This essay reviews the following works:

In Harm’s Way: the Dynamics of Urban Violence. By Javier Auyero and María Fernanda Berti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 239. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780691164779.

Violence at the Urban Margins. Edited by Javier Auyero, Philippe Bourgois, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 323. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780190221454.

Bruno: Conversations with a Brazilian Drug Dealer. By Robert Gay. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 219. $23.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822358497.

The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil. By Erika Robb Larkins. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 231. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520282773.

Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America. By Eduardo Moncada. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 219. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804794176.

Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life. By R. Ben Penglase. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2014. Pp. ix + 197. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780813565439.

This article seeks to examine empirically several recent hypotheses on the evolution of Latin American urbanization based on data from five countries in the Caribbean Basin. The hypotheses were advanced by the senior author in an earlier article in this journal (Portes 1989). They concern three major aspects discussed in the literature on Latin American cities: changes in urban primacy, spatial polarization within the largest cities, and the urban informal economy as a countercyclical mechanism. The hypotheses contradict much of the scholarly consensus on the character of Latin American urbanization as summarized in a number of publications (Beyer 1967; Hardoy 1975; Portes and Walton 1976; Roberts 1978; Portes and Johns 1989).

The population census of 1725–1740 was one of the few general censuses to occur in Peru during the colonial period. The census left a mass of detailed demographic data recording a unique moment when the population of the viceroyalty stood at its lowest historical level. It was the centerpiece of a major body of viceregal reform that affected levels of Indian tribute and the mita labor draft and permanently changed the base population subject to both levies, incorporating a large new sector previously partially or wholly exempt. It strongly influenced Peru's Indian and mestizo peoples throughout its execution and provoked the first major wave of popular unrest under the Bourbons. Yet despite the significance of the census, it remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed introduction to the census as a major administrative reform and a source for demographic and other history.

Desde hace más de quince años, el debate sobre la gobernabilidad democrática latinoamericana gira en torno al problema de la “pugna de poderes”, enfatizando el potencial desestabilizador de los conflictos entre el Ejecutivo y el Legislativo. Este ensayo se basa en el análisis histórico de cuarenta y cinco disputas constitucionales en dieciocho países latinoamericanos entre 1950 y 2000. En la primera parte se propone el concepto de crisis presidencial como categoría analítica para estudiar este problema. Las secciones segunda y tercera exploran los efectos de estas crisis sobre la estabilidad del régimen político y su impacto sobre el equilibrio de poderes a lo largo de las últimas cinco décadas. En las conclusiones se sugiere que los efectos desestabilizadores atribuidos al presidencialismo son históricamente contingentes y se exploran los parámetros bajo los cuales ha operado el nuevo presidencialismo latinoamericano a partir de la década de los noventa.

Carlos Fonseca's unequivocal bracketing of Augusto Sandino's political project with that of Latin America's premier Marxist revolutionary would have shocked most readers when it was written in 1972. In this and other seminal essays, one of the three founders of Nicaragua's Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) formally integrated Sandino the historical figure into the ideology of their revolutionary struggle. Sandino had fought a six-year guerrilla war against the U.S. forces occupying Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. His assassination in 1934 by Anastasio Somoza's henchmen ushered in a forty-five-year dynastic dictatorship by a succession of Somozas. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until Fonseca died in combat against the Guardia Nacional in 1976, his writings guided the FSLN's resurrecting and reconstructing of the image of Sandino in order to reshape it into the dominant symbol of a powerful revolutionary ideology.

In recent years the idea of “culture as resource” has been hailed as a new epistemological paradigm for assigning value and significance to artistic practice. This article acknowledges this idea as determining values assigned to art in the recent context of globalization. Yet it questions the heuristic hold of such an episteme for the interpretation of some cultural practices, especially those of musicians in a world where many of them are not so much administering resources as managing their scarcity. It thus explores the disjuncture between the idea of care of the self, invoked by using the performativity of culture as the basis of the resource paradigm, and the actual practices of musicians in promoting careers that demand investments of money, affect, time, and other resources in order to sustain those careers. In such situations, musicians often privilege other values of music—aesthetic desires, stylistic options, and so on—as primary epistemic and affective reasons for determining their choices and what they find valuable in music. I explore this through the work of two Colombian musicians with contrasting careers and musical styles and practices, Lucía Pulido and Charles King.

