It has often been observed that “Where power is, women are not.” Noting women's virtual absence from the realm of conventional politics, Jane Jaquette urged scholars in 1980 to look beyond elections in studying female political participation in Latin America. Arguing for an “expanded notion of the political,” she called for research on female participation within different social classes, especially their role in “informal networks, … clientele linkages, … strike activities, urban land seizures and barrio politics”. This article employs a community study method to investigate women's grass-roots participation in politics and labor mobilization following World War II in the region of greater São Paulo known as ABC (named after the municipios of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano).

Activities commemorating (positively or negatively) the Columbian quincentenary have moved the story of this encounter out of the libraries, off the dusty shelves of nineteenth-century museums, and back into the political arena where it began. In the United States and Canada, as in Latin America, the search for a usable history that would include Native Americans has prompted reassessment and revision of the historiography of Indian-white relations. This research note will review some of the more important ethnohistorical issues raised in North America and comment on possible comparative studies for the Southern Cone.

Within the extensive literature on international regionalism, the more limited academic work done on regional financial organizations (RFOs) tends to assume that, by pooling resources to address such common international economic issues as development funding and financial crises, RFOs contribute to economic stability in their parts of the global landscape. Although South America has led the pack in creating such RFOs, their effectiveness is limited by the asymmetry in economic heft of the continent's governments. Rather than weighing the significance of financial regionalism in South America from the point of view of the majority, we assess whether and how this phenomenon has contributed to Brazil's politico-economic rise to near-major-power standing on the world stage in the twenty-first century. Drawing on extensive interviews with Brazilian officials conducted in March 2013, we analyze three instances of South America's international public finance: development lending, crisis lending, and payment systems. Our findings suggest that self-generated unilateral and bilateral financial initiatives have brought Brasília far more significant economic and political results than have RFOs, whose various incarnations have yielded the continental giant few economic and only minor political gains.

It has been traditional to treat the life and art of Julián del Casal and José Martí as antithetical statements.

Almost a century ago, long before biodiversity expressed a scientific value for nature, Latin American countries began establishing national parks. Today, they represent over 6 percent of Latin America’s landmass. By considering national park creation across a broad regional span and six crucial decades, this article explains a mode of state formation focused on caring for nature instead of just exploiting it. It examines how national parks expanded in the region by identifying three consequent trajectories: the use of these conservation units for frontier development in Argentina and as part of a broader project seeking social justice in Mexico; the formation of more haphazard park initiatives in various countries, taking Brazil and Chile as main examples; and the development of ecologically coherent park systems through the cases of Peru and Colombia. The article also addresses the role of science (especially forestry) and international cooperation in shaping national parks. In this manner, it uncovers the paths that faded from view after the idea that parks intend to protect biodiversity took hold and illustrates a rarely acknowledged aspect of state expansion.

Util y amena ha sido la lectura del trabajo de Jorge E. Hardoy y Carmen Aranovich, “Escalas y funciones urbanas de América Hispánica hacia 1600, Un ensayo metodológico.” Un valioso y sugestivo intento de mensurar el origen de la historia urbana del continente, por lo menos en cuanto a una caracterización de magnitudes y un delineamiento de las más importantes funciones del fenómeno urbano en América.

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.

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.