No one with even a passing acquaintance with the literature on Mexican society, not to mention the rest of Spanish America, can fail to be impressed by the frequent use of the term mestizo. Despite its ubiquity in the writings of social scientists, however, the concept of the mestizo is customarily employed in a vague fashion and usually left undefined. This is especially evident in the work of anthropologists, who for many years have been preoccupied with defining the Mexican Indian but have rarely focused their analytical powers on the mestizo. The term itself has been used rather loosely to refer to a certain group of people who presumably comprise a majority of the Mexican population, a cultural pattern shared by these people and other Latin Americans, and even a personality type.

This article examines the breadth and depth of anti-Americanism in contemporary Latin America. Using individual-level data from 2012, we employ regression analysis to understand why some Latin American citizens are more likely than others to distrust the government of the United States. By examining the attitudes of citizens of countries that are part of different groupings—such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas and the Pacific Alliance—we find great variation in the levels and predictors of anti-Americanism. While citizens' ideology is a common predictor in most countries, other variables such as the receipt of remittances, the perception of insecurity, and nationalism appear as predictors in only some. Furthermore, although there is a positive correlation between presidential approval and anti-Americanism in countries where leaders have an overtly anti-American discourse, this relationship disappears in countries where the president is perceived as neutral, and it is inverse in countries where the president is perceived as pro-American.

Mexico achieved food self-sufficiency and raised rural living standards in the thirty years prior to the mid-sixties, yet the country is now plagued by a profound agricultural crisis that is manifesting itself in serious natural resource disequilibria, unemployment and underemployment, and inadequate food production. This seemingly contradictory outcome has resulted from an agricultural growth strategy that reoriented production toward agroexports and animal feeds. Understanding the effects of this strategy is essential because these same trends are the most important phenomena in the agricultural sector of many developing countries today (Barr 1981; Winrock International 1981; DeWalt 1983).

Although a large number of democracies have extended political rights to expatriates, relatively little is known about the depths of transnational political engagement. How attentive are expatriates to politics in the country of origin? When expatriates judge leaders “back home,” are their evaluations based on the same ideological considerations as those of citizens in the country of origin? Drawing from original surveys conducted during presidential elections in Mexico (2006) and Colombia (2010), in which both emigrants and citizens within the country were sampled, this study addresses these questions. The results indicate that for each nationality group, living abroad is not associated with a drop in political attentiveness, and time abroad does not in and of itself depress attention to politics from a distance. Moreover, emigrants and individuals in the country of origin do not vary in the extent to which ideological preferences are used to judge presidents, which is a key marker of political sophistication. These results suggest that in the context of Mexican and Colombian politics, living abroad does not markedly diminish the potential for effective democratic engagement.

It has for years been accepted that as Latin American countries urbanize and industrialize, the proportion of people employed in tertiary (“services”) categories relative to those in secondary (manufacturing, construction) increases more swiftly than in the nineteenth-century industrial countries. This is usually taken to mean that urbanization here “outruns” industrialization, that people are released from precarious rural occupations faster than stable secondary-sector jobs are created for them. The situation is aggravated by the introduction of advanced technology that allows high worker-output ratios and by the lack of possibilities for migration abroad such as relieved Europe of 55 million “excess” persons in the period 1750-1939. Table 5 shows that although the per cent of Latin Americans working in factories more than doubled in the period 1925-60, thus increasing much more sharply than the per cent of city dwellers, the total share employed in manufacturing barely increased at all—and in fact shaded off in the 1950s—because of a relative drop in artisans.

As recently as 1960, edwin lieuwen observed that “on the general subject of militarism in Latin America no important books have yet appeared,” (Arms and Politics in Latin America, N.Y., 1960:279) a judgment that has never been seriously disputed. This is not to say that before that year the political role of the Latin American armed forces went unnoticed by historians and social scientists. On the contrary both the scholarly and popular literature dealing with the area abounds with references to militarism. From a scholarly point of view, however, the bulk of this production is unsatisfying.

Domestic workers, as essentially black women in highly precarious conditions, lacking social protection, and often not recognized as proper workers, are considered particularly hard, or even impossible, to organize compared to the “standard” male industrial worker. Yet they have been mobilizing for decades in several countries, including Brazil, where they won new labor rights in 2015. Through an ethnographic study of domestic workers’ unions in Brazil, I argue that what has made their mobilization possible is precisely the intersectional dimension of their oppression. While gender, race, and class have produced multiple forms of exclusion, these vectors of oppression have also enabled domestic workers to build alliances with women’s, black, and workers’ movements, thus giving domestic workers more visibility and more resources to organize their members. I have identified three forms of alliance building, each determined by domestic workers’ unions’ particular framing of gender, race, and class issues: rigid autonomy, critical alliance, and encompassing unionism.

