As part of a long-standing debate about the extent to which official, government-linked unions in Mexico actively seek to win gains for their members, analysts of labor relations in Mexico have described the dominance of contratos de protección, collective bargaining contracts that offer little or nothing to workers while protecting employers from real union representation. In particular, a number of researchers have asserted that such contracts are universal in retail. Analyzing forty-one retail collective bargaining contracts from four Mexican cities, I find strong evidence that this is not the case. I find considerable variation in wages and fringe benefits, benefits in excess of the legal minimum in 27 to 68 percent of cases (depending on the benefit), and cases of sustained improvement in contractual benefits. Detailed consideration of the patterns suggests that these contracts are not uniformly protection contracts, indicating that there is strong as well as weak unionism in Mexican retail, including among official unions, but that competitive conditions in Mexican retail constrain the possibilities for strong unionism.

In analyzing the historical development of Meso- and Andean-American society, historians have stressed the hacienda's destructive impact on native settlements, which, once broken down, became disposed to the adoption of Spanish traits. This view focuses primarily on the hacendado's acquisition of Indian land and labor and the resultant destruction, partial or complete, of traditional Indian forms of cultivation, trade, and ultimately social relationships. To the extent that the hacendado forced communal Indians to resettle in newly opened lands, cultivate European crops, and engage in European trade, he encouraged the Indians to abandon their traditional rituals and adopt readily available Spanish patterns as replacements.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Chile prided herself on a century-old tradition of social studies. Beginning with the so-called generation of 1842 and with the support of the University of Chile (established in 1843), some of the most distinguished Chilean minds devoted themselves to the study of Chilean society and its evolution. Hernán Godoy Urzua (1967) classifies this intellectual production in six groups: social thinking of the nineteenth century, studies belonging to traditional social disciplines, writings on the “social question,” novels with social content, modern social essays, and writings with sociological intent.

This essay reviews the following works:

Democracia em risco? 22 ensaios sobre o Brasil hoje. By Sérgio Abranches and twenty-three others. bold>São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2018. Pp. 328. R$69.90 paperback. ISBN: 9788535932027.

Presidencialismo de coalizão: Raízes e evolução do modelo político brasileiro. By Sérgio Abranches. bold>São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2018. Pp. 434. R$69.90 paperback. ISBN: 9788535931556.

Brazil Apart: 1964–2019. By Perry Anderson. bold>London: Verso, 2019. Pp. 224. $21.56 hardcover. ISBN: 9781788737944.

Dinheiro, eleições e poder: As engrenagens do sistema político brasileiro. By Bruno Carazza. bold>São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2018. Pp. 324. R$69.90 paperback. ISBN: 9788535931259.

Valsa brasileira: Do boom ao caos econômico. By Laura Carvalho. bold>São Paulo: Todavia, 2018. Pp. 192. R$49.90 paperback. ISBN: 9788593828621.

Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems. By Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy J. Power. bold>Oxford: Oxford University Press. US$85.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780198817208.

O lulismo em crise: Um quebra-cabeça do período Dilma (2011–2016). By André Singer. bold>São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2018. Pp. 392. R$54.90 paperback. ISBN: 9788535931150.

A batalha dos poderes: Da transição democrática ao mal-estar constitucional. By Oscar Vilhena Vieira. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2018. Pp. 233. R$49.90 paperback. ISBN: 9788535931815.

This article analyzes student mobilization and public discourse on higher education during the June 2013 protests in Brazil in an effort to situate the protests historically. I argue that higher education was a major, yet overlooked, component of the 2013 protests, and that concerns over the failings and shortcomings of Brazil’s university system had deeper roots in institutional problems and student discourses on education, society, and democracy. These historical inequalities combined with institutional memories that offered students models and examples of past mobilization and allowed them to tie their present-day concerns to past examples of student politics. I consider the ways in which the often-overlooked question of educational reform offers insights into ongoing social inequalities in Brazil, the failure of various regimes to address structural issues, and how students in 2013 looked to the past while simultaneously drawing on their own particular educational contingencies. This article situates 2013 historically while exploring the ways in which higher education in the twenty-first century has transformed, even as it remains an important part of political and social struggles between society and the state. Finally, this article explores how the 2013 protests in Brazil reflect ongoing struggles to define the role of the state in society, not just in Brazil but in the Americas more generally.

