Despite persisting impunity, over the past several years Guatemala has made important strides in prosecuting war crimes committed during the internal armed conflict (1960–1996). This article provides an ethnographic account of the 2018 Molina Theissen trial, which resulted in the conviction of four senior military officials for crimes against humanity, aggravated sexual violence, and forced disappearance. An ethnographic study of this critical human rights trial can help us understand how a country with a relatively weak judicial system and well-organized spoilers has managed to hold the intellectual authors of wartime atrocities responsible for their acts. It also contributes to a richer understanding of the construction, meaning, and impact of human rights prosecutions for victims and the broader society, and what role they play in broader public debates over the historical memory of conflictual pasts.

During the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), Mexican women published poems that tested the boundaries of conventional definitions of female subjectivity and domesticity. Central to the construction of female authorship was the idea of a collective women's voice, a “lyrical sisterhood” that situated the individual poetic voice within a broader historical tradition and a contemporaneous coalition of women writers. In speaking out about the war, women poets foregrounded their symbolic authority to exalt Mexican resistance to the invader, to decry Mexico's political and military failures, or to measure the horrors of war. In doing so, they self-consciously used gender to blur the distinction between the public and domestic spheres.

This essay reviews the following works:

Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. By Michael E. Donoghue. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 333. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822356783.

Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico. By Isar P. Godreau. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 291. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9780252080456.

The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity. By April J. Mayes. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. Pp. viii + 187. $69.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780813049199.

Cuba’s Racial Crucible: The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750–2000. By Karen Y. Morrison. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 327. $32.00 paper. ISBN: 9780253016546.

Research in social mobility in postcolonial Argentina has not benefitted from the sweeping changes in methodology and content found in histories of other periods and areas. The question of social mobility receives close attention in these studies partly because it offers such a variety of research opportunities and is measurable in several forms. Usually, the laboratory for these recent studies is the city—the place with the greatest opportunities for self-improvement. Since the nineteenth century, the city has become the locus of concentration for countless native and foreign migrants. With the appropriate data, urban social historians have investigated their spatial and economic dimensions of mobility. In addition, one of the bases of social change most often studied is the shifting within the occupational structure. The ties between occupation and social ranking are intimate. “Thus,” writes Michael Katz, “to trace the movements of a man from occupation to occupation is, to a considerable extent, to trace his vertical movement within social space; the sum of those movements determines the patterns and rate of social mobility, the degree of openness, within a society.”

Este artículo analiza la manera en que determinadas políticas económicas (en este caso el proceso de privatización que involucró la industria azucarera dominicana a partir de 1999) pueden generar nuevas formas de subyugación individual basadas en la trampa de la deuda. Mediante el recurso a la literatura histórica y teórica del área del Caribe y al testimonio etnográfico de un joven migrante haitiano, dedicado al corte de la caña de azúcar, ilustraremos la dinámica concreta que informa las relaciones laborales en las plantaciones de la República Dominicana, para finalmente llegar a establecer una conexión entre la gestión privada de la industria azucarera y condiciones de trabajo comparables a la esclavitud de la deuda.

Diverse elements have driven inflation in the Cuban economy in the early 2020s, but the big-bang devaluation of the peso in 2021—the key measure that unlocks monetary reform—stands out as the main determinant. Analysis indicates that the inflation rate ranged between 174% and 700%, well above the government’s 2021 consumer price index estimate (77%) and closer to the deflator of household consumption derived from the national income accounts (442%). Even with this larger inflation, there is room for a real depreciation of the peso in the short term. The relative rise of tradable goods prices and incomplete pass-through from the exchange rate to inflation create new incentives and enhance financial transparency in the short term. However, the absence of sufficient structural reforms, the complex macroeconomic scenario, and the persistence of high fiscal deficit, inflation, and devaluation of the peso in the informal market after 2021 put most of the potential benefits of the monetary reform at risk. Monetary instability is a deep, continuing problem.

While global history’s emphasis on networks and its de-emphasis on the nation has brought about a fruitful platform for exploring interregional connections, this article argues that a global history recentered in the periphery and willing to draw from its rich national historiographies has the potential to reveal new forms of globalization and connection. It takes Argentina as an exemplary case to consider the ways in which tracing one nation’s many transnational and global orientations might bring to light motivations, geographical dimensions, and fields of power previously unseen.

This essay reviews the following works:

Making Up the Difference: Women, Beauty, and Direct Selling in Ecuador. By Erynn Masi de Casanova. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Pp. xix + 239. $55.00 cloth: ISBN: 9780292723863.

Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade. By Linda B. Hall. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 358. $60 cloth. ISBN: 9780804784078.

Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela. By Marcia Ochoa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 277. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822356264.

Of Beasts and Beauty: Gender, Race, and Identity in Colombia. By Michael Edward Stanfield. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Pp. x + 280. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292745582.

Beauty and the Beast. By Michael Taussig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. x + 172. $18.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226789866.

This essay reviews the following works:

Seams of Empire: Race and Radicalism in Puerto Rico and the United States. By Carlos Alamo-Pastrana. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. xvi + 213. $79.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780813062563.

Civil Rights and Beyond: African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States. Edited by Brian D. Behnken. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. 270. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780820349176.

Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. By Kwame Dixon. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. xiii + 174. $74.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780813062617.

Black Autonomy: Race, Gender, and Afro-Nicaraguan Activism. By Jennifer Goett. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 222. $26.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781503600546.

The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil. By Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 266. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316637043.

The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space. By Ulrich Oslender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 290. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822361220.

Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil. By Tianna S. Paschel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 311. $26.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780691169385.