El autor, abogado y consultor independiente, nos da cuenta, de primera mano, de la conflictiva Asamblea Constituyente de Bolivia (AC), donde delegados constituyentes elegidos produjeron una nueva constitución política del Estado en 2006–2007. En la AC, movimientos sociales desafiaron modelos de democracia tradicionales representativos, empujando nuevos modelos participativos los cuales incorporaban reivindicaciones étnicos para la justicia. El artículo examina los principales actores (partidos políticos, movimientos sociales, organizaciones no gubernamentales y grupos opositores) y los obstáculos al proceso como la falta de consenso sobre metas y estrategias, la capacidad institucional limitada y una estructura reglamentaria que facilita el veto minoritario de la decisión mayoritaria. El autor concluye que estos problemas finalmente hicieron posible que los intereses y partidos alrededor de la AC dictaran los resultados en lugar de los delegados elegidos.

This study discusses the responses of Mexican intellectuals to the 1968 massacre in the Plaza de Tlatelolco. Several published studies and anthologies have covered the poetry, narrative, and essays written on the subject, but no such consideration has been given to the theatrical works written and staged since 1968. Jeanette Malkin's theory on memory-theatre, Pierre Nora's “lieux de mémoire,” and Michel Foucault's concept of countermemories all shed light on how these dramatic works function in a changing Mexico, now moving toward authentic democracy and ready to revive a segment of history suppressed and distorted but never forgotten. Of the many plays commemorating the events of 1968, four that focus on the process of memory are analyzed in this essay. Because of the slow democratization of Mexico, the growing maturity of former participants and witnesses, and the postmodern craving for testimony, the repressed memories of Tlatelolco have not faded into oblivion but continue to inspire the dramatic imagination.

Conceived as a contribution to debates about the role of state institutions in perpetuating racial inequality in modern Brazil, this article explores the relative importance of social and racial characteristics in determining defendants' treatment in Rio de Janeiro's criminal courts between 1930 and 1964. Focusing on rarely noted aspects of defendants' class and citizenship status, and emphasizing the importance of judicial procedure, it argues that social discrimination was open in Rio de Janeiro's courts, but that race alone was a relatively poor predictor of defendants' fates. At the same time, it suggests that racial and social characteristics ought not to be seen as separate and competing categories, both because “social' language had important racial meanings and because ”social“ discrimination had significant racial implications. Institutionalized social prejudice may thus go far in explaining the stubborn persistence of racial inequity in an age when ”racial democracy“ became a national hope and mantra.

Latin American scholars in the twentieth century often pointed to the agrarian question and the dominance of the large latifundio estates as the key to explaining their countries’ underdevelopment. Yet, in more recent years, the emphasis on agrarian structures has declined and the latifundio is no longer seen as a relevant factor to economic development. In its place have emerged explanations that emphasize international trade relations, institutions, or the capacity of local states. This study makes a case for bringing the latifundio “back in” to explanations of underdevelopment in Latin America, and points to the persistence of particular property relations, low-intensity land use, and low-risk productive strategies throughout the region as barriers to development. Agricultural census data and various other sources on land use suggest that large latifundio estates are still a relevant factor throughout the region, and I argue that they continue to represent a significant barrier for the deepening of industrialization.

Despite its important role in the construction of imagined communities throughout the region, the study of silent cinema in Latin America has barely gone beyond an initial stage of unearthing national and regional cinemas to a more comparative and critical study of trends and ideologies from a transnational perspective. This essay outlines such a comparative history by using the spatiotemporal metaphor of triangulation as a framework for theorizing the politics of criollo aesthetics, and by combining a diachronic examination of major trends with synchronic close readings of paradigmatic films. The periodization and selection of films respond, in turn, to a broader consideration of how ideology, aesthetics, and economics intersect in the evolution of filmic practices in Latin America during the silent era. Finally, in the conclusion, I argue that the most important legacy of this period of Latin American cinema on subsequent filmmaking in the region is not so much the elaboration of a criollo aesthetics, which would not survive beyond the silent period, but rather the development of the strategy of triangulation, whereby Latin American filmmakers navigated a global cinematic landscape from a position of marginality.

