Este artículo analiza la prensa satírica producida por obreros tipógrafos en Chile entre finales del siglo XIX y principios del siglo XX. A partir de la revisión de archivos de prensa y utilizando la conceptualización sobre “cultura popular ausente”, los principales resultados revelan características diferenciadas del objeto de estudio respecto de la autorrepresentación de lo popular y del rol jugado en la esfera pública, que por un lado lo apartan de la sátira chilena del siglo XIX centrada en las disputas de los partidos oligárquicos, al tiempo que visibilizan un sujeto popular (emisor y receptor) más complejo y paradójico que el de la prensa obrera dominante, generando hallazgos relevantes para un debate actual sobre los otros populares, el modo en que han permanecido ocultos históricamente y cómo traerlos a escena para la reflexión sobre proyectos políticos del presente.

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.

Why do some voters believe that there is electoral fraud when this belief contradicts the best available evidence? While the literature on public opinion has explored misperceptions’ pervasiveness and the factors that contribute to them in advanced industrial democracies, the present study analyzes motivated reasoning among voters in a young democracy, Mexico. This study highlights the important role that partisanship plays in voters’ likelihood to believe the allegations of electoral fraud in the 2006 presidential election in Mexico, which continues polarizing both political elites and the electorate even today. To understand the mechanisms at work, this research finds that it is not voters lacking information but rather voters with high levels of affective polarization and conspiratorial thinking who are more likely to believe that there was electoral fraud. The study also includes a survey experiment that fact-checked the belief in the alleged electoral fraud. Consistent with motivated reasoning theory, MORENA partisans resisted efforts to reduce their misperception. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the conditions that make some voters hold misperceptions in young democracies.

Economic historians are accustomed to treating 1930 as a landmark date in the development of Latin America. The onset of the Great Depression was an abrupt external shock to every country in the region, cutting off traditional export markets and making it exceedingly difficult to secure consumer goods, replacement parts, and new capital equipment in return. Many countries began experiments in national self-sufficiency, turning to policies that came to be identified, especially after World War II, as import substitution industrialization (ISI). Although these experiments were sometimes disappointing, they represented a watershed in the evolution of national economic systems.

Los resultados de una etnografía multisituada desarrollada en 2015 y 2016 entre los saraguros, indígenas del Ecuador, permiten describir nueve factores que intervienen, con paradójicas relaciones, en el turismo místico andino. El neoincaismo esencialista, la concepción de una naturaleza prístina con lugares energéticos, el auge de la medicina ancestral, la idealización de lo comunitario como opuesto al estilo de vida occidental, el reconocimiento institucional de la interculturalidad y las culturas de los pueblos originarios, la ampliación internacional de las redes de la galaxia neoindia, el sincretismo new age, el capital cultural de los yachaks y la posibilidad de mercantilizar lo espiritual bajo formatos de fast rituals muestran la multidimensionalidad de un tipo de turismo que escapa a su simple categorización como auténtico o simulacro, y nos hace comprender —a la luz de un fenómeno glocal— el lugar en el mundo que ocupan actualmente muchos grupos indígenas en Latinoamérica.

In this research note, we introduce congressbr, an R package for retrieving data from the Brazilian houses of legislature. The package contains easy-to-use functions that allow researchers to query the Application Programming Interfaces of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, perform cleaning data operations, and store information in a format convenient for future analyses, making a previously difficult task fast and convenient. Congressbr downloads data on legislators, submitted and ratified law proposals, Senate and Chamber commissions, and other information of interest to social scientists across various fields. We outline the main features of the package and demonstrate its use with practical examples.

This essay reviews the following works:

• Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History. By Lamonte Aidoo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 272. $26.95 paperback. IBSN: 9780822371298.

• Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas. Edited by Dania Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. 240. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780820354040.

• Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. By Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 294. $24.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108480642.

• Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. By Jessica Marie Johnson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 360. $4.95 hardcover. IBSN: 9780812252385.

