This essay reviews the following works:

The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America. Edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 830. $250.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780521767330.

Native Evangelism in Central Mexico. By Hugo G. Nutini and Jean F. Nutini Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 197. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780292744127.

New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa. By Stephen Offutt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 192. $80.18 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107078321.

The Roots of Pope Francis’s Social and Political Thought: From Argentina to the Vatican. By Thomas R. Rourke Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. vii + 220. $80.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781442272712.

Since 1973, Venezuela has had extraordinary oil revenues. These go to the government and from the government to its employees and contractors. The monies have filtered into the Venezuelan economy, where large profits have been made in selling imported goods, construction, banking, and light industry. There are opportunities for investment in Venezuela, but the affluent Venezuelan is already a participant in a multitude of businesses; thus, when Florida real estate brokers sold properties in Caracas, Venezuelans, who had been looking for places to invest monies, were obvious customers. Indeed, so great had been the number of purchases of Miami condominiums that the Venezuelan government, in November 1977, put restrictions on sellers in Venezuela of foreign land and real estate, but not on the buyers. Monies have continued to flow out of Venezuela, which (at the time of this writing) has no restrictions on the capital exporter.

Although the knotted cord texts known as khipus have been created in the Andes for over a millennium (ca. AD 950–1950), their historical philology has been little understood. This study, based on original archival and ethnographic research, analyzes hybrid khipu/alphabetic texts known as “khipu boards,” examining their development in colonial Peru, and their role in twentieth-century Andean rituals. Particular attention is paid to a previously unknown sacred manuscript, the Entablo, from the community of San Pedro de Casta, Peru, which describes how villagers used khipu boards in their annual religious ceremonies until the 1950s. This study reveals new insights into the social and symbolic nature of post-Inka khipus as texts, particularly with reference to gender, place, and knowledge.

This note reports on research in Latin America and the Caribbean concerning international relations and foreign policy. It lists persons in the region who are working on these subjects, comments on changing priorities in research by Latin Americans, broadly evaluates the quality of their research, considers the institutional loci and contexts for Latin American work in this field, and discusses the relevance of work in Latin America and the Caribbean to scholars in the United States and other Northern countries, and to those in developing countries beyond Latin America. The report draws on a considerable number of books, journal articles, and unpublished memoranda made available by colleagues, on correspondence with a number of Latin American social scientists, and on several interviews. These notes are surely not complete, and inadvertent inaccuracies may be included, but this version is presented with the hope that it will be helpful to others in its present form and that it may stimulate the submission to LARR of additional pertinent material.

This essay reviews the following works:

Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands: Gender, Age, Memory, and Place. By Traci Ardren. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 210. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780292768116.

The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes. Edited by Tamara Bray. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014. Pp. xvi + 403. $70.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781607323174.

The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru. By Claudia Brosseder. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 456. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292756946.

Ancient Zapotec Religion: An Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Perspective. By Michael Lind. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. Pp. xviii + 386. $70.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781607323730.

Inca Sacred Space: Landscape, Site and Symbol in the Andes. Edited by Frank Meddens, Katie Willis, Colin McEwan, and Nicholas Branch. London: Archetype Publications, 2014. Pp. vii + 309. £65.00 paper. ISBN: 9781909492059.

Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity: Space and Spatial Analysis in Art History. Edited by Maline D. Werness-Rude and Kaylee R. Spencer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 426. $75.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780826355799.

Are women and men in positions of authority judged differently? If a gender evaluation gap exists, is it due to persistent stereotypes or notions of gender solidarity? We explore gender differences in judgement through a survey experiment in Argentina with a national sample of 4,068 employees. Respondents were asked to recommend a salary increase for a “bad boss” whose behavior was characterized as aggressive and at the limit of what is fair and appropriate. The survey experiment measures the extent to which respondents punish and reward female and male managers differently. The main finding is that women are more likely to punish male bad bosses, and men are more likely to punish female bad bosses. We explain variation as a function of respondents’ social and personal networks. Study findings carry significant implications for the study of the gender pay gap.

Although the study of international relations is among the oldest fields of Latin American history, historians have not fully exploited the diplomatic archives of that region. No doubt the main obstacle has been the restrictive policies of the Latin American chancelleries, which have tended to view all diplomatic correspondence as inherently sensitive, particularly since boundary disputes have survived in many cases until the present moment. For this and other reasons, the study of Latin American foreign relations has lagged far behind that of Europe and the United States. Among Latin Americans, ex-ambassadors seem more prolific than professional historians in the field of diplomatic history; their works vary tremendously in quality, from the valuable studies of Cardozo (1961) and Herrera (1908-1927, 1930) to a host of mediocre treatments. European and North American historians have tended to focus on diplomatic contacts with the Great Powers, whose archives are more easily accessible, and to see Latin American foreign relations from the vantage point of the Great Powers. Such products include the classic works of Manchester (1933) and Robertson (1939) and the more recent studies of Burns (1966) and Wood (1966). Some works dealing with inter-American relations—e.g., Tulchin (1971) and Wood (1961, 1966)—define their topics so as to use no Latin American archival materials at all; others, such as Parks (1935) define their topics more broadly but still use United States or British archives exclusively.