This article seeks to accomplish four goals. First, it will examine the historical circumstances of the rise of the U.S.-Caribbean garment production circuit from the standpoint of economic restructuring within the U.S. industry and U.S.-Caribbean trade relations and from the perspective of the major political interests involved. It will also examine the impact of this restructuring on local garment sectors and the wider host economies in the Caribbean. The article will then explore the role of the “Big Three” Asian suppliers in the contemporary restructuring as well as their role in the offshore garment sector in the Caribbean. The latter effort constitutes a preliminary investigation of an emerging area of political and scholarly interest, and it will be partly integrated into the treatment of the first two topics. Finally, while I will refer more broadly to the major garment-producing Caribbean islands, Jamaica will provide a case-study focus for my remarks here. The essay will conclude by looking briefly at the “free-zone” or “free-trade-zone” model of industrial relations and its impact on older traditions of trade unionism and labor-management practices, taking the experience of a number of Hong Kongese garment factories in the state-owned Kingston and Garmex Free Zones in Kingston, Jamaica, as an example.

Thearticle explores popular opposition to the nineteenth-century liberallaws thatmandated privatization ofthecommunal lands held byIndian communities in Mexico. It argues that peasants in Michoactin responded to the reparto withacomplex mixtureof resistance, negotiation, andaccommodation in attempts to retain local control over the definition and distribution of property rights and to defend local religious and political institutions. The first section provides a briefoverview of liberal thinkingand legislation on the privatization of communal lands, highlighting the legal and ideological ambiguities and contradictions that provided opportunities for resistance and negotiation. The second section explores howand why peasants sooften opposed the reparto in Michoacdn, stressing the complex natureof popular resistance and state responses to it. Thethirdsection offers a briefoverview of nineteenth-century agrarian development in Michoactin as background for thetwo case studies of the politics of privatization at thelocal level. Zacapu peasants managed to delay thereparto for thirty-five years but ended up losing muchof theirlandto statetax officials and neighboring landowners. SanJuan Parangaricutiro successfully retained its substantial woodlands as communal property, evenas local mestizo elites appropriatedthe best of cultivated landas private property. Thearticle concludes with a comparative analysis of the liberal reparto in the two communities, linking the different outcomes to peasant partisanship in theagrarian andpolitical struggles of theMexican Revolution.

Until the 1970s, Paraguay's eastern frontier was known primarily for its vast virgin forests and its domination by semifeudal enterprises engaged in extracting yerba maté and timber. After the 1970s, however, the extension of transportation networks, construction of the massive binational Itaipú hydroelectric works, and the release of state lands for private purchase paved the way for large-scale in-migration, settlement, and transformation of the region into a zone for commercial agriculture. In less than two decades, the rapid expansion of soybean production into this area has catapulted Paraguay into the ranks of the world's major exporters of soybeans.

This essay reviews the following works:

¿Quienes deciden la política social? Economía política de programas sociales en América Latina. Edited by Alejandro Bonvecchi, Julia Johannsen, and Carlos Scartascini. Washington, DC: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, 2015. Pp. xx + 200. Digital open access. ISBN: 9781597822190.

Crafting Policies to End Poverty in Latin America: The Quiet Transformation. By Ana Lorena De La O. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 175. $84.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107089488.

Sistemas políticos y bienestar social: Estudios comparados: Brasil, Colombia y Venezuela (2000–2010). By Augusto De Venanzi. Almagro: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 2015. Pp. 238. $22.99 paperback. ISBN: 9788416345144.

The Political Logic of Poverty Relief: Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. By Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Federico Estévez, and Beatriz Magaloni. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 236. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107140288.

Social Policy Expansion in Latin America. By Candelaria Garay. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii + 256. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316606407.

Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America. By Alisha C. Holland. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 398. $35.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316626351.

The Quest for Universal Social Policy in the South: Actors, Ideas, and Architectures. By Juliana Martínez Franzoni and Diego Sánchez-Ancochea. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii + 256. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781107564893.

Slavery in the interior state of Minas Gerais has been a focal point of the voluminous historiography appearing on Brazilian slavery in the past twenty years. During the mineral boom of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Minas was the key region of the colonial Brazilian economy and the largest slaveholding capitania. The older literature on Brazilian history recognized the centrality of slave labor to the eighteenth-century mining sector but concluded that as the mining boom waned after 1750, slavery began to disintegrate. The history of Minas Gerais after the boom was interpreted as a long period of economic stagnation accompanied by reversion to cattle raising and subsistence agriculture, slow demographic growth, and the transfer of the Mineiro slave population during the nineteenth century to the more dynamic coffee-growing areas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period of dramatic economic and population change for the Spanish Caribbean, including Puerto Rico. This note describes a unique collection of population data that sheds nuanced light on older research themes and promises to inspire new inquiries. These aggregate population data, or padrones, commissioned by the Spanish Crown and now more widely available and usable than ever before, offer details on Puerto Rico's sex, age, status, and socio-racial composition on an annual basis for the period spanning 1779 to 1802. We describe the data, their accompanying limitations, and their potential uses to advance scholarship on late-colonial Spanish America.

