In the past fifteen years, many Latin American cities have sponsored programs that promote reading through their city's public transportation systems. This article analyzes two of these programs, Libro al Viento in Bogotá, Colombia, and Santiago en 100 Palabras in Santiago, Chile, framed with examples from Buenos Aires, Argentina. These programs insert stories into public space to enhance social interaction and develop a positive sense of local belonging. Literary reading is harnessed as a socially embedded practice that can facilitate change, in response to previous periods of censorship and repression under dictatorship (in Chile) and political violence (in Colombia). Shifting the view of reading from an individual to a collective experience rather than focusing on functional literacy, these initiatives put literary reading to the service of civic and community development. The programs emerged during a period of increased investment by municipal governments in public space, including renovated subways and new bus rapid transit systems, and rely on a combination of public and private sponsorship. The intricate relationship between urban infrastructure and literary culture in these contemporary programs challenges but also perpetuates the role of the “lettered city.”

In the context of urban poverty in Brazil, this article considers the national context of civil society starting in the 1950s through to the approval of the Statute of the City in 2001. Focusing on a case study of Niterói, Rio de Janeiro State, I unpack the perception of a declining civil society in that city. Rather than taking a retraction of civil society at face value, I make the case for alterations within civil society and the role of the political context.

O presente artigo busca responder a seguinte questão: quando confiar é bom? Diversas pesquisas têm se debruçado sobre o fenómeno da desconfiança, estudando suas causas e efeitos para o regime democrático. Porém, pouca coisa foi explorada em relação ao fenómeno contrário, o da confiança. Nosso argumento é que confiar é bom quando duas condições são satisfeitas: a existência de um contexto institucional que justifique a confiança e um ambiente informacional adequado. Para justificá-lo, utilizamos dados.de uma pesquisa sobre um projeto de socialização política no Brasil, o Parlamento Jovem. Trata-se de um quase experimento, com pré-teste, pós-teste e grupo de controle, realizado em Minas Gerais em 2008. A conclusão é que mediante um intenso fluxo informacional, os participantes do projeto adquiriram maior conhecimento a respeito do processo de desenvolvimento institucional da Assembleia Legislativa Mineira, passando, então, a confiar mais nela. Mediante esse quadro, pode-se dizer que confiar é bom.

The present article analyzes the media produced by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, especially its national cable TV station and online news agency. We discuss whether these media sources promote accountability and participation. Our findings suggest that although these sources have been employed, according to the logic of audience democracy, to promote the public visibility, credibility, and reputation of Brazil's federal representatives, they do contribute to enhancing the accountability and quality of Brazilian democracy, insofar as they provide access to relevant information about legislative processes.

This article examines the effect of perceived ethnoracial identity on electoral politics in the Dominican Republic and provides an explanation for the low salience of race and ethnicity in political behavior in Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, individuals will deal with ethnoracial discrimination and stratification through exit rather than voice —that is, they will reclassify their way out of marginalized ethnoracial categories instead of voting for candidates or parties that share their ethnoracial identities. This tends to be the case where ethnoracial group identity is inchoate and group boundaries are permeable. I also argue that where ethnoracial group loyalties are weak and immigration is widespread, citizens may emphasize national origin over race or ethnicity. Findings from an original field experiment and survey in Santo Domingo show that candidates did not consistently support candidates that shared their ethnoracial attributes, but they did slightly favor candidates perceived as white. Respondents strongly discriminated against candidates of Haitian origin.

Urban violence is an emerging challenge to development and democracy across Latin America. How do cities negotiate this challenge alongside pressures to compete in global markets and enable greater political participation? This article analyzes the politics of urban violence in the intriguing case of Medellín, Colombia, which international donors and policy makers herald as having reshaped its urban governance and economic appeal through its response to violence. The article provides a within-case comparative analysis of contrasting outcomes in the trajectories of the political projects Medellín launched in response to urban violence amid the drug wars of the early 1990s and the subsequent urbanization of the Colombian civil war. I argue that a focus on urban political economies and patterns of armed territorial control contributes to our understanding of the politics of urban violence, reveals limitations for the diffusion of the Medellín model, and identifies promising avenues for future research.

This study considers whether there are gender differences in the ability of international migrants as well as remittance managers in households of origin to channel remittances to physical and financial asset accumulation. Drawing on a national-level survey of household assets for Ecuador, we show that while only a small share of male or female migrants are able to channel their remittances to asset accumulation, women are as likely to do so as men. Moreover, female migrants tend to exert greater control over their remittances than men, particularly when these are to be used for the acquisition of assets. In addition, women managers in households of origin are a majority of those owning the assets purchased with remittances. These results suggest that processes of international migration may strengthen the economic autonomy of women and facilitate greater gender equality.

Asians in Argentina have received little scholarly attention despite the current proliferation of studies on Asians in Latin America. Asian Argentines' absence from academic research reflects, in part, their marginality and presumed foreignness in Argentina's past and current national narratives. Existing scholarship frames Asian