Debates surrounding race in Brazil have become increasingly fraught in recent years as the once hegemonic concept of racial democracy (democracia racial) continues to be subject to an ever more agnostic scrutiny. Parallel to these debates, and yet ultimately inseparable from them, is the question of what it is to be “white.” In this interdisciplinary paper, we argue that whiteness has become increasingly established in Brazilian public discourse as a naturalized category. Seeking afresh perspective on what we perceive to have become a sterile debate, we examine Machado de Assis and his work to illustrate how assumptions surrounding his short story “Pai contra mãe,” and indeed comments on the author's very body, reveal the extent to which whiteness has come to be seen as nonnegotiable and fixed. Placing a close reading of Machado's text at the heart of the article, we explain its implications for the scholarly debates now unfolding in Brazil concerning the construction of whiteness. The article then develops an anthropological reading of whiteness by pointing to the inherent differences between perspectives of race as a process and perspectives of race as a fixed and naturalized given.

En los primeros códigos civiles, las mujeres fueron definidas como sujetos de incapacidad de hecho relativa, limitación que venía asociada a la potestad del varón dentro del matrimonio. Este artículo aborda el reconocimiento de la capacidad civil plena de las mujeres en Uruguay (1946), Brasil (1962), Argentina (1968) y Chile (1989) como parte de un proceso complejo hacia la erosión (pero no disolución) del patriarcado. Para ello pone en práctica una metodología específica para el análisis del fenómeno legal que permite revelar los mecanismos discriminatorios. Asimismo, asume una perspectiva sociológico-histórica comparativa que muestra los diferentes recorridos hacia la reforma de la ley civil y los elementos que le son comunes. Se explicitan las distintas trayectorias, asumiendo que las dinámicas internas son únicas, pero mostrando que es posible identificar un mismo patrón de cambio: la modernización conservadora. En efecto, las mujeres casadas quedaron fijadas como sujetos de inferioridad jurídica, incluso cuando se les otorgó formalmente la capacidad civil plena. La modernización trajo cambios, pero el proceso estuvo dominado por las fuerzas de la tradición.

This article analyzes new forms of distinction and inequality generated within Uruguayan squatter settlements as a result of neoliberal policies, class polarization, and the downward mobility of previously integrated populations that have migrated to the informal urban periphery. Based on ethnographic research in Montevideo, this article shows how newly impoverished Uruguayans have dealt with their new spatial proximity and ever-increasing socioeconomic proximity to chronic poverty through the maintenance of symbolic boundaries between themselves and the chronic poor. This boundary work is dependent on the reproduction of a series of moral oppositions, highly reminiscent of hegemonic discourses on the culture of poverty, which cast the chronic poor as dirty, lacking in values, apathetic, disorganized, and responsible for their own poverty.

Studies on the Argentine public administration have usually underlined the weakness of Argentine state bureaucracies. On the basis of these assertions, scholars have tended to equate the number of state jobs with cases of patronage. By doing so, they have neglected the crucial issue of the scope of appointments effectively controlled by political parties. This article applies an innovative empirical inquiry to measure the extent of party patronage, assessing where, how deeply, and to what extent parties reach into the Argentine federal state structures. While the results by and large confirm the widespread notion of the broad scope of political appointments in Argentina, they refute the conventional hypothesis of a state thoroughly colonized by parties. Overall, the results suggest that parties' distribution of public jobs in the Argentine federal state is oriented less to mass-style patronage than to gaining effective and broad control over state institutions.

What is the impact of exposure to criminal violence on support for political institutions in Latin America? The increase in criminal violence in the region since the return to democratic rule makes this a timely question. Several scholars have demonstrated the impact of a series of variables (political performance, economic performance, interpersonal trust, perception of corruption) on citizens' support for political institutions (system support). The goal of this study is to assess the impact of two additional variables (victimization and perception of violence) that have been neglected in the literature. I test the impact of exposure to violence on system support by using survey data from the 2004 edition of the Latin American Public Opinion Project. My findings demonstrate that both victimization and high perception of violence have a negative impact on system support in Latin America.

This study employs an original, nationally representative survey of citizens in Argentina to understand the economic and political factors that shape individual-level preferences for social insurance. In the past two decades, Latin American democracies have undergone significant changes in their social welfare institutions, in some cases dramatically reversing course from previous policies. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how and when citizens shift their preferences for competing social policy proposals. We emphasize the role of dissatisfaction with prevailing policies in creating political opportunities for the introduction of sweeping reforms. Our survey capitalizes on the 2008 pension reform in Argentina to test competing hypotheses regarding preferences for different policies of old-age insurance. We find that dissatisfaction with existing private policies increases individual-level support for policy reform across all citizens, whereas partisanship has a more restricted effect, shaping preferences only among middle- and low-income respondents.

Latin American elites authored and disseminated ideologies of mestizaje or race mixture, but does the general population value them today? Using the 2010 Americas Barometer, we examined public opinion about mestizaje in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using survey questions that modeled mestizaje both as a principle of national development and as tolerance for intermarriage with black or indigenous people. We found that most Latin Americans support mestizaje, although support varies by country and ethnicity. Across countries, we find partial evidence that the strength of earlier nation-making mestizaje ideas is related to support for mestizaje today, and that strong multicultural policies may have actually strengthened such support. Ethnoracial minorities showed particular support for the national principle of mestizaje. Finally, we discovered that the national principle of mestizaje is associated with more tolerant attitudes about intermarriage, especially in countries with large Afro-descendant populations.

Like many Guatemalan documents referred to by scholars in the past, the Libros Segundo y Tercero del Cabildo de Guatemala (Books Two and Three of the City Council of Santiago de Guatemala) have long been thought to be missing, thereby removing from consultation key sources concerning the events and circumstances of the early colonial period. It turns out that these two tomes, which span the years between 1530 and 1553, are not missing and have been part of the holdings of the Hispanic Society of America for the past century. We discuss how other documentary treasures were taken from Guatemala or disappeared from circulation altogether, identifying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the period during which national patrimony was most under threat from both internal and external forces.

La ponencia “La función ideológica de la historiografía cubana en la década del sesenta del siglo XX”, analiza, desde una perspectiva general, el mundo ideológico de los años sesenta en Cuba y la unidad concreta que se da entre el discurso político y la producción historiográfica de la etapa. Se define esta historiografía como un arma ideológica fundamental para legitimar el presente revolucionario y el nuevo ideal social que lo guiaba. Se resume brevemente la política editorial e institucional de esta primera década revolucionaria orientada a convertir la historia en un fenómeno de masas y en una fuente esencialmente ideológica capaz de crear, no sólo en los intelectuales, sino en la totalidad del pueblo cubano, la nueva conciencia socialista. Se describen los temas fundamentales de esta historiografía, haciendo un apartado en el tema de la formación de la nación cubana, destacando la significación ideológica de cada una de estas temáticas y del tema de la formación nacional en particular, dada su importancia central en la historiografía de la década. Se enumeran y describen de forma general los aspectos en que se da el tratamiento teórico de este tema, así como los autores y las obras emblemáticas. Se hace referencia al hecho de que, a pesar del impulso que la Revolución dio al oficio del historiador y a la historia como ciencia propiamente, la producción historiográfica de dicha etapa resultó más reinterpretativa que investigativa, lo que denota la sublimación de su función ideológica por encima de la teórica.