Anthropologists have demonstrated that having information about new settlements is crucial for drawing migrants. Pilgrimage to ritual landscapes and their shrines allows people, including Maya societies, to explore places where they can settle. They then establish or augment settlements around the landscape shrines, which explains the locations and growth of some centers. Migrants continue to make pilgrimages to shrines, such as sacred mountains, near their receiving settlements to enhance community cohesion through ritual contact with spiritual forces. In this article, I show that pilgrimage is an important element in the establishment of select migrant settlements and their community identity. I focus on Maya and Mesoamerican cultures, particularly at Mensabak in Chiapas, Mexico, and on supporting archaeological, historical, and ethnographic information. I conclude that Maya perceptions of movement, connectivity, and transformation in their world are linked to pilgrimage, migration, and community formation. Importantly, pilgrimage provides a religious variable, in addition to better-known economic, political, or demographic factors, to consider in migration.

Great kivas served as important ritual spaces and played significant roles in community integration throughout the Pithouse period (AD 550–1000) occupation of the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico. This article uses data from excavations at the Harris site, a large pithouse village located in the Mimbres Valley, to explore the role of great kivas and an associated plaza in community integration as the village grew, extended family households formed, and social distinctions developed. Data from excavations of sequentially used great kivas surrounding the plaza along with household data from domestic structures are used to examine the role of ritual space during the Pithouse period.

This article investigates the mechanisms by which different communities were articulated during the Late Intermediate period (ca. AD 1000–1450) in the Río Grande de San Juan Basin, also called the Chicha Region, located in the border region of Bolivia and Argentina. Through analyses of systems of pottery production, circulation, and consumption, we examine interaction networks, social integration, and alliance building at a regional level. Yavi-Chicha pottery from two sites in the Chicha Region—Chipihuayco, in the Talina Valley (Bolivia), and Finispatria, in San Juan Mayo (Argentina)—provide key insights into regional integration and constellations of practice through their localized technological style and shared consumption strategies. This study reveals that people of Finispatria incorporated the entire Yavi-Chicha-style household assemblage—partly produced in Chipihuayco, partly in Finispatria, or partly at some unknown location—into their everyday lives. We argue that the entire household ceramic repertoire of the study region played a fundamental and socially integrative role as it circulated across the region.

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.

The Mayan Indians of Guatemala share the burdens of local government by taking on a set of public duties, thereby maintaining community cohesion as well as political autonomy. This article analyses recent changes in this cargo system in a context defined by development, new representations of ‘Mayanness’, and multicultural politics. It shows how sovereignty – grounded in a distinct philosophy of leadership that generates meaningful self-rule – is crucial in facilitating political transformation towards more democratic arrangements at the cost of rule by the elders.