Well-financed opposition parties can exert their organizational strength to undercut the territorial advantages of political machines and clientele networks. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, leftist parties in Brazil's Northeast region brought conservative dominance to an end. The Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) led this shift, not only garnering regional majorities in presidential elections but also winning multiple governorships and increasing its share of federal and state legislative seats in the region. In contrast to arguments attributing recent electoral shifts in the Northeast to civil society, aggregate growth, and conditional cash transfers, we argue that the territorial expansion of the PT organization played a central role. A spike in party finances between 2001 and 2003 enabled the PT, for the first time, to establish party offices in northeastern municipalities from the top down. Drawing from underutilized data and sources, we show that the PT leadership eroded conservatives' monopoly on rural territory in the Northeast by strategically targeting hundreds of conservative-dominated municipalities and investing resources to stimulate the formation of local offices. The study demonstrates that this top-down territorial targeting produced considerable electoral gains for PT candidates across federal and state races.

Despite calls to improve and systematize research on political participation in Latin America more than a decade ago (Kling 1964, Flores Olea 1967), the burgeoning literature on the subject has yet to achieve full recognition. Thus certain contradictory and incomplete traditional images still linger in the scholarly literature (Booth and Seligson 1978a). These treatments vary dramatically and almost bewilderingly: while one suggests that Latin Americans are becoming increasingly politically mobilized, two others hold that mass participation is very low and that most political activity is restricted to socioeconomic elites. Other images portray mass political participation as irrational and dwell upon political violence. Such familiar notions have often intertwined. For example, a common picture depicts most Latin Americans, and especially peasants, as politically passive and quiescent until provoked, when they may burst violently into the political arena (for example, see Forman 1971, Singelmann 1975, Handelman 1975b, Moreno 1970). Similarly Wiarda (1974, pp. 4–5) discusses how the image of mobilization often combines with that of violence, producing the notion that the rising political awareness and participation of Latin Americans leads inexorably to ever greater levels of conflict (e.g., Schmitt and Burks 1963, Hadley 1958, Petras and Zeitlin 1968, Petras 1968).

While universities in several South American nations are experiencing the effects of redemocratization, Chilean universities have entered their second decade under military rule. Exploring Chilean higher education in the first decade reveals much about the fate of a major political, economic, and social institution and also sheds light on theoretical concerns that have attracted substantial scholarly attention.

Costa Rica es un país que de manera sistemática ha mostrado altos niveles de satisfacción de vida a pesar de que su ingreso per cápita no es alto. Datos recientes de la encuesta Gallup del 2008, la cual se hace en más de 140 países del planeta, muestran que los costarricenses tienen la satisfacción de vida más alta del mundo. Esta investigación sigue un enfoque de dominios de vida para entender la satisfacción de vida de los costarricenses y plantea que la satisfacción de vida es el resultado de la satisfacción personal en cada una de las diferentes facetas o áreas concretas donde se ejerce como ser humano. La investigación muestra que el ingreso, aunque estadísticamente significante, no es determinante de la satisfacción económica, y que la satisfacción económica no determina la satisfacción de vida. La investigación concluye que para los costarricenses el nivel de vida es solo uno de los aspectos que influyen en su satisfacción de vida; por ello, su satisfacción de vida es muy alta a pesar de que su ingreso per cápita es comparativamente bajo.

Despite the fact that the election of Vicente Fox to the presidency of Mexico in 2000 saw the arrival of the most socially conservative administration in contemporary Mexican politics, his government launched the country's first nationwide antihomophobia campaign in early 2005. This article attempts to solve this seeming policy puzzle by presenting empirical research evidence that suggests that the formulation and implementation of this policy was largely a result of the ability of several advocates of sexual minority rights to pursue this policy initiative from within government. Because Fox's election also saw a significant opening of the policy process, several “policy entrepreneurs” gained access to the policy-making process. However, given the controversial nature of the policy they pursued, policy entrepreneurs relied on the deployment of two policy frames to implement their policy in the face of fierce opposition: a scientific frame and a legal frame. The research presented here reveals that the successful launch of the campaign was the result of the strategic use of these two frames by an alliance of policy entrepreneurs working from within the state across federal bureaucratic agencies. Given the advantage the two frames afforded their case when confronting arguments based on morality, they ultimately managed to overcome fierce opposition from state and nonstate actors to implement their policy.

In January 1966, delegates from the liberation movements of eighty-two nations came together at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Africa, Asia y América Latina, OSPAAAL), quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of radical cultural production throughout the world. I argue that this influential political movement, which has been the subject of surprisingly few scholarly studies, forms the ideological backbone of current conceptualizations of global subalternity, such as the increasingly circulating notion of the Global South. Through close analysis of documents from OSPAAAL's propaganda apparatus, namely the Tricontinental Bulletin and a newsreel by Santiago Álvarez called Now (1965), I examine how OSPAAAL, through its engagement with the African American Civil Rights Movement, presents a theory of transnational subaltern political resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.