This essay reviews the following works:

From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico. By Miruna Achim. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. ix+ 327. $30.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781496203373.

Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu. By Amy Cox Hall. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 267. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477313688.

Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology. By Lesley Green and David R. Green. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. Pp.vi + 308. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816530373.

Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas. By Jennifer Jolly. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 340. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477314203.

Nature and Antiquities: The Making of Archaeology in the Americas. Edited by Philip L. Kohl, Irina Podgorny, and Stefanie Gänger. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 246. $60.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816531127.

Our Indigenous Ancestors: A Cultural History of Museums, Science, and Identity in Argentina, 1877–1943. By Carolyne R. Larson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 221. $79.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780271066967.

Maya Cultural Heritage: How Archaeologists and Indigenous Communities Engage the Past. By Patricia A. McAnany. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. ix + 245. $85.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781442241275.

Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru. By Mark Rice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 233. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469643533.

En Latinoamérica, la transición demográfica se desarrolla, en general, de la misma manera en la que se desarrolló en Europa. No obstante, los efectos demográficos del proceso de modernización son muy variados, especialmente en grupos indígenas. Desde los años treinta las poblaciones indígenas del Gran Chaco Argentino comenzaron un proceso de modernización. El objetivo de este trabajo fue analizar los cambios demográficos en una población toba del norte de Argentina. Se utilizaron los censos de los años 1985 y 2002, registros de nacimientos y defunción de agentes sanitarios toba, del centro médico, del Registro Civil y entrevistas a mujeres tobas. Se estimó la tasa de crecimiento poblacional; se analizaron pirámides poblaciones y se obtuvo el índice de masculinidad, la tasa de mortalidad infantil y la tasa global de fecundidad. El crecimiento poblacional fue similar al provincial, se evidenció un rejuvenecimiento de la población, un moderado descenso de la mortalidad infantil y un aumento de la fecundidad. Se discute la necesidad de desarrollar modelos más integradores que consideren las variaciones demográficas de estos grupos.

This research note provides a detailed account of the development and implementation of a household survey conducted in 2016 as part of a larger investigation into the lifeways and political subjectivities of Brazil’s “once-rising poor,” the demographic sector comprising poor and working-class people who experienced various forms of socioeconomic mobility in the early twenty-first century. After reflecting on the challenges of maintaining a critical perspective on class labels and relations that were intensely contested at the time, the article introduces the survey sample (n = 1,204), highlighting variables captured. It then establishes the demographic profile, mobility experiences, political values, attitudes, and behaviors of the sample. The portrait that emerges for this sector is one of economic precarity, heterogeneous experiences of socioeconomic mobility (and nonmobility) over the past two decades, and significant alienation from formal politics.

This essay reviews the following works:

Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production. By Sarah Bowen. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xvii + 260. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520281059.

Alcohol in Latin America: A Social and Cultural History. Edited by Gretchen Pierce and Áurea Toxqui. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 306. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780816530762.

Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. By Deborah Toner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. vi + 346. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9780803274327.

El ritual chamánico de la ayahuasca ha sido adoptado, adaptado y reinventado en contextos urbanos y cosmopolitas de diferentes países del mundo, un proceso que ha estado fuertemente permeado por prácticas y creencias de tipo new age. Una de las versiones locales de este fenómeno se conoce en Colombia como “tomas de yajé”, donde participan citadinos no indígenas de clase media y alta en busca de alteridad tradicional e inspiración espiritual. La investigación que dio origen a este artículo se basa principalmente en observaciones etnográficas y entrevistas, gracias a las cuales se analizaron las maneras en que se interpreta esta forma de chamanismo, indagando particularmente sobre los usos y sentidos del concepto de espiritualidad en las narrativas de los adeptos a las tomas. Los resultados son discutidos a la luz de teorías sobre las subjetividades y las religiosidades en la modernidad, lo cual permite comprender mejor los fundamentos socioculturales y las implicaciones de esta espiritualización del chamanismo. Se concluye que el giro subjetivo de la modernidad tardía es un factor clave para entender la reciente valoración del ritual, el cual se ha convertido, paradójicamente, en un vehículo para la difusión de valores individualistas.

This article seeks to understand the relationship between populism and participatory democracy through analysis of Rafael Correa’s left populist regime in Ecuador (2007–2017). It argues that rather than adhering to its own standard for participatory democracy, what the Correa regime referred to as the “Socialism of Buen Vivir,” it employed the rhetoric of participatory democracy in the service of populist rule. As a result, the Correa regime failed to promote the participatory form of democracy and citizenship promised in Buen Vivir, its version of twenty-first-century socialism. Accordingly, analysis of the Correa regime demonstrates how the concentration of top-down executive power characteristic of populism in general, and rentier populism in particular, impedes the egalitarian and solidaristic mission of participatory democracy. Thus, inductive analysis of the Correa regime reinforces the conceptual understanding that populism is antagonistic and antithetical to participatory democracy.

The study of Latin American labor history is at a crossroads. It is now an established field, with a growing body of scholars and research and opportunities for major advances. At the same time, it is in danger of isolating itself from promising intellectual and methodological currents and confining itself to institutional chronologies and ideological controversies. To avert this danger and take advantage of these opportunities, Latin American labor history must both become more fully the history of labor and transcend the limitations of that definition.

This study assesses the environmental damage caused by copper mining on surface water bodies in Chile. The few official records on the discharges and concentrations of arsenic and copper only allow for identifying the impacts of some mining operations in the regions of Coquimbo, Valparaíso, and O’Higgins. The economic valuation is carried out through the impact pathway approach, which relates copper production, discharges, concentrations, and dose-response coefficients to establish effects on health and agriculture. The results show that the economic damage due to water pollution occurs mainly in the regions of Coquimbo and O’Higgins. The above is explained because the greatest externalities are generated in agricultural areas, while the damage to health is low because of the small population exposed (97.6% versus 2.4%). Finally, total damages represent 0.43%, 0.26%, and 0.0001% of copper sales in the mining operations analyzed in the regions of Coquimbo, O’Higgins, and Valparaíso, respectively.

This essay outlines the three articles in this dossier, “Latin American Studies and the Humanities: Past, Present, Future.” The authors, working in different disciplines, contribute to debates about how to reconceptualize area studies. Each article considers how area studies might be enriched by considering different spatial scales and incorporating methodologies drawn from ethnic studies disciplines. Our introduction explains how each essay contributes to our understanding of five key issues in Latin American studies: (1) the relationship between the field’s regionally bound framework and emerging conceptual paradigms like the global South; (2) the potential for interdisciplinary, rather than multidisciplinary, research; (3) how to place Latin American studies in dialogue with ethnic studies; (4) how to rethink the origins of Latin American studies by tracing the long history of Latin America–generated knowledge about the region; and (5) how recent indigenous studies approaches might decolonize the field of Latin American studies.

The widespread violence in Mexico by state and nonstate actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to define has proven difficult from a bureaucratic, political, and aesthetic perspective. This article examines and contrasts three commemorative and transformative memorial interventions to show that in a context that lacks a clear transition and access to justice, memory activists respond to the state in a playing field that is not simply concerned with a politics of memory—who gets to decide how to remember the past—but with delineating the past from both the present and the future in the first place: a politics of time.