Dependencia theory is in vogue among social scientists throughout the world. Having originated in Latin America in the early 1960s, it was widely embraced both there and in parts of Europe and Africa by the end of the decade. In the 1970s, North Americans joined the flood of scholars attempting to grapple with the problems of underdevelopment in the so-called Third World from a perspective explicitly rejecting traditional theories of development. With this new stream of researchers came new tools and new approaches to the study of peripheral societies, tools and approaches intended to complement those previously used within the dependencia tradition.

Latin American urban areas often comprise large low-income former shantytown areas that originated as illegal land captures and that have been consolidated through self-build over thirty years or more. Today most of the original households still live in their homes, often alongside adult children (and grandchildren). As part of the Latin American Housing Network study (www.lahn.utexas.org), this article reports on survey research for Mexico and describes the stability and nature of these shared arrangements and the considerable asset value now represented by these properties. Although these properties are often considered patrimonio para los hijos, many consolidator pioneers are aging, so that the issue of property inheritance has become salient, especially for second-generation adult children and their families. However, fewer than 10 percent of owners have wills, and most will die intestate, often having made verbal inheritance arrangements regarding their “estate.” This augurs the rise of a new round of informality of property holding that bears little relation to the national and state legal provisions that actually govern inheritance succession, whether through wills or via intestacy provisions. The article describes the various legal codes that prevail in Mexico relating to marriage and acquisition and assigning of property upon death, and it offers several case scenarios of interfamilial and intragenerational conflict, especially insofar as these relate to gender and social constructions of inheritance rights among the poor.

Programs of economic liberalization have many common features all over the world, but they do not necessarily have the same consequences. Differences in their effects reflect differences in the countries themselves along with accidental factors of timing and external events, and they can also embody systematic consequences of alternatives within the programs. The starting point in this discussion is that different versions of liberalization—alternatives consistent with the basic strategy—can have significantly different effects on poverty and inequality.

Indigenous peoples of Ecuador have organized and mobilized over the past thirty years, partly to reshape their identities after centuries of domination. This research is a preliminary effort to explore the contemporary complexity of that identity. Best viewed as a quantitative case study, this analysis uses responses from seventy-six indigenous college students to a self-administered questionnaire. The authors found that indigenous students with greater “acculturation experiences” with mestizo culture were more strident in rejecting elements of that culture than were their colleagues who had had fewer encounters with mestizo elements of Ecuadorian society. While the tendency to identify oneself ethnically by rejecting the dominant culture represents only one dimension of ethnic identity (maintaining distinctiveness), the authors consider the findings important for future research on the dynamics of the process of ethnic identification.

This study uses the hedonic wage method to estimate the value of statistical life (VSL) in Chile and then extrapolates this value to different Latin American countries. The data are obtained from the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional, CASEN 2013), which includes information on socioeconomic and labor variables at the individual level. Records of fatal and nonfatal occupational risk in each economic sector are obtained from the Superintendency of Social Security (Superintendencia de Seguridad Social). The results of the best hedonic wage estimate for the Chilean case (which corrects for endogeneity and selection bias) show that the VSL is US$3.7 million, with a confidence interval of 95 percent ranging between US$3.4 million and US$4.0 million. A meta-analysis that relates the VSL to GDP per capita is conducted to extrapolate the findings to other Latin American countries, with average values ranging from US$0.01 million for Haiti to US$5.2 million for Puerto Rico.

The recent discovery in Lima's National Museum of History of a sixteenth-century inspection of the royal repartimiento of Yanque Collaguas in the district of Arequipa, has stimulated a search for further important documentation about the region. The investigation was made possible by financial support from the Ford Foundation under its Peruvian program for projects in the social sciences (PA73–807). The project is coordinated by Dr. Franklin Pease G. Y., with the active participation of Dr. N. David Cook, Professor Juan Carlos Crespo (Catholic University, Lima), and Dr. Alejandro Malaga Medina (University of San Agustin, Arequipa).