This article explores the reality of entrepreneurship in the favela of Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro. It contrasts the prescriptions of federal and state training programs and support policies for entrepreneurship with the reality of the practice of entrepreneurial activities in Rocinha. It shows that the logic of effectuation can explain microentrepreneurial trajectories in favelas, expanding its original reach from expert entrepreneurs in large firms. It also exposes the severe shortcomings in the training programs and support policies of the Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas (SEBRAE). It points to the urgency of reform of the very foundation of entrepreneurship policies in favelas.

This article reports on the current state of collective migrant organizing for two Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Strained relations between migrant organizations and village authorities combine with small active memberships to limit the level and type of fund-raising in support of village development and governance. These findings highlight the difficulties that communities face to maintain effective translocal institutions over time, particularly as first-generation migrants “retire” and a lack of new arrivals hinders organizational renewal.

This article explores Latin American genomic studies of mestizaje and the way mestizaje’s inherent contradiction between equality and hierarchy—a contradiction typical of liberalism—is managed in genomics. In Latin America, ideologies and practices of mestizaje may be seen as an antidote to hierarchies of race and class, but also as a terrain for the enactment of these hierarchies. Mestizaje mediates this contradiction between equality and hierarchy first by deploying the idea of sexual intimacy and family kinship across racial difference, and second by representing blackness and indigeneity as spatially peripheral and temporally backward-looking, thus naturalizing them as other. Multiculturalism can be seen as a recent variant on these themes, as well as a departure from them. Recent genomics research in Latin America strongly reiterates these ideas, while also adding some new twists. Despite its apparent connection with progressive politics and policies (antiracism, better health for all, protection of human rights for victims of oppression), genomics here appears as a mainly conservative force.

Beginning in the 1930s, a new type of song entered American popular music—the so-called “latune,” that is, a tune with a Latin beat and an English-language lyric. Although latunes drew on a variety of genres, what prevailed were Cuban rhythms, and particularly the “rhumba,” an elastic term (unrelated to the Afro-Cuban rumba) that included up-tempo sones as well as languid boleros. At one time or another, many of the best-known American composers—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer—contributed to the latune songbook. In spite of their popularity, however, latunes have elicited little attention, for they have been regarded as vapid, watered-down versions of authentic Latin American music. Arguing that these songs furnish important clues about the United States' absorption of Latin American culture, this essay undertakes a study of the history, features, and principal categories of latunes.

Scholars and journalists have devoted considerable attention to analyzing the three military rebellions that rocked Argentine democracy in 1987 and 1988 (Boron 1987; Fontana 1988; López 1988; Stepan 1988). In addition to considering whether these revolts threatened the stability of the new political regime, academic and political interpretations have pointed to another issue stemming from the revolts: the emergence of a new generation of army officers with political goals and ideological values that differ from those prevailing in the upper levels of the Argentine military hierarchy. According to some observers, the experiences of middle-ranking officers during the last authoritarian regime produced a breach within the army that led, in the extreme view, to “two opposing armies.” This argument asserts that the Argentine Army currently appears divided between the high command (“oficiales superiores” made up of colonels and generals) and middle-ranking officers, who encompass “subalternos” (lieutenants and captains) and “jefes” (majors and lieutenant colonels). The split seems to have stemmed from differing political goals and ideological affiliations. The question, however, has remained speculative rather than being subjected to analytical research.

What interests of Latin American women create distinctive attitudes toward justice system equality that differ from those of Latin American men? Building on recent work on general justice system bias and using 2003 Latinobarómetro data, I test this question in three Central American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) using two sets of attitudes toward justice system performance (equal punishment and equal treatment). Women are significantly more likely to believe that the criminal justice system provides unequal treatment before the law than are men, while women and men express the same level of belief that the justice system provides equal punishment. Evidence indicates that women connect unequal treatment to economic factors and follow a conflict model of criminal justice, which posits these attitudinal differences as a function of the group's subordinate position in society.