• The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico. By Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Pp 288. $29.95 paperback. IBSN: 9780826360403.

• Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality: Gendering War and Politics in Cuba. By Bonnie A. Lucero. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 345. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826363336.

• Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. By Jennifer L. Morgan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. 312. $27.95 paperback. IBSN: 9781478014140.

• Pobres, negros y esclavos: Música religiosa en Córdoba del Tucumán (1699–1840). By Clarisa Eugenia Pedrotti. Córdoba, Argentina: Editorial Brujas, 2017. Pp. 302. $33.99 paperback. ISBN: 9789877600742.

• Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion. By Matthew Pettway. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. Pp. 344. $30.00 paperback. IBSN: 9781496825018.

• Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima. By Tamara J. Walker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 240. $29.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781107445956.

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.

El 2 de octubre de 2018 marcó la quincuagésima conmemoración de la masacre del aún desconocido número de estudiantes, transeúntes y otros inocentes en la Plaza de las Tres Culturas de Tlatelolco. Como siempre, el programa cultural del Memorial 68 incluyó varias producciones teatrales, pero esta vez llamó la atención el uso casi exclusivo de la farsa como modo de expresión dramática. La farsa tiende a ser burlona, irreverente y alejada de la realidad, lo que lleva a preguntarse por qué tantos dramaturgos han recurrido a este género antiguo y poco respetado para tratar un capítulo tan doloroso y álgido de la historia mexicana. Este estudio se fundamenta en la teoría de la farsa, la tragedia y la risa y en la percepción extendida de la misma historia mexicana como una farsa. Aunque el uso de la farsa como vehículo para una conmemoración tan significante podría sorprender y hasta ofender, el análisis de cinco obras comprueba que la farsa es últimamente la expresión más realista del ciclo absurdo y sin fin de la historia mexicana, la que ha mostrado repetidamente que se puede matar con impunidad tanto a estudiantes como a todos los que se oponen al orden establecido.

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.

This article explores the spatial politics of Peru’s gastronomic revolution and corresponding efforts to territorialize Peruvian agricultural products by tracing the spatial dynamics of quinoa’s trajectory from highland dietary staple to coveted national food. Efforts to codify Peru’s national cuisine have involved mapping ingredients and dishes onto specific regions while dramatically reshaping agricultural production geographies and culinary topographies. Because of quinoa’s success as a high-value export crop, the Peruvian altiplano is no longer perceived as a landscape useful exclusively for livestock pasture and mining. Instead, it is imagined as agriculturally productive: the country’s quinoa heartland. At the same time, quinoa’s trajectory illuminates spatial contradictions in the gastronomic boom’s purported objectives and its tangible effects. The revalorization of quinoa led to a geographical expansion of its production outside the high Andes, undermining the spatially bound concepts of authenticity promoted by gastronomic leaders in Peru. Broadly, efforts to commercialize marginalized food products and their corresponding regions can at once reconfigure territorial discourses in important ways, reinforce long-standing geographical inequalities, and generate contestations of the geographic imaginaries of food and nation.

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.

El presente artículo, cuya base empírica es una entrevista estructurada a quince de las principales organizaciones nacionales de observación electoral latinoamericanas, muestra que los grupos de la sociedad civil de la región más activos en esta área han usado desde 2005 diversas herramientas de las nuevas tecnologías de la información y comunicación para hacer observación colectiva (lo que se conoce en inglés como crowdsourced election observation), ya sea para desarrollar proyectos especializados o para sustituir por completo sus herramientas de observación tradicionales. En opinión de los directivos de las organizaciones, las nuevas tecnologías han servido fundamentalmente para concienciar a la población general sobre la importancia de las elecciones e implicarla en sus actividades, y para abrir a la observación áreas que sin las nuevas herramientas hubieran sido impracticables. La observación colectiva afronta el reto de fijar un estándar comúnmente aceptado de verificación de la información recopilada, al menos potencialmente, por un conjunto de observadores desconocidos y que puede no haber recibido la suficiente capacitación.