This essay introduces the three essays in this collection, “Latin American Studies and the Humanities: One Year Later.” This collection follows our first dossier, “Latin American Studies and the Humanities: Past, Present, Future,” which was published in September 2018 (https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.521). The essays here—all written by historians—address current questions in humanistic research in Latin American and ethnic/area studies, including object-centered analysis, comparative methodologies, and archival formation and practices. Our introduction situates the essays in the dossier within three critical contexts, suggesting how new work in Latin American studies can engage with diverse scholarly paradigms, frameworks, and methodological approaches, specifically oceanic worlds and science studies, ethnic and area studies, and Latinx studies.

This article suggests that transnational motives have remained key components of legitimation strategies for regional realignment in Latin America. Specifically, we assess the legitimation strategy of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the associated political movement, Chavismo, as a recent case of transnational identity politics. Studies of Chavismo have stressed its role in the changing balance of power in early twenty-first-century Venezuela and the redrafting of global alliances, through a series of organizational moves and petrodollars. Combined with these political and economic boosters, Chavismo’s impact was sustained through a strategy that sought legitimation by drawing on earlier narratives of the solidarity of “Nuestramérica” (Our America), used in reshaping transnational networks within the region and beyond. This identity layer provided a basis for regional and international realignment and organizational creation, even if more recently it lost traction and became criticized for its unfulfilled promises and growing gap between rhetoric and implementation.

This article contributes to discussions on capitalist transformation and impact on peripheral agriculture by focusing on the province of Santiago del Estero in northern Argentina. The concept of land grabbing is useful for qualitative analysis of the recent dynamics in the land market in this peripheral territory, where the concentration of land for agrarian use is historical but has accelerated in recent decades with the expansion of soybean cultivation. Tensions between capitalist and noncapitalist actors have been taking place within the current crisis of the world capitalist system and its expansion to marginal lands, often occupied by peasant producers with precarious tenure and different logics to that of market capitalism. The province’s history is characterized by processes of different temporalities and scales of limited capitalist transformation, agrarian land concentration, and exploitation of local populations. This article seeks to understand the overlaps and tensions in these processes.

Over the past generation Latin America has experienced high levels of criminal violence associated with extortion, the drug trade, and other criminal rackets. While there has been considerable research into the role of state policy in controlling criminal violence, there has been considerably less investment in analyzing the success of social action to control both police and criminal violence in the high-conflict zones where criminal groups operate. The inadequacy of the existing literature emerges at least in part from the limited data on successful social efforts to control violence in urban areas controlled by organized crime groups. Drawing on over three hundred qualitative interviews conducted in four cities in Latin America and the Caribbean over an extended period of time, this article examines the various strategies used by civic groups to control violent activities on the part of police and criminal groups. The article observes six different forms of social responses to violence and points to the conditions under which these actions emerge.

This article explains why some indigenous communities in Mexico have been able to resist drug cartels’ attempts to take over their local governments, populations, and territories while others have not. While indigenous customary laws and traditions provide communal accountability mechanisms that make it harder for narcos to take control, they are insufficient. Using a paired comparison of two indigenous regions in the highlands of Guerrero and Chihuahua—both ideal zones for drug cultivation and traffic—we show that the communities most able to resist narco conquest are those that have a history of social mobilization, expanding village-level indigenous customary traditions into regional ethnic autonomy regimes. By scaling up local accountability practices regionally and developing translocal networks of cooperation, indigenous movements have been able to construct mechanisms of internal control and external protection that enable communities to deter the narcos from corrupting local authorities, recruiting young men, and establishing criminal governance regimes through force.

This article analyzes the conservative narratives underlying current changes in Brazilian rural development public policies. It first presents an overview of the recognition and institutionalization of family farming and the main policies created in support of this segment. Subsequently, it discusses how a conservative narrative started to question the ability of these policies to integrate family farmers into modern agricultural markets. Focusing on how this narrative tries to legitimate a new “referential” for public action, the article analyzes the discourse on newly occurring segregation between agricultural policies for productive farmers and social policies for unproductive ones. It demonstrates how this discourse excludes family farmers from the social pact that prevailed over the past three decades and depended on the state as an actor to mediate the contradictions in the unstable coexistence of agribusiness and family-farming logics. Finally, it analyzes how rural social movements are reacting to this process.

Which factors determine support for the armed forces? What is the effect of agency politicization on confidence? Existing studies, which draw largely from bureaucratically neutral militaries, find that interpersonal trust and demographic variables play significant roles in determining public confidence in the armed forces. I argue that this is different for a politicized agency. A loss of bureaucratic neutrality activates voters’ partisan attachments, inducing individuals to judge the agency on the basis of their ties to the governing party or leader. Using survey data from Venezuela, I show that government evaluation has a salient and bifurcated effect on respondents’ perceptions of their armed forces. Respondents sympathetic to the governing leader are more likely to have a favorable view of the military while those identifying as opposition are more likely to have a negative view. The results suggest that politicization of public agencies may impose an upper limit on public support regardless of institutional performance, undermine their representativeness and legitimacy, and weaken their mandates.