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The study of the distribution of income summarizes a nation's social organization and the outcome of the forces of social change. The measurement of income distribution itself yields a type of social scorecard, the resolution of claims by competing groups for the economy's output. As an indication of social justice, income distribution measures as well the extent to which different groups share in a nation's economic progress.

Political economy theory expects that changes in macroeconomic governance are often catalyzed by institutional factors, such as partisanship, elections, or International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality. I challenge and contextualize this view by incorporating the role of technocratic advisors into a domestic policy-making framework. I contend that presidents from countries with crisis legacies are more likely to appoint mainstream economists that pursue budget discipline. Employing an originally constructed dataset, the Index of Economic Advisors, I conduct an econometric test of sixteen Latin American countries from 1961 to 2011. I find that politicians are most likely to appoint mainstream economists who embrace fiscal rectitude in countries with inflation-crisis legacies. Furthermore, these crisis legacies are enduring given the severity of inflationary trauma relative to other types of domestic economic volatility in Latin America. In fact, these effects hold when controlling for both historical and contemporaneous shocks to unemployment.

This article argues that the national political context of Colombia in the 1970s and 1980s led the Colombian indigenous movement to elaborate an ethnic citizenship. The failures of the left and the decline in effectiveness of partisan citizenship played a large role in the representation and political practices of the premier indigenous grassroots organization Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca; CRIC). This article focuses on the formative moments of the 1970s and early 1980s when CRIC began to represent its movement as a primarily indigenous, ethnic one, minimizing the importance of nonindigenous actors. The nation-state, at each stage of the movement's development, fostered the “ethnicization” of the indigenous movement of Colombia in hopes of weakening the southwestern insurgency and legitimizing its institutions:

The changes men and women in a rural community in Nicaragua say they have implemented over the past decades differ in ways that relate to their vulnerability to drought. Short-term coping was more common among the women, especially the female heads of households, while adaptive actions were more common among the men. The Community Capitals Framework offers a tool to understand the differences. A gendered culture meant that the division of other types of capital (natural, human, social, financial, built, cultural, and political) as well as the division of labor in the case study area were also highly gendered. These gendered inequalities in access to and control over different forms of capital has led to a gender-differentiated capacity to respond to climate change, men being able to adapt and women experiencing a downward spiral in capacity and increasing vulnerability to drought.

The ethnic-cultural (re)naissance in Chile is currently undergoing an expansion as well as a diversification along lines of minority cultures and gender differentiations. Since the explosion onto the Chilean literary landscape of the bilingual poet Leonel Lienlaf in 1989, Mapuche-Huilliche writers have come into the spotlight of academia, state, and popular culture critics. Younger generations of Huilliche poets are distinguishing themselves through a hybrid, reflexive, and literary expressiveness. In opposition to the poetry that is tied to indigenous cultural institutions, orality, and traditional rural forms of existence, these poets thrive and strive for a pluricultural and complex way of living and expressing themselves. This work explores a selection of poets and their individual circumstances in an attempt to delineate the differences within and between these poets and the more traditional ones, and suggest a greater cultural change that is coming about in south Chile.

The article is a schematic cultural-historical analysis of a major genre of regional popular music in Brazil, baião (the precursor to today's forró). Using Gramscian terminology appropriate to a discussion of hegemony and resistance, I argue that the early proponents of baião had to wage a cultural war of maneuver to challenge the existing hegemony of the Rio de Janeiro culture industry and to gain new respect for the northeastern Brazilian people and their culture. After success in this initial endeavor, subsequent generations of musicians have carried on a war of position to maintain baião's, and later forró‘s, prominence on the national stage. The article also analyzes certain common themes in forró (e.g., saudade, or nostalgia, for the home region and a critical view of the urban Southeast) as tactics that have contributed to forró‘s continuing relevance to Northeasterners and to its successful struggles of maneuver and position.