This essay explores the various ways Mexicans and Colombians envisioned and employed modernity in the nineteenth century, especially the flourishing and collapse of an alternative mentalité I call American republican modernity. I argue that in the late 1840s a vision of civilization emerged that privileged political progress, measured by the success of republican projects and the enactment of extensive citizens' rights, as a marker of modernity over older visions, defined by high culture or wealth. Because conceptions of modernity deeply affected the hegemonic rules of political life in Spanish America, I also suggest how such a discourse enabled subalterns to exploit this language to promote their inclusion in new nation-states. The article concludes by exploring the collapse of this alternative modernity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Western notions of modernity—involving technological innovation, industrialization, and state power—became dominant.

Although much has been written on civil society participation in the formulation and monitoring of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), very little systematic and scientific evidence exists on the kind of organizations that participate and the elements that explain their involvement in these processes. This article considers one country case, Honduras, for which survey data were gathered from 101 civil society organizations (CSOs) in 2006. This study examines the characteristics these organizations display which explain (non)participation in the next participatory round of the PRSPs. The findings challenge some of the by now widely accepted ideas relating to the kinds of organizations involved in PRSP processes. The idea that predominantly urban-based, highly professional, well-funded, donor-bred-and-fed nongovernmental organizations participate is too blunt. The Honduran case shows that the players in participative processes are more diversified than much of the current literature on PRSPs suggests.

In the national consciousness, Ecuador is a mestizo nation. However, it is also an ethnically diverse nation with sizable minorities of indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. In national surveys, there is also a considerable minority who self-identify as blanco (white). Although there is strong evidence of continuing discrimination and prejudice toward both indigenous and Afro-descended peoples, there is little public discussion or political action addressing such issues. The emergence of a powerful and resilient indigenous movement in the late 1980s gained international interest and acclaim in the 1990s, in part because of the peaceful mobilization efforts and effective bargaining tactics of the movement. However, indigenous leaders usually have not engaged in a discourse of racismo and/or discriminación. There has been much less social movement solidarity and activism among Afro-Ecuadorians, but their leaders commonly employ a discourse of racismo and discriminación. In August and September 2004, a survey of more than eight thousand adult Ecuadorians was conducted in regard to racism and related topics. In this research, we use several measures from this survey that focus on awareness of and sensitivity to issues of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. Self-identification of respondents enables us to contrast the responses of whites, mestizos, Indians, and Afro-Ecuadorians to the measures. Other independent variables of interest are level of education, the region in which the respondent resides, and whether the respondent lives in an urban or rural area. Regression results show differences among the ethnic groups in levels of awareness of racism, but more powerful predictors are level of education and rural residence.

In recent decades, the impacts of climate on society and on human well-being have attracted increasing amounts of attention, and the forecasts that predict such impacts have become more accurate. Forecasts are now distributed and used more widely than they were in the past. This article reviews three cases of such use of forecasts in Latin America. It shows that in all cases, the users are concentrated in particular sectors and regions (agriculture in the Argentine pampas, fisheries on the Peruvian coast, water resources in northeastern Brazil) and that the forecasts are distributed not by government agencies but by intermediate organizations—semistatal organizations or nongovernmental organizations. It draws on the concept of environmental citizenship to discuss these cases and assesses them for such attributes of citizenship as equity, transparency, accountability, and promotion of collective goals. It traces the implications of these cases for the current era of global warming.

In prose and poetry and throughout his career, Roque Dalton used the life story of his U.S. émigré father to explore the themes of power, dependency, and identity that interested him and other Salvadoran intellectuals of his era. Yet it was a theatrical image of Winnall Dalton, that of a marauding, gunslinging cowboy, that other writers took as fact and that became part of the poet's posthumous reputation. I show here that the image of a western outlaw is wrong and that Winnall Dalton came from a comfortable, Mexican American family in Tucson that had fallen on hard times just before he migrated to Central America around 1916. Dalton delved into the paradoxes of his own upbringing—raised in a working-class neighborhood as the illegitimate offspring of a millionaire, a Marxist revolutionary who was the son of pure capitalism—almost until his death in 1975. Taken together, the shifting depictions of his father all point to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Dalton's views on power and the nature of identity than previously understood in the context of the revolutionary struggle that ultimately consumed him.