Drawing from a combination of the author’s own research on Portugal’s empire and recent work across a range of disciplines, this essay discusses the growing dialogue between Latin American studies and science and technology studies (STS). It discusses key similarities and differences in the questions, methods, and theoretical frameworks which have guided research in both areas. It focuses particular attention on the divergent ways in which the two interdisciplinary arenas of scholarship have handled objects and materiality. The author argues that despite important differences in orientation, a focus on objects and materiality informed by STS perspectives can broaden the archive available to scholars of colonial Latin America, challenge and extend critical insights of colonial research, and call into question the adequacy of conventional Latin American and Atlantic spatial frameworks.

This essay reviews the following works:

Peru: Elite Power and Political Capture. By John Crabtree and Francisco Durand. London: Zed Books (distributed by University of Chicago Press), 2017. Pp. viii + 206. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781783609031.

Peru in Theory. Edited by Paulo Drinot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. ix + 255. $105.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781137455253.

Rethinking Community from Peru: The Political Philosophy of José María Arguedas. By Irina Alexandra Feldman. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 175. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822963073.

The Rarified Air of the Modern: Airplanes and Technological Modernity in the Andes. By Willie Hiatt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 215. $49.54 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190248901.

Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post–Shining Path Peru. By Anne Lambright. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 212. $120.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781781382516.

Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist. By Manuel Llamojha Mitma and Jaymie Patricia Heilman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 229. $23.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822362388.

Peru: Staying the Course of Economic Success. Edited by Alejandro Santos and Alejandro Werner. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2015. Pp. xv + 440. $40.00 ISBN: 9781513599748.

Gangs’ territorial control affects the lives of residents in thousands of neighborhoods across Latin America, particularly in northern Central American countries. I argue that gang dominance constrains the ability of neighborhood residents to mobilize politically and consequently resist gang violence through institutionalized channels. Living in gang-controlled neighborhoods results in fewer incentives and opportunities to make political elites accountable for one’s personal safety. Even residents who have already experienced crime firsthand are discouraged from turning to politics as a strategy to change the status quo. My theoretical insights identify mechanisms through which gangs’ neighborhood control affects nonelectoral and electoral participation. To test my hypotheses, I rely on census and public opinion data collected in seventy-one neighborhoods in El Salvador. This article offers the first systematic statistical analysis of the effect of gangs’ territorial control on political participation in the Latin American context. The findings suggest that living under gang rule undermines residents’ right to engage freely in politics in nuanced ways.

Across Latin America, mestizo nationalism became a common response to postcolonial independence, revolt, and revolution in the twentieth century. These different mixed-race nationalisms have been the subject of continuous debate in Latin American studies. The field of Asian American studies offers a different approach that highlights the political and cultural function of anti-Chinese politics beyond their targeting of racialized Chinese subjects. This article examines the anti-Chinese politics and mestizo nationalisms of Mexico and El Salvador to question if and when popular Orientalist racism aided indigenous and peasant consent to state-sponsored mestizo nationalism. This methodology underscores the historical role that ideological formations of Asia and Asians have contributed to the political and cultural life of race in Latin America even when actual populations remained small or nonexistent. By understanding racial formations in a multiracial context I underscore the notion that anti-Chinese racism is not only important in that it discriminated against Chinese, but also that it served non-Chinese Latin Americans remarkably well and helped build an unstable equilibrium of mestizo hegemony.

How might industrial transformations with mutual gains unfold in late-developer contexts devoid of the state’s helping hand or the pedagogical guidance of multinational buyers in global value chains? This article addresses this question through the study of a deviant case focused on a set of seven cheese-processing cooperatives in Nicaragua. It traces the cooperatives’ adoption of a new, upgraded “Gebhardian” organizational model—incorporating improvements in primary production and export-oriented processing—to the actions of a team of “developmental professionals” employed by foreign aid agencies. Drawing on ideational accounts in political science and sociology, the article then suggests that two explanatory factors set these professionals apart from other comparable actors: their adherence to a social democratic ideology and their base of expert knowledge. It also highlights the prerevolutionary collective experience of targeted rancher communities, which is reminiscent of Hirschman’s conserved “social energy,” as an indispensable background condition for the transformation.

This essay reviews the following works:

Families in War and Peace: Chile from Colony to Nation. By Sarah C. Chambers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 288. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822358831.

Of Love and Other Passions: Elites, Politics, and Family in Bogotá, Colombia, 1778–1870. By Guiomar Dueñas-Vargas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 268. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826355850.