The subject of industrialization has become almost an obsession with Argentines. The image of a belated, weak, incomplete, and truncated process of industrialization has become associated with the frustrated destiny of Argentina. At some moment in its history, the country must have taken a wrong turn and, squandering opportunities, set off on a perverse downhill, an inexplicable turn in the first place, and not only for those who think of the country as being richly endowed. In the search for some explanation, the issue of industrialization has always occupied a central place in the debate.

Whether and how the international trade and investments of less-developed countries affect their patterns of income distribution has long been a matter of interest and debate. Classical economic theory has tended to be optimistic on this count based on the assumption that when poor, heavily populated countries specialize in and export the labor-intensive goods in which they are expected to have an advantage, they will grow fast and improve their income distribution as well. But while trade's positive impact on distribution may be the natural expectation when a country's exports are mainly labor-intensive manufactures, no such generalization is warranted when primary products dominate the export mix, even though one might still expect some loose tendency toward labor intensity. The distribution of rents associated with an export-specific input or inputs may be very concentrated (often the case with mineral exports) or relatively egalitarian (as with exports produced by small family farms), but political factors also affect who gets them. Other, less-direct effects may also be important, including the type of linkages from the export sector, the demands created by the income they generate, and the direction of government expenditure of the fiscal revenues resulting from the trade.

Scholars have recast debates on globalization by emphasizing both national actors’ selective appropriation of transnational practices and their hybrid reinvention in national settings. Drawing on Nestor García Canclini’s concepts of “global communities “ and “hybrid cultures, “ I explore these debates by comparing gay and lesbian activists’ first experiments in electoral activism in Mexico and Brazil, both occurring in 1982. The different electoral strategies that prevailed in each country drew on the transnational arena in different ways. To explain these differences, I consider the relative strength of competing sectors within heterogeneous social movement fields and their variable participation in competing global communities. The relative influence of these sectors and thus the relative salience of specific transnational practices, in turn, reflected each movement’s embeddedness in broader opposition movements to authoritarian regimes. Finally, I argue that these practices should be read contextually, with attention given to their transformation and limitations in national settings.

Comparando espacios de participación (consejos, comités, gabinetes, etc.) en municipios similares en Brasil, Venezuela y Nicaragua, gobernados por partidos que se autodefinen como de izquierda, se indaga a partir del paradigma clásico de Maxine Molyneux, en qué medida estas experiencias contribuyen a “emancipar” a las mujeres. Los resultados muestran que, en el caso de Venezuela, en un contexto de movilización, hay una inclusión abrumadora de mujeres en las bases locales aunque no necesariamente un avance profundo en torno a sus intereses estratégicos. En contraposición, los espacios de interface local anclados en el paradigma de la participación en Brasil no muestran una inclusión amplia de mujeres, pero sí un incremento relativo de contenidos estratégicos. Finalmente, cuando el partido en el gobierno en Nicaragua sigue una estrategia de cooptación para consolidar un monopolio partidario, existe un fuerte retroceso en relación al contenido emancipador de la lucha por intereses estratégicos de las mujeres.

Decentralization has been considered a tool of democracy promotion because of its ability to improve citizen participation and increase equity by allocating resources to long-neglected populations. I examine these claims by focusing on decentralization's effects for indigenous and Afro-Latino individuals in fifteen Latin American countries. Using AmericasBarometer survey data provided by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), I first analyze how the inclusion of ethnic citizens in local government affects attitudes that are considered crucial for democratic consolidation, such as satisfaction with democratic governance. I then assess whether decentralization has increased inclusion by examining how political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization affect ethnic individuals' participation and engagement in local government. The analyses demonstrate the limits of decentralizing reforms for democratization. I find that the inclusion of marginalized citizens is not substantially enhanced by decentralization, which is especially important given the other significant result of this study: that local inclusion increases ethnic individuals' support for democracy. The results suggest that individual reserves of social capital may be most important for enhancing local inclusion, and hence support for democracy.