This article explores the transition from nationalism to postnationalism through food in Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home (2007), by playwright Eduardo Machado. The framework used is Sigmund Freud’s narrative of the Oedipus complex. I suggest that the exilic condition of Oedipus and his rebellious behavior make the Oedipal narrative a useful tool for approaching the postnational rejection of the oppressive nature of the nation. I replace the phallus as the source of pleasure with food, and argue that the memories that ensure the continuity of the nation are largely alimentary. A study of what Eduardo Machado eats or refuses to eat to keep recognizing himself as Cuban leads me to explore ways in which the nation shapes subjectivity and the subject informs the postnation, adding to the scholarship on Cuban American literature.

Gabriela Mistral's uncharacteristic short stories, which she began writing at the age of fourteen, demonstrate the Chilean poet's need to express violence through the brief narrative genre. Mistral wrote six short stories and in all of them she blurs the boundaries between gender and violence. For the sexes to be defined, Mistral seems to use violence as a means to distinguish them. When women suffer through men's actions, both gender performances become more pronounced and defined: women and men exist precisely because of men's harmful actions. A shift of perspective and agency occurs when men fail to recognize their own behavior and blame women for their fate. Both sexes lose their subjectivity (or sexuality) and become so intertwined that their differences are no longer perceptible. The two stories analyzed in this essay are the first story Mistral wrote, “El perdón de una víctima” and her last, “El rival.” In both, Mistral demonstrates her wariness to define a norm for heterosexual relationships, while at the same time, she attempts to discern female difference.

Marxian anthropology is a particular trend of “dark anthropology.” Michael Taussig has dedicated his work to understanding the connections of colonialism, capitalism, and local cultures under a Marxian-Benjaminian perspective. This article examines the meanings of hope and future concealed within Taussig’s “dark ethnographies” accomplished in Latin America. The purpose of this analysis is to echo Taussig’s concern to write efficiently against terror to acknowledge that even ethnographies of violence and social injustice can carry powerful cultural messages of hope.

This is a response to the recent critique of my book The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 1970) by Felix G. Boni and Mitchell A. Seligson. Their factor analysis of my data on poverty suggests, first, that their methodology is more “sensitive” than mine; second, that they have confirmed the thrust of an earlier analysis by Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith; and third, that the task of quantitative history is to reduce data of “unwieldy proportions” so that it is subject to greater understanding.

The recent literature dealing with Mexico in the nineteenth century is massive. This motivated us to the task of reviewing the material published since the Third Reunion of Mexican and North American Historians at Oaxtapec in 1969. Initially over 450 titles were identified, dealing with all aspects of the period. Our original intention was to review the literature in Spanish, since that material is already becoming difficult to locate, but our attempt to treat material in only one language became unworkable. We also had planned to organize the essay conceptually rather than chronologically, but too many important studies were left out. So we have reluctantly returned to the traditionally accepted periodization of political history: independence, early republic, reform, and the porfiriato. Limitations of space forced the elimination of sections dealing with local, diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural history.

The study of history in Ecuador is still in its infancy. Too few foreign scholars have ventured into the country's past and most Ecuadorean historians have failed to produce well-researched studies. Consequently, generalization and bias have passed for scholarship. Although there are many reasons for the backward state of Educadorean historiography, perhaps the most important has been the poor condition of the nation's archives. During the last decade, however, libraries and repositories in the country have improved tremendously. While not yet the equal of research facilities in many other Latin American nations, still it is now possible to do historical research with relative ease in Ecuador.

In prose and poetry and throughout his career, Roque Dalton used the life story of his U.S. émigré father to explore the themes of power, dependency, and identity that interested him and other Salvadoran intellectuals of his era. Yet it was a theatrical image of Winnall Dalton, that of a marauding, gunslinging cowboy, that other writers took as fact and that became part of the poet's posthumous reputation. I show here that the image of a western outlaw is wrong and that Winnall Dalton came from a comfortable, Mexican American family in Tucson that had fallen on hard times just before he migrated to Central America around 1916. Dalton delved into the paradoxes of his own upbringing—raised in a working-class neighborhood as the illegitimate offspring of a millionaire, a Marxist revolutionary who was the son of pure capitalism—almost until his death in 1975. Taken together, the shifting depictions of his father all point to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Dalton's views on power and the nature of identity than previously understood in the context of the revolutionary struggle that ultimately consumed him.

Government agencies in many countries are prolific publishers of information in a surprising variety of fields, reflecting their myriad activities, their economic and political interests, and the needs and interests of their constituents. Reports of agencies, transcriptions of congressional hearings, and agricultural extension bulletins are well-known examples, but government agencies as sources of reference materials—publications in a format designed to be consulted for specific pieces of information, rather than to be read from start to finish—are often overlooked.

La cifra de desaparecidos en Argentina motiva debates recurrentes. Durante la última dictadura militar (1976–1983) sus denunciantes elaboraron diversas cifras y estimaciones pero el número de 30 mil desaparecidos adquirió un carácter canónico. Tras retornar la democracia, la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas registró 8.960 casos. En los años noventa, en un contexto de impunidad, grupos de la sociedad civil elaboraron sus propias cifras y en los dos mil el Estado ofreció nuevos registros. El resurgimiento del negacionismo y la relativización del crimen revitalizaron este debate. Este trabajo historiza las cifras de desaparecidos y víctimas de desaparición forzada elaboradas por diversos actores y propone una aproximación académica sobre el tema. Comprende a estas cifras en su doble dimensión: como fruto de la elaboración de conocimiento sobre las desapariciones y como expresión de los combates por la memoria sobre las violaciones a los derechos humanos sucedidas en el país.