepciones respecto del propio estatus o estatus social subjetivo. Sin embargo, la evidencia internacional señala una marcada tendencia hacia la media del estatus subjetivo, es decir, existirían distorsiones del estatus subjetivo respecto del estatus objetivo. La presente investigación intenta profundizar en este aspecto para el caso de Chile, particularmente en la relación entre estatus socioeconómico, clase social y estatus subjetivo. Los datos a analizar corresponden al módulo de desigualdad económica de la encuesta International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), en su versión del año 2009 para Chile. Los resultados indican una marcada tendencia en la población hacia la media del estatus subjetivo, principalmente de parte de aquellos con mayor estatus objetivo.

Like many Guatemalan documents referred to by scholars in the past, the Libros Segundo y Tercero del Cabildo de Guatemala (Books Two and Three of the City Council of Santiago de Guatemala) have long been thought to be missing, thereby removing from consultation key sources concerning the events and circumstances of the early colonial period. It turns out that these two tomes, which span the years between 1530 and 1553, are not missing and have been part of the holdings of the Hispanic Society of America for the past century. We discuss how other documentary treasures were taken from Guatemala or disappeared from circulation altogether, identifying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the period during which national patrimony was most under threat from both internal and external forces.

Much of the literature on political economy expects complementarities between (universal) welfare regimes and production regimes. This article draws from Costa Rica's showcase of human development and universalistic social policies to address how the production regime supports and constrains the welfare regime. We show that there were some positive relations between the two regimes at various points but that they were neither fully nor mostly complementary. At the heart of our interpretation of Costa Rica's performance—and Latin America's pervasive lack of complementarities—lies the dominance of structural heterogeneity in the production regime. Our analysis has significant implications for current theoretical and policy debates in Costa Rica and elsewhere. At the theoretical level, we highlight key features of production in Latin America and the need to consider such material bases as part of robust welfare policies. At the policy level, our argument stresses the importance of promoting both leading and low-productivity sectors simultaneously and of securing stable funding mechanisms for the welfare regime. Our article thus offers a cautionary note to Latin American countries slowly moving toward the creation or re-creation of universal social programs in the context of relatively unchanged production regimes. Since tensions between production and welfare regimes may also be appearing in a growing number of postindustrialized developed countries, theoretical and policy implications can easily travel beyond Latin America.

La ponencia “La función ideológica de la historiografía cubana en la década del sesenta del siglo XX”, analiza, desde una perspectiva general, el mundo ideológico de los años sesenta en Cuba y la unidad concreta que se da entre el discurso político y la producción historiográfica de la etapa. Se define esta historiografía como un arma ideológica fundamental para legitimar el presente revolucionario y el nuevo ideal social que lo guiaba. Se resume brevemente la política editorial e institucional de esta primera década revolucionaria orientada a convertir la historia en un fenómeno de masas y en una fuente esencialmente ideológica capaz de crear, no sólo en los intelectuales, sino en la totalidad del pueblo cubano, la nueva conciencia socialista. Se describen los temas fundamentales de esta historiografía, haciendo un apartado en el tema de la formación de la nación cubana, destacando la significación ideológica de cada una de estas temáticas y del tema de la formación nacional en particular, dada su importancia central en la historiografía de la década. Se enumeran y describen de forma general los aspectos en que se da el tratamiento teórico de este tema, así como los autores y las obras emblemáticas. Se hace referencia al hecho de que, a pesar del impulso que la Revolución dio al oficio del historiador y a la historia como ciencia propiamente, la producción historiográfica de dicha etapa resultó más reinterpretativa que investigativa, lo que denota la sublimación de su función ideológica por encima de la teórica.

This research report explores critical and methodological approaches to game studies, or ludology, contextualizing them within the field of Latin American cultural studies. It provides evidence of the growing influence of video games and explains major ludological concepts such as simulation and remediation, providing the theoretical and critical background necessary for the development of research on games and their cultural impact in the region. The report goes on to offer a preliminary taxonomy of Latin American cultural simulations in video games, thoroughly discussing examples of existing portrayals as well as laying the groundwork for further critical inquiry in this burgeoning field of study.