In 1877 Miguel Luis Amunátegui, noted historian and Chile's Minister of Education, observed aptly that while the Chinese bound their daughters' feet, his countrymen bound their daughters' minds. Amunátegui's dictum reveals an official concern for women's education that was unique in nineteenth-century Latin America. Chile's efforts to remove the “bindings” from the minds of its young women are important in several respects. Education was in fact the linchpin of an ambitious strategy to revamp and modernize every aspect of Chilean society. Because of the centrality of formal education in this experiment and the intensity of thinking on the subject, when women's education was addressed in official circles, female roles were being defined as part of a coherent national ideology. The Chilean experiments in education thus provide a rare opportunity to observe explicit, detailed reflection on women's roles. Unequivocal official commitment to public education in Chile also resulted in the creation of a large bureaucracy that in turn collected immense quantities of data on household size, family income, occupation, and related subjects. Much of this data concerns women and insofar as it documents the “social bedrock” so often obscured to scholars, it is immensely useful for women's history.

Studies of how previous political experience affects a candidate’s electoral success have overlooked the experience that candidates get from running campaigns even if they lose. This article argues that experience running for office, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, could give candidates several benefits, such as expertise in running strong campaigns, a network of connections, and visibility among the electorate. As a result, candidate experience, not just office-holding experience, should be positively correlated with electoral success. The article tests this expectation in Brazil using a database of candidates for seven types of elected offices between 1998 and 2018. It finds that candidates who ran for, but lost, elected offices are more likely to win when they run in future elections for the same and lower-ranked offices, compared to candidates with no experience running for office. Thus, candidate experience, not just office-holding experience, is important for explaining electoral success in politics.

This article reports the results of a pioneering and in-depth survey of the research and information-seeking behavior of the student members of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) living in the United States and Puerto Rico. The results suggest that the new generation of Latin Americanists in the universities surveyed are confident in their abilities to carry out research on the region within their respective disciplines. However, most of these students have not received formal instruction by course instructors or librarians on how to carry out their research on Latin America. Use of the Internet as a research resource is popular but has not replaced the use of the library and long-standing research strategies such as footnote-chasing. While the reported use of library electronic resources is very high, awareness of Latin America-specific and electronically-available research tools such as HLAS, HAPI, and LAPTOC is low. The survey is the first step in reassessing the ever-changing needs and research patterns of this cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary group of academic library users and future leaders in Latin American studies.

The Brazilian defense industry has become the country's most dynamic high-tech industry. This article will examine and analyze its remarkable growth and development. In the first section, the matrix of motivations behind the establishment of the Brazilian defense industry will be discussed. The second section will review its growth and strategic directions, and the third will elaborate on the industry's export drive, especially its major markets and products. The following sections will discuss the catalytic role of the Brazilian government in the defense industry, the industry's tripod strategy, and major barriers to further growth and development.

In 1955, a monument to Inca warrior Rumiñahui was erected in Otavalo's central plaza. In this article, I study the ways in which competing imaginings of the Ecuadorian nation have shaped the material and symbolic trajectory of the monument. The monument was the outcome of a struggle for hegemony between nonindigenous elites. The current appropriation of the monument by the local indigenous population, however, is at odds with the ideological purpose for which it was built. The initiative to build the monument emerged from the public sphere—which at that time excluded indigenous peoples—in a context of national debates about the Indian problem. The widespread notion that the indigenous people of Otavalo were exceptional propelled the local nonindigenous elite to debate the Indian problem and shape, in the process, a public sphere. Elucidating the workings of the public sphere in the racialization of indigenous peoples, I aim to contribute to the academic literature about the relationship between Indian and nation in Ecuador. This literature has focused on the role that either the state or the private sphere has played in this racialization and has not paid enough explicit attention to the public sphere.

This essay reviews the following works:

China y América Latina en una nueva fase: Desafíos en el siglo XXI. Edited by Pamela Aróstica and Walter Sánchez. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 2019. Pp. 270. ISBN: 9789561126268.

China–Latin America Relations in the 21st Century: The Dual Complexities of Opportunities and Challenges. Edited by Raúl Bernal-Meza and Li Xing. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Pp. 289. $79.64 hardcover. ISBN: 9783030356132.

