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.

One of the most characteristic and picturesque features of Latin American commercial activity is the market, “an organized public gathering of buyers and sellers of commodities meeting at an appointed place at regular intervals” (Hodder 1965: 57). These markets are held in open market squares or plazas, in streets and open spaces, at roads junctions, and in public, municipal market buildings. Locally, markets are referred to by such names as ferias, plazas, or mercados in Spanish-speaking Latin America, feiras in Brazil, tianguis in Indian areas of central Mexico, catus in some Quechua-speaking Andean areas, and marchés in French-speaking countries. Generally found in medium to large nucleated settlements, markets are also encountered in very small hamlets, particularly those located at nodal points in communication networks. A settlement may have one or more different market locations within the built-up area, or on the outskirts of the settlement. Most larger towns and cities have several separate markets which specialize in different commodities, or serve different neighborhoods or social groups. Places with one or more markets are generally referred to as market centers.

The analytic paradigms of race and nation have dominated scholarship on the Dominican Republic and have framed social and cultural analysis in ways that have limited the theorizing of Dominican materials to a narrow focus on identity. These gatekeeping concepts have been especially influential in shaping Dominican studies in the United States and in defining the predominant questions of interest in the field. This article assesses the conceptual limits of race and nation as persistent modes of analysis applied to the Dominican Republic and evaluates how these restrictive themes both shape and are shaped by conventional ideas about Dominican society. We argue for deeper engagement with homegrown scholarship and voices on the ground in order to move beyond repetitive and provincial concerns with “Dominicanness” and to trouble the far-too-common portrayal of the country as a novel racial problem.

Since the term Mesoamerica was coined in 1943, it has been used widely as an inclusive analytical unit. Paul Kirchhoff's original definition was based on “geographic limits, ethnic composition, and cultural characteristics at the time of the Conquest” (Kirchhoff 1943, 94). He employed these criteria to delineate an area from northern Mexico south through Central America to the Gulf of Nicoya (1943, 98).

“In the last two or three years, … a group of Mexicans …, supported and advised by the private banks, has stolen more money from our country than the empires that have exploited us since the beginning of history…. They've robbed us …, but they will not rob us again.” With these words, President López Portillo nationalized Mexico's private banks and imposed controls on foreign exchange. Many of those attending this State of the Union address on 1 September 1982 stood to applaud, while the president cried and one banker fainted. Mexico's chief of state continued, “The revolution will speed up; the state will no longer be intimidated by pressure groups.”

Several scholars have argued that decentralization benefits states and municipalities, granting them more autonomy for managing their budgets and more resources to deliver their services. Others have questioned this assertion, claiming that decentralization makes subnational units more fiscally dependent on central governments. This article argues that the fiscal impact of decentralization must be differentiated across states. It theoretically specifies and empirically demonstrates which states benefit during periods of decentralization and centralization. It argues that powerful presidents who centralize resources have imposed greater costs on more developed and fiscally independent districts (which prefer to administer their own resources and can be serious challengers to presidential power), thus relying mainly on support from less developed and more fiscally dependent provinces, which prefer more redistribution. I present empirical evidence for Argentina (1983-2004), a developing federation with strong governors and high cross-regional inequality, and discuss some implications for comparative studies on the topic.

The existence of a division between what Italo López Vallecillos has termed the “agro-financial” and “agro-industrial-financial” factions of the Salvadoran elite has become what Enrique Baloyra calls “the consensus of scholarly opinion” on elite politics in El Salvador. As López Vallecillos describes the division, the agro-financial faction “opposes any attempt to transform the rigid framework of land concentration and low salaries in its devotion to the plantation economy that is the basis of its income and profits.” The agro-industrial faction, in contrast, “tries to introduce changes in the economic system … and opts for less authoritarian political forms, within the framework of liberal democracy, representative but restricted and controlled.” Oscillation between these two elite strategies has long characterized Salvadoran politics, and in the 1920s, the temporary dominance of the more liberal faction gave El Salvador the reputation of being the most progressive country in Central America. During times of crisis like the 1930s and the early 1980s, however, the positions of the two factions converged to support the retrograde policies of the more conservative “agro-financial” faction, which have given El Salvador an international reputation for ferocious authoritarianism.