From the coloniality of power to the decolonial swerve, US-centered decolonial academics concur with the foundational points introduced by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Nevertheless, they seldom cite Latin American Indigenous or Native American intellectuals’ decolonial perspectives, or examine specific bodies of critical thinking emerging in hemispheric Indigenous communities. In turn, a diversity of Indigenous paradigms and methods are appearing in the Americas, either as literary texts or critical works. Indigenous or Native American writers and theorists are often political actors, working within their respective grassroots movements, or writing to advance specific goals of their own communities. This article will emphasize Native American and Indigenous decolonial issues framed from a critique of contemporary Indigenous narratives. Their views both enrich and complicate Western decolonial theorists’ assumptions. Examining their production provides continuity to the political and epistemological searches of both, while also contributing to breaking down those invisible walls separating them.

This article examines two cases of folklorization led by teachers in Peru between 1939 and 1971, and characterized by the participation of the indigenous and mestizo subjects whose local cultures were transformed into folklore. These cases show teachers as active agents of cultural change in Andean schools, who were responding to de-Indianization by promoting a serrano (pertaining to the Sierra) regional identity among their students. In this fashion, teachers were reinventing “local traditions” to produce a new popular identity based on a common regional bond, through which indigenous and mestizo populations could negotiate new waves of cultural interaction with modernity and national society. The first case analyzes the projects of José María Arguedas and Emilio Barrantes to bring local folklore to the school curriculum and to promote an Andean popular culture. The second case explores school folklore competitions organized autonomously by provincial teachers, in which traditional dances were folklorized and turned into a popular spectacle. While framing both folklorization cases within the study of teachers as local intellectuals, the article also highlights the importance of a magisterial culture in Peru that, drawing from the progressive education movement, viewed teachers as agents of sociocultural change and nationalism.

In 1977 concern for the long-range effects of policy-making prompted President Carter to direct the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State to study the “probable changes in the world's population, natural resources, and environment through the end of the century.” The projections of that commission, as detailed in The Global 2000 Report to the President (Barney et al. 1981), foresee a growth in the world's population of as much as 70 percent, combined with staggering increases in demand for the world's resources of water, minerals, soils, and forest products.

Deforestation in Latin America, especially in the Amazon basin, is a major source of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming. Protected areas play a vital role in minimizing forest loss and in supplying key environmental services, including carbon sequestration and rainfall regulation, which mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change amid a rising tide of economic development in the region. The area of protected forest has expanded rapidly since 1980 to cover one-fifth of Latin America and more than two-fifths of Amazonia, a region whose rain forest captures some 40 percent of Latin America's carbon emissions. The reserve sector has traditionally suffered from severe underfunding, but the possibility of new resources being generated through financial compensation for “reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD) or “avoided deforestation” under a new Kyoto protocol after 2012 could help strengthen the environmental and social roles of protected areas. However, a number of major implementation and governance challenges will need to be addressed.

A crisis of urban violence has emerged in northern Central America during the past two decades. Although youth gangs are responsible for only a portion of this violence, punitive approaches to dealing with gang violence have sharpened public hostility toward gang members and created a context conducive to the practice of “social cleansing” aimed at reducing gang violence by eliminating gang-affiliated youth through extrajudicial executions. Against this backdrop of public anger and resentment aimed at gang youth, a sizeable number of Evangelical-Pentecostal pastors and lay workers have developed ministries aimed at rescuing gang members and restoring them to society, often making considerable sacrifices and taking personal risks in the process. After describing the difficulties and risks associated with leaving the gang, this article takes a sociological approach to gang member conversions to discover the resources that Evangelical-Pentecostal congregations and gang ministries offer to former gang members facing the crisis of spoiled identity. I draw on semistructured interviews conducted in 2007 and 2008 with former gang members and gang ministry coordinators in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and a handful of follow-up interviews conducted in 2013.