In-depth interviews and a three-wave longitudinal study of workers in international export-processing plants (maquiladoras, referred to here as maquilas) of the central highlands of Guatemala were conducted to explore the effects of labor turnover on individuals and households. The data suggest a framework in which labor conditions and sources of support at home are linked to turnover of youths working in the maquila. Turnover in the study is associated with decreased input into important household decisions and a lowered sense of adjustment and life satisfaction. Despite this, turnover is often volitional, representing a form of resistance and response on the part of workers to adverse working conditions in the factories. The study reveals the complex dynamics underlying both involuntary and voluntary turnover in the maquilas.

La existencia de un nacionalismo oficial identificado únicamente con el independentismo y el sentimiento antiestadounidense parece explicar la relativa escasez de estudios sobre la primera generación republicana en Cuba. Buscando disminuir este vacío crítico, este artículo estudia la obra de José Antonio Ramos para ahondar sobre una corriente de pensamiento nacionalista que intentó balancear arielismo y proamericanismo a principios de siglo XX. Sin lograr constituir una fórmula integral de reconciliación entre polaridades, este discurso terminó por reducir al aislamiento a gran parte de la primera generación republicana. Atrincherados en un discurso elitista de la antipolítica, el rechazo a la opinión pública de intelectuales como Ramos, conllevó a la imposibilidad de establecer las alianzas necesarias para la consolidación de una identidad nacional viable aún en los términos reformistas neocoloniales.

In the past few decades, a new era of socioenvironmental institutions and policies has promoted experimentation with alternative proposals for managing land and resources in the Amazon region. The rubber tappers' home state of Acre was transformed by the florestania policies of the “forest government” regimes that built on the rubber tappers' identity and history to promote forest-based development and to extend citizenship rights. Beginning in 1999, the state became a laboratory for experimentation with new approaches to development, at a time of rapid changes among both urban and rural populations. This article uses data from household surveys in the capital city of Rio Branco, as well as extensive secondary literature, to trace the evolution of these new policies and projects and their ambiguous implications for citizenship and sustainable development.

Democratization studies initially focused on processes at the national level, but in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the spatially uneven nature of democracy at, the subnational level This article draws on examples from Argentina and develops an analytical framework of closed games to analyze the functioning of subnational democracy. It argues that the less democratic provinces or states of nationally democratic countries are not necessarily authoritarian and that the concept of subnational authoritarianism prevents us from seeing political dynamics that may arise in the context of a reasonably well-functioning electoral democracy and may result in subnational closed games. The article takes into account the role of political families, media ownership, control of access to business opportunities, and control of the provincial state.

This article analyzes two sets of narratives that describe the area contained within the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Araripe Basin Geopark, the first such geological preserve in the Americas. The first group includes scientific-sounding accounts of fossils, sediments, and geological formations. The second is a series of “folk” stories that describe the sacred geography of a part of the northeastern Brazilian backlands best known for their economic backwardness and religious mysticism. Although at first glance the two sets of narratives appear wholly divergent, both treat the natural world as ancient, fluid, composed of interrelated elements, mysterious, and deeply worthy of protection. These shared conceptions have important policy implications in strategizing a sustainable tourism that will preserve the region's geological and cultural heritage while bringing economic benefits to the local population.

This article discusses the sustained and increasingly institutionalized transnational practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their hometowns in Mexico. Far from being a strictly private transnational practice, migrants' desire for a posthumous return and burial in their homelands is popularly expressed in the memories, music, and everyday exchanges of the Mexican diaspora. Drawing on transnational ethnographic research in Los Angeles, California, and Zacatecas, Mexico, this article documents how the Mexican state has institutionalized this process at the transnational, national, state, and municipal levels of governance. Last, the article discusses the role of migrant family and social networks in these repatriations. The goals of this article are to provide a preliminary cultural and institutional understanding of the practice of repatriating cadavers from the United States to Mexico and to discuss the implications of this process for the scholarly debate on migrant transnationalism.