Sino–Latin American Economic and Trade Relations. Edited by Chai Yu and Yue Yunxia. Singapore: Springer, 2019. Pp. 193. $64.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9789811334047.

China, the United States, and the Future of Latin America. Edited by David B. H. Denoon. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Pp. 432. $39.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781479821648.

Globalizing Patient Capital: The Political Economy of Chinese Finance in the Americas. By Stephen B. Kaplan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 390. $84.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107182318.

Dependency in the Twenty-First Century? The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations. By Barbara Stallings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 75. $20.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781108793032.

Dragonomics: How Latin America Is Maximizing (or Missing Out on) China’s International Development Strategy. By Carol Wise. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 328. $36.57 hardcover. ISBN: 9780300224092.

This article analyzes Salvadoran newspaper coverage of a social movement struggle that emerged in 2002 to prevent the privatization of the health-care system. Movement groups pursued their policy goals through both extrainstitutional protest and formal legislative channels. Through an analysis of news content, this article examines whether these different components of the movement's claims-making repertoire influenced the portrayal of the movement's goals, actors, and actions by one of the major Salvadoran news dailies. The analysis reveals that, compared to protest events, legislative processes that the movement set in motion generated coverage that was more sympathetic to the movement and that presented greater interrogation of government and elite plans for health-care reform.

This article examines the appearance of religious metaphors and imagery—related to the evil eye, envy, energy, and purification—in the narratives of former leaders from Porto Alegre's internationally renowned initiative in direct democracy, the Participatory Budget. The data come from qualitative interviews conducted with female grassroots community leaders who for various reasons have withdrawn from active civic participation. While notions of envy and evil eye are commonplace in everyday life in Brazil, their appearance in discourse around citizen participation appears out of place. This article uses four ethnographic cases to examine how notions of envy and evil eye are drawn upon to explain discontinued civic participation. I argue that the apparent anachronism of religious imagery such as envy and evil eye reflects a widespread assumption among activists, politicians, and scholars that civic participation initiatives like the Participatory Budget are inherently secular. I also advance the broader argument that bringing scholarly attention to nonpolitical metaphors and tropes that shape grassroots political experience leads to a more complete account of citizenship practices and identities in Porto Alegre.

Since 1976 profound changes have occurred in Brazilian national society, changes that have implications for the tribal populations in Brazil as well as for those conducting anthropological and linguistic research among these populations. Many of these changes can be linked to the government policy of abertura (opening). This policy was begun implicitly under the regime of Ernesto Geisel (1974-79) and has been continued more explicitly by the current President, João Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo, who is scheduled to remain in office until 1985. Perhaps equally as important at the infrastructural level have been the global economic changes that were largely linked to earlier increases in oil prices. These steep increases have severely shaken the Brazilian economy, causing annual inflation rates in 1980, 1981, and 1982 of approximately 100 percent.

An increasing amount of research has been undertaken in the last decade on the power structure of the Empire of Brazil (1822–89). In common with similar work on the rest of Latin America, many of the studies on Brazil have adopted the concept of the elite for their theoretical framework. And, as elite studies must do if they are to be more than speculative, several of the works have drawn on prosopography, or collective biography, to support the interpretations of the power structure that they advance. If the results have not, in general, been entirely satisfactory, this is largely due to the limitations in the prosopographical materials used. Since the materials have not easily lent themselves to a proper quantitative approach, they have been used selectively in the form of examples, the validity and relevance of which must always be suspect.

Recent studies of the history of Mexican cinema continue to speak of the complex relations between the state and the film industry, and the most frequently analyzed aspects tend to be the same: the reach and forms of censorship, as well as the financial dependence on the state. To broaden this perspective, I propose a classification of cinematic discourses that represent the relations between film characters and state powers. I discuss four basic modes of representation that, determined by historical and economic circumstances, reflect and mediate the attitudes and dispositions of viewers toward the political regime. For each mode, I discuss a sequence in a paradigmatic film, analyzing visual and ideological aspects in relation to the political moment at the time of the film's release. Finally, I argue that, despite the resurgence of the Mexican cinema and a more critical tone in its approach to state institutions, fictional films still rest on indirect and allegorical representations of recent events. This is due to the uncertainty of the prolonged and still-incomplete transition to institutional democracy in Mexico.