The Oligarchy and the Old Regime in Latin America, 1880–1970. By Dennis Gilbert. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Pp. x + 293. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781442270909.

Los terratenientes de la pampa argentina: Una historia social y política. By Roy Hora. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2015. Pp. 390. $21.96 paperback. ISBN: 9789876295567.

Una familia de la elite argentina: Los Senillosa, 1810–1930. By Roy Hora and Leandro Losada. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2015. Pp. 166. $46.72 paperback. ISBN: 9789875747463.

This article focuses on the oral and artifact-filled archive of a working-class Afro-Cuban family to create an intimate set of histories that illuminates the Americas as deeply connected and challenges the limits of national borders. The article explores the ways in which national identities assert themselves in the “private spaces” of migratory life through storytelling and the creation of collective memories, and how gender functions within these spaces. This family has created a master narrative about its own racially conscious, respectable, revolutionary Cuban working-class identity and practice that denies the centrality of international marriage and diasporic experiences to its making. Women’s whispered stories, marginalized from the familial narrative, illuminate alternative meanings and motivations for the strategies that propelled their family into the center of the great conflicts of Cuban history.

This article examines the clandestine connections between participants in the illicit drug trade and members of state security forces to understand how they impact everyday understandings of the law. Drawing on a unique combination of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a poor, high-crime district in Argentina and wiretapped conversations drawn from a court case involving a drug trafficking group active in the same area, we find that traffickers use illicit relationships to maintain economic control of the territory, and that collusion fosters widespread cynicism about law enforcement among residents. This article expands the literature on the covert relationships between drug trade participants and agents of the state by detailing the inner workings of collusion. Furthermore, it analyzes residents’ perceptions of police complicity as an underexplored source of legal cynicism. Finally, it offers a methodological blueprint of how to access and analyze data that capture state actions usually hidden from public view.

This essay reviews the following works:

Oil and Nation: A History of Bolivia’s Petroleum Sector. By Stephen C. Cote Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 195. $26.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781943665471.

Food Systems in an Unequal World: Pesticides, Vegetables, and Agrarian Capitalism in Costa Rica. By Ryan E. Galt Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 284. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816506033.

Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina. By Pablo Lapegna. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 217. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780190215149.

Social Mobilization, Global Capitalism and Struggles over Food. A Comparative Study of Social Movements. By Renata Motta. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xiv, 190. $149.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9781472479082.

Globalized Fruit, Local Entrepreneurs: How One Banana-Exporting Country Achieved Worldwide Reach. By Douglas Southgate and Lois Roberts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 215. $59.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248074.

Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia. By Kevin A. Young Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. vii + 265. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477311653.

This essay reviews the following works:

Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform. By Michael Albertus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xv + 347. $29.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781107514300.

Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Agrarian Reform in Brazil. Edited by Miguel Carter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. xxix + 494. $33.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822351863.

Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and U.S. Foreign Policy. By Ethan B. Kapstein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xi + 306. $29.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316636640.

Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside. By Tore C. Olsson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 277. $35.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780691165202.

Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico. By Mikael D. Wolfe. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 317. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822363743.

This essay reviews the following works:

Sexual Violence during War and Peace: Gender, Power, and Post-conflict Justice in Peru. By Jelke Boesten. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. ix + 231. $100.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781137383440.

Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru: Decolonizing Transnational Justice. By Pascha Bueno-Hansen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 222. $28.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780252081002.

Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Edited by Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius C. G. M. Robben. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 257. $59.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812247206.

Reflections on Memory and Democracy. Edited by Merilee S. Grindle and Erin E. Goodman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 260. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780674088290.

Mining Memory: Reimagining Self and Nation through Narratives of Childhood in Peru. By Mary Beth Tierney-Tello. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017. Pp. 302. $90.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781611487732.

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. By Kirsten Weld. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2014. Pp. xvi + 335. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822356028.

This essay reviews the following work:

The Diary of Heinrich Witt. Edited by Ulrich Mücke. 10 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. ccxx, 7017; incl. 604 images. E-book, open access. ISBN: 9789004307247.

This essay reviews the following works:

Staying Afloat: Risk and Uncertainty in Spanish Atlantic World Trade, 1760–1820. By Jeremy Baskes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 381. $54.57 hardcover. ISBN: 9780804785426.

The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. By Robert S. DuPlessis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 332. $29.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107105911.

The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. By Adrian Finucane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 1 + 211. $45.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248128.

Guiana and the Shadows of Empire: Colonial and Cultural Negotiations at the Edge of the World. By Joshua R. Hyles. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Pp. ix + 185. $76.56 hardcover. ISBN: 9780739187791.

The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts. By Darlene J. Sadlier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 314. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477311486.

Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil. By Michiel van Groesen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xx + 272. $47.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248661.