Until recently, the Córdoba Reform of 1918 was the symbolic landmark in twentieth-century Latin American higher education. Achieving a pioneering victory in Argentina, the Reform soon became influential throughout much of the region, and university autonomy from government emerged as its most cherished legacy. Despite frequent violations, the principle of autonomy often promoted a substantial degree of university self-rule and even sanctuary for free expression. In 1968—fifty years after the Reform's genesis—the Mexican government's brutal repression of university students seemed to symbolize a secular change. Many observers feel that events of the last decade have reduced autonomy to little more than a cherished memory. Autonomy has indeed suffered a tragic fate in Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, among the more important nations. But what about Mexico? This article argues that the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) remains substantially autonomous. This is, admittedly, a relative statement; no public university is completely independent of government control. However, UNAM seems to enjoy considerable self-rule and is notably autonomous in cross-national perspective.

Recent criticism of the Spanish American novela total likens the genre's “totalizing” approach to social representation to that of state-administered nationalism, in which differences are either systematically erased or institutionalized through demographic segmentation in order to construct homogeneous, “democratic” consensus among political agents. In this view, the total novel misappropriates others' voices for the cultural elite's own political and commercial ends. In contrast, the testimonio is held up as a more democratic genre that distributes representational authority among a variety of agents. This essay reevaluates the relationship between the novela total and testimonial modes of discourse, arguing that Mexican author Fernando del Paso's total novels draw on the litigious power of testimonial as well as modernist aesthetics of rupture to disrupt the narrative of democratic consensus constructed by Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional and to postulate a civil society that congeals as a horizontal, aggregative ethical community in opposition to state politics.

The Mexican government recently proposed as a medium-term objective that the minimum rate of economic growth should be twice the rate of population growth (Mexico, Presidencia de la República 1988). This proposal may indicate a renewed interest in Mexico in linking demographic variables to the economic and development issues of the country. In proposing such a target, the Mexican government seems to be suggesting that its long-term development plans will hinge on criteria that depart radically from those recently used to assess the performance of these plans. The proposal seems particularly revealing because it came from President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who is an economist himself.

In the first part, I will describe briefly the intuitive relevance of Professor Markos Mamalakis' “Theory of Sectoral Clashes” to the Mexican case. In part II, I will briefly comment on aspects of the theory which are relevant to empirical verification. And finally, in part III, I will attempt to derive and test some of the empirical implications of this hypothesis.

En este trabajo se revisan los principales factores que permiten explicar la emergencia del movimiento piquetero argentino en una de las regiones donde se manifestó más tempranamente: las localidades salteñas de Tartagal y Mosconi. A diferencia de lo que se ha venido afirmando, la idea de la existencia de un estado de bienestar antes de las contrarreformas neoliberales de la década de 1990, y la caracterización del movimiento piquetero, las rebeliones populares (puebladas) y las asambleas populares de la zona como nuevas formas de organización y protesta vinculadas al efecto de las contrarreformas, resultan inadecuados. Con respecto a la primera, se mostrará que nunca existió en la zona algo parecido a un estado de bienestar; sobre la segunda, que existían experiencias de lucha previas dentro de las que el corte de ruta y la Asamblea Popular ya habían sido implementadas, y que esas experiencias nutrieron los acontecimientos posteriores.

The March 1976 coup that overthrew a turbulent Peronist government in Argentina also ended one of the few experiments with worker control of industry in Latin American history. For nearly three years, the Buenos Aires local of the country's strong light and power workers' union, the Sindicato de Luz y Fuerza, administered the great public utility SEGBA (Servicios Eléctricos del Gran Buenos Aires), provider of electric power for the capital city and much of the province of Buenos Aires. This experiment with worker control was all the more noteworthy because it was not undertaken by the maverick Cordoban local of Luz y Fuerza, led by Agustín Tosco, principal spokesman within the labor movement for socialism. Rather, the initiative was taken by a bastion of traditional Peronist trade unionism led by Juan José Taccone, the implacable foe of Tosco's clasista positions.

This study analyzes variations in the incidence of state involvement in investment treaty arbitration in Latin America and the Caribbean over the 1987–2014 period. Its main contributions are fourfold. First, by focusing on the balance of incentives and opportunities facing political leaders and foreign investors, the study establishes a new basis for understanding the reasons actors opt for the risks and uncertainties of international arbitration instead of resolving international investment disputes via alternative means. Second, by restricting the focus of research to the Latin American region, the study is able to move beyond the analysis of relatively time-invariant structural and institutional conditions and crude indicators to address the role played by the preferences of political actors. Third, by disaggregating disputes by sector of investment, the analysis documents the variable role of ideology and electoral incentives in investment treaty arbitration. Finally, by underlining the distinctiveness of the Latin American experience with investment treaty arbitration, the study offers new insights into the global backlash against investment treaty arbitration, which has gone farther in the region than anywhere else. Overall, the results underline the potential payoffs of breaking down the international experience with investment treaty arbitration into regional patterns to obtain a deeper and more granular understanding of the political economy of investor-state dispute settlement.