Genomic research in Latin America has looked into the African, Amerindian and European ancestry of local populations. This article explores how indigeneity and blackness figure in genomic science in the light of previous and current representations of indigenous and Afro-descendent people. These categories have been cast as ‘other’ in Latin America, but they have occupied different locations in ‘structures of alterity’. I look briefly at these similarities and differences in the colonial and republican periods and in recent multiculturalist reforms. I look at the gendered sexual imagery surrounding each concept, before examining in detail how blackness and indigeneity figure in gendered ways in genomic science research on admixture and ancestry in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. I conclude that, in the context of multiculturalism, genomics works to re-centre imaginaries of the nation around the mestizo and mixture, while casting blackness and indigeneity, in sexualised and gendered ways, as different kinds of others.

In Chile and Argentina, indigenous Mapuche intellectuals contend that there is a single Mapuche nation that spans the Chile–Argentina border. When Mapuche people talk about the Mapuche nation and create symbols to represent it, however, they can mean both the Mapuche nation within the Chilean and Argentine state borders and the cross-border Mapuche nation. The dual nature of this project raises important theoretical questions about the nation-building process. In this article, I argue that Mapuche activists are engaging in a multi-scalar geopolitical imagination. They are imagining the geographic, political and cultural elements of the Mapuche nation at two scales simultaneously: within nation-state borders and across them. The overlapping and contested nature of this process means that the nation-building project is full of new tensions and constraints. However, it is also an example of ‘thinking otherwise’ and imagining an alternative sense of national belonging.

El Salvador has undergone a deep economic transformation over recent decades, from a model based on agro-exports to an open, transnational service-based economy. This transformation has occurred in a context dominated historically by a small group of elite families that formed family-owned diversified business groups (DBGs). This paper studies the leading groups' strategies in confronting transnationalisation. It shows that the DBGs have adapted to the new realities through a combination of sector shifts, internationalisation and the adoption of different kinds of relationships with multinationals. In spite of this, there is little evidence that the DBGs have become less important or subordinate to multinational corporations. Rather, they have, in different ways, exploited their local and regional knowledge and networks to confront competition at home and expand at the regional level.

This paper examines the women's association movement in Buenos Aires between 1920 and 1940, and its connection with the emergence of a social state. Subsidised by the state, associations led by upper-class women provided a significant number of social assistance services to mothers, working women and children, and had a notable impact on the design of social policy. While historiography concurs that by 1930 the significance of this charitably oriented women's movement had started to decline, being replaced by public welfare services, this paper seeks to question such a conclusion by analysing three of the most important women's social welfare associations in the period and showing how, having become the maternal face of the state, they retained a central role in the provision of social assistance until well into the 1930s, thus helping to prevent the state from becoming a ‘colossal bureaucratic machine’.

The 60th anniversary of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 led by the MNR provided an opportunity to review a Latin American political experience of disputed importance in the light of the government of the MAS under Evo Morales since 2006. This essay reappraises the historiography of 1952 from the perspective of MNR officialism and from critical positions, particularly those associated with indigenismo or Katarismo. Bolivia hoy, an influential collection of essays edited by René Zavaleta Mercado in 1983, is identified as a key moment in changing interpretations of the 1952 revolution.