Controversy and intrigue greeted Charlie Chaplin's new film, The Great Dictator, when it arrived in Latin American theatres in early 1941. With tear gas, Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic insults, pro-Axis factions from Mexico to Argentina protested against the Hollywood star's ridicule of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. At an important Good Neighbour moment, the film's tumultuous Latin American circulation and exhibition exposed fault lines in hemispheric solidarity by subverting US efforts to recruit allies in the region and threatened President Roosevelt's support for European intervention at home. Down south, heated public debates over the film trained a harsh light on Latin American leaders’ own anti-democratic impulses and raised questions about constitutionality within unequal societies. This article moves beyond film as text to examine the Chaplin picture as a cultural object and agent that exposed the limits of US imperialism and Latin American resistance strategies more broadly.

This article studies the intersections between race and regional identity in the 1940s and 1950s in Salvador, Bahia, a critical site for the African diaspora. It examines how tourist guides produced for domestic consumption, first by Jorge Amado and later by intellectuals Odorico Tavares and José Valladares, sought to frame the city in new ways around blackness. Grounding the production of such guides in national trends for mobility and travel, the article proposes that they provided a foundational site for the crafting of a regional identity. Critically, these texts established early links between a commodified black culture and tourism in ways that would prove exceptionally long-lasting.

Within the neocolonial context of ‘Plan Colombia’ in the early 2000s, agents of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took up position in the heart of the Colombian penitentiary administration to lead a reform based on the United States’ ultra-punitive penal regime. This paper analyses how the reform was set up on the ground, shedding light on the partially divergent expectations of the two governments. Drawing on recent literature on the mobility of policies and built forms, the paper argues that the introduction of US-inspired prisons in Colombia is a striking case where a mobile policy and a travelling architectural type coincided and complemented each other.

This paper explores the meanings that youth crime and policing acquire in the context of their mediated representation on the televised news in Nicaragua. In particular, it explores this question by juxtaposing the televised imagery of the apprehended juvenile delinquent with the discursive treatment of his person by both police and reporters on Nicaragua's most watched news shows, Acción 10 and Crónica TN8. The police are presented as heroic protagonists who serve and protect the barrio through ‘communitarian policing’ whilst the juvenile delinquent – the ‘pinta’ – is excluded and stigmatised. This turns such youths into socially expendable and ‘tainted, discounted’ outsiders who can be treated as such. In this way, through the news, pintas are targeted for ‘removal’ from the barrio, and their mediated arrests become ‘spectacular performances’ of community. A discrepancy appears, then, between the police's communitarian discourse and its reactionary practice.

Why do new parties split? Scholars of new party schisms shy away from leadership-centred explanations for fear of excessive voluntarism and thus fail to conceptualise differences between leaders systematically. This article challenges that trend, arguing that externally appealing, internally dominant leaders generate cohesion in new parties. It analyses why some externally appealing leaders are internally dominant, while others are not, and argues that this variation can make the difference between schism and survival. The article supports its argument through a representative case study: the fatal (and consequential) schism of Peru's United Left coalition in the late 1980s.

When and why did Brazilian cotton become important to the Industrial Revolution in Britain? Between 1791 and 1801, Brazilian cotton represented 40 per cent of raw cotton imports in Liverpool, rivalling those from the West Indies. Using archival data between 1760 and 1808, this paper shows that Brazil benefitted from increasing British demand for a new variety of cotton staple that emerged with mechanised textile production. Previous explanations for the rise of Brazilian cotton trade attributed it to the revolutions in the Caribbean in the 1790s, and the American War of Independence, which ended in 1783. Evidence, however, suggests that these explanations are incomplete or incorrect. The United States did not export cotton to Britain before 1790, and British imports from the West Indies did not fall after the revolutions.

The Coloniaje Exhibition, held in September 1873 in Santiago, Chile, represents a milestone in the history of Chilean museums. As the first retrospective display of the history of the Chilean nation, it was an important precedent for the collections that led to the construction of the National Historical Museum in 1911. By examining the ideas associated with the history of the colonial era and the museography related to the exhibition, this article analyses the ambiguous ways in which the Coloniaje Exhibition mobilised the colonial past in the context of the ascendancy of liberalism and the transformation of Santiago's urban social life. Situated between alienation and identification – between critiquing the colonial system and celebrating its imprint on Chilean society – the Coloniaje Exhibition is important for the understanding of postcolonial societies in Latin America.