This article analyzes the impact of state policies since the 1970s on household food security in several Mapuche communities in the Araucanía region of Chile (Region IX). The author highlights key transformations in the national economy and food system and endeavors to link those to local phenomena, in particular the absorption of the local livelihood strategies and food systems into capitalist markets and the high incidences of food, insecurity. The article concludes that a reconceptualization of macroeconomic and indigenous policies are required to rebuild the material and social foundations of rural Mapuche communities that provide the bases from which their inhabitants can reconstruct a mutually beneficial relationship with the broader Chilean society and avert the continued acceleration of tension and violence.

The Rio de Janeiro state archive's collection of entry logs for the city's central detention center, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, provides a rare glimpse into the lives of Rio's—and Brazil's—poor and working classes who otherwise left few written records behind. During the time when the institution maintained the entry logs, police exercised broad power to make arrests. Although relatively few detainees were ever prosecuted or even formally charged, the detention center kept detailed records of detainees' physical appearance, attire, home address, nationality, sex, affiliation, and so on, as well as information about any criminal charges. This article explores the wealth of empirical data that the entry logs provide. It also suggests how scrutinizing this type of document across time shows how record keeping itself changed, in turn affording researchers rare insight into the inner workings of modern Latin American society.

Este trabajo tiene por objetivo examinar la presencia de movimientos chiítas radicales en América Latina, algunos de ellos comprometidos en acciones violentas, especialmente en dos zonas geográficas. Primero, en la denominada triple frontera de Argentina, Paraguay y Brasil, presencia vinculada con los atentados contra la embajada de Israel en 1992 y contra la Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina en 1994, ambos realizados en Buenos Aires. Segundo, en la zona de la Alianza Bolivariana para las Américas, particularmente en Venezuela, a partir de la existencia del denominado Hezbolá Venezuela, de la islamización chiíta de la tribu wayuu — que habita la zona de la Guajira en la frontera entre Venezuela y Colombia— y su relación con el Hezbolá originario del Líbano.

Deforestation in Latin America, especially in the Amazon basin, is a major source of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming. Protected areas play a vital role in minimizing forest loss and in supplying key environmental services, including carbon sequestration and rainfall regulation, which mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change amid a rising tide of economic development in the region. The area of protected forest has expanded rapidly since 1980 to cover one-fifth of Latin America and more than two-fifths of Amazonia, a region whose rain forest captures some 40 percent of Latin America's carbon emissions. The reserve sector has traditionally suffered from severe underfunding, but the possibility of new resources being generated through financial compensation for “reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD) or “avoided deforestation” under a new Kyoto protocol after 2012 could help strengthen the environmental and social roles of protected areas. However, a number of major implementation and governance challenges will need to be addressed.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period of dramatic economic and population change for the Spanish Caribbean, including Puerto Rico. This note describes a unique collection of population data that sheds nuanced light on older research themes and promises to inspire new inquiries. These aggregate population data, or padrones, commissioned by the Spanish Crown and now more widely available and usable than ever before, offer details on Puerto Rico's sex, age, status, and socio-racial composition on an annual basis for the period spanning 1779 to 1802. We describe the data, their accompanying limitations, and their potential uses to advance scholarship on late-colonial Spanish America.

Declining profitability of agriculture and/or higher prices of forest products and services typically drive an increase in forest cover. This article examines changes in forest cover in Candelaria Loxicha, Mexico. Forest cover increased in the area as a result of coffee cultivation in coffee forest-garden systems. Dependence on forest products and services, and not prices of forest products, drive the process in our study site. Low international coffee prices and high labor demand outside the community might pull farmers out of agriculture, but they do not completely abandon the lands. A diversification in income sources prevents land abandonment and contributes to maintaining rural populations and coffee forest gardens.