Latin American military dictatorships of the twentieth century were often right-wing, elitist and violent. A marked exception was the left-wing Peruvian military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado. More exceptional still was the government's use of visual media. Between 1968 and 1970 it produced approximately 20 posters, printed in editions of 50,000 to 200,000, to promote the radical Agrarian Reform Law. These posters provide vibrant representations of the agrarian reform's ideological aspects, which have been under-studied. A detailed exploration of visual communication shows that the government deployed aesthetically sophisticated propaganda and symbols to encourage social participation in the reform.

Liberationist Christianity in Central America has faced considerable challenges adjusting to changing circumstances since 1990. Yet the political concerns and economic conditions that animated religious movements for liberation in the region have not disappeared, nor have adherents of progressive religion. Central American Lutherans embody a distinctive dialogue with liberationist religion, one not adequately treated or understood in existing studies focused on religious change and the state. In El Salvador and Nicaragua, Lutherans adapted perspectives from liberation theology through the resources of their own theological inheritance, but both this heritage and they themselves were equally shaped and transformed by their efforts to counter, survive and redeem the inhumanity and political violence of the societies they inhabited. The Lutheran story is an important addition to the current understanding of the diverse ways in which religious communities interacted with theologies and movements of liberation, and engaged with processes of social change in the Central American context.

Female heads of households in the migrant-exporting community of Jima, Ecuador, are using remittances to employ domestic workers. As both workers and ‘mistresses’ originate from the same mestizo peasant class, these new labour relations do not reflect embedded class inequalities, but are rather emerging as a new mode of distinction between newly prosperous households and those for whom migration has been a less successful strategy. This lends a temporal fragility and fluidity to household relations, as worker and employer seek to define their roles and establish hierarchies. Employers negotiate these tensions not only to reduce their own burden of labour, but also because domestic workers are a symbol of social mobility and help enhance the reputation of migrant men. Thus, while men are physically absent, they continue to inform the reorganisation of the Jimeño household, and there is little to suggest that gender roles are being realigned in a structurally significant manner.

This article examines the rhetoric and practice of a large social movement organised around low-income housing in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Making explicit the relationship between housing and citizenship, the União de Movimentos de Moradia (Alliance of Housing Movements) articulates a ‘politics of rights’ with which it calls on the state to uphold the constitutional right to housing, and legitimates its high-profile occupations of abandoned buildings in the centre of the city. The article engages with James Holston's historical examination of homeowners’ struggles on the peripheries of São Paulo to assert themselves as rights-holders and to mobilise against threats of eviction. While Holston names these groups of residents ‘insurgent’ citizens for the way they have unsettled entrenched social inequalities, this article presents the concept of ‘transgressive’ citizenship to reflect the challenge the housing movement makes to the state as it uses text-based law to justify building occupations.

This article develops and utilises an ideal point index of judges to explain why they may cast conviction-based votes in contexts of institutional instability. In it, I modify the classic argument that an increase in institutional instability causes a commensurate increase in the likelihood of strategic voting. By instead proposing a curvilinear relationship between these two variables, the article proposes that, irrespective of the term length of the judges, an increase in institutional instability increases the probability of strategic voting only to a given point, after which, paradoxically, a greater degree of job uncertainty tends to favour conviction voting. This scenario provides incentives for the emergence of ‘judges without robes’: attorneys who accept appointments as judges for a limited time, and who use the judicial arena to improve their personal prestige and portfolio of clients who will return to them for future consultation.