Desde una perspectiva cualitativa, el artículo (i) analiza cómo un grupo de migrantes españoles de alta calificación percibe, valora y representa su espacio vivido y cómo construye un sentido de lugar en la Ciudad de México, (ii) explora la identificación de este grupo con la ciudad y los lugares de residencia, sus relaciones interpersonales, de ocio, así como los vínculos con el país de origen y sus intenciones de estancia y (iii) evalúa hasta qué punto sus valoraciones, percepciones e identificaciones son válidas para entender los procesos migratorios y de asentamiento en el país de destino. El artículo se basa en un trabajo de campo realizado en la Ciudad de México desde mayo a septiembre de 2005 que consistió en veintinueve entrevistas en profundidad con migrantes españoles de alta calificación. El artículo concluye que estas personas mantienen vínculos con los lugares de proximidad, aunque no necesariamente impliquen un sentido claro de pertenencia y, en todo caso, estos vínculos geográficos sólo explican parcialmente las intenciones de estancia en México.

This article examines residential segregation by skin color in forty of the largest metropolitan areas in Brazil, using census tract data from the 2010 Brazilian census. Residential dissimilarity among whites, browns, and blacks is moderate to low by US standards, and residential segregation correlates positively with socioeconomic status. By contrasting our findings with results from the 1980 Brazilian census, we observe that in thirty years, residential segregation decreased significantly in many metropolitan areas, particularly white-brown and brown-black dissimilarities. We speculate as to why these changes should have occurred.

In Latin America, indigenous identity claims among people not previously recognized as such by the state have become a key topic of anthropological and sociological research. Scholars have analyzed the motivations and political implications of this trend and the impacts of indigenous population's growth on national demographic indicators. However, little is known about how people claiming indigenous status constructs the meaning of their indigenous ethnicity. Drawing from sixty-four in-depth interviews, focus-group analyses, and participant observation, this article explores the double process of identity construction: the reconstruction of the Arapium indigenous identity and the creation of the Jaraqui indigenous identity in Brazil's Lower Amazon. The findings reveal six themes that contribute to the embodiment of a definition of indigenous identity and the establishment of a discursive basis to claim recognition: sense of rootedness, historical memory, historical transformation, consciousness, social exclusion, and identity politics.

Detailed analyses of ancient stone tools, or lithic analyses, were performed by archaeologists as early as the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, the Near East, and North America. However, it was not until the past thirty years that lithic analysis became a standard part of prehistoric research in Mesoamerica. The reasons for this belated beginning involve the dominant humanities-art history orientation toward much of Mesoamerican archaeology prior to the 1960s; the extraordinary richness, complexity, and accessibility of other cultural components (particularly architecture, hieroglyphics, ceramics, and sculpture); and the lack of quantitative dating techniques. The paucity of reliable dating techniques until quite recently led archaeologists into elaborate attempts to date the past by using a variety of subjective ordering techniques. It is therefore not surprising that, prior to the last ten years, most Mesoamerican lithic analyses had as their major objective the isolation of chronologically significant classes. These were discovered and defined at both the typological and the attribute (or modal) level of classification.

This article looks at the Chocó Department, where black and indigenous ethnic movements demanded collective land rights and autonomy to safeguard local livelihoods from resource-intensive economies. However, after decentralization and state restructuring reforms granted constitutional protections of local ethnopolitical autonomy in the nineties, most indigenous and black communities failed to benefit from the new rights. This has been explained as the result of human rights violations, neoliberal development, and armed groups' appropriation of regional economies, which created stressful conditions for self-governance. In such a scenario, autonomy was maintained only by communities that could resist violence and hold regional or national governments accountable. I build on these claims and add that the difference between the intent and the actual outcome of the reforms is explained by the way new institutions were territorialized or adapted by specific actors to local dynamics. In the Chocó Department, reforms were territorialized in a context of weak institutions, government corruption, and resource-intensive land-use changes that worked against ethnopolitical autonomy by enabling local intermediaries, who frequently made decisions that went against community rights.

Sociolinguistics, itself a relatively young field of scholarly endeavor, more and more has been reflecting an interest in Mexican Americans insofar as they, like blacks and American Indians, constitute a distinct linguistic-social group that is grappling with the problems common to poor ethnic minorities in the United States. This paper intends to survey the literature existing to date on the Chicano speech community as viewed from a sociocultural vantage point.