Este articulo analiza el papel que desempeñaron turistas norteamericanos en la redefinición de la vocación productiva de dos localidades mexicanas. Estos visitantes desde sus actividades empresariales tuvieron un papel fundamental en la constitución de estos espacios sociales como lugares turísticos. El trabajo analiza el papel de los emprendedores como agentes en la transformación de la identidad cultural de pequeñas poblaciones que, hasta antes de la presencia de estos emprendedores, no eran considerados destinos turísticos y pasaban por una crisis económica por lo que sus proyectos parecían una aventura destinada al fracaso. El papel que los visitantes norteamericanos han tenido en la definición de la cultura y la actividad turística en México ha sido poco analizado. Los casos de estudio son Taxco (Guerrero) y Álamos (Sonora).

Social conflicts stemming from industrial mining projects in Peru have increasingly been fought in court cases in recent years. This article analyzes the dark side of this judicialization of mining conflicts, a process through which state authorities criminalize participation in social protests and attempt to prevent the mobilization of social movements. This use of the law by public authorities is an example of the so-called shrinking space in which the scope of action of civil society actors is increasingly restricted and constrained worldwide. This article presents an in-depth analysis of a specific court case against a group of mining opponents in the Cajamarca region of Peru. Based on ethnographic field research conducted in Peru, the article discusses three different modalities of the law’s domination, exploring the various ways the law rules those who oppose large-scale extractive projects.

Mounting evidence shows that authoritarian orientations exert a powerful influence on public opinion attitudes and candidate support. The 2018 Brazilian elections brought to power Jair Bolsonaro, a candidate with an open disregard for democracy and democratic institutions. This study examines Brazilian voters’ differences in authoritarianism and electoral support for a right-wing authoritarian candidate. It employs the AmericasBarometer national survey data to demonstrate that authoritarianism is politically important in Brazil because of its association with attitudes toward the use of force as well as with conservative social and political attitudes. The effect of authoritarianism on the probability of voting for Bolsonaro is as large as that of other relevant political behavior variables such as ideology, negative partisanship, or religiosity, whereas nonauthoritarian voters spread their votes across other candidates. Although these other variables are also relevant to Bolsonaro’s victory, his candidacy was uniquely able to mobilize a coalition of authoritarian voters. Whether or not authoritarianism remains a salient cleavage in the electorate is considered along with the consequences of this potential divide for political competition in Brazilian politics.

We examine the promise and accomplishments of New Social Movement (NSM) theory for understanding recent social movements in Latin America. After delineating and critiquing the key premises and concerns of NSM analyses, we demonstrate how a conceptual frame combining political economy and political sociology accounts better for the origins and trajectories of the social movements, including two of the most important in Latin America, Brazil's Movement of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) and Bolivia's Movement toward Socialism (MAS).

University Students Have Been a Highly Visible Participant in Latin American politics for many years. To cite a few examples, they played an important role in the overthrow of the regimes in Cuba (1933, 1959), Guatemala (1944), Venezuela (1958), and Bolivia (1964), and have led significant anti-government demonstrations in nearly every Latin American country at one time or another. No government in the region can afford to disregard students as a political group.

This essay reviews the following works:

Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America: Trauma, Politics, and Resistance. Edited by Aída Díaz de León, Llorente Marina , and Marcella Salvi. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. vi + 177. ISBN: 9781498507806.

La consagración de la memoria: Una etnografía acerca de la institucionalización del recuerdo sobre los crímenes del terrorismo de Estado en la Argentina. By Ana Guglielmucci. Buenos Aires: Antropofagia, 2013. Pp. 398. ISBN: 9789871238996.

Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-Telling in Post-Shining Path Peru. Edited by Cynthia E. Milton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 307. ISBN: 9780822355304.

Ni tan elefante, ni tan blanco: Arquitectura, urbanismo y política en la trayectoria del Estadio Nacional. By Valentina Rozas Krause. Santiago, Chile: RIL Editores, 2014. Pp. 342. ISBN: 9789560100641.

Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires: Balancing Memory, Architecture, and Tourism. By Brigitte Sion. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. xix + 129. ISBN: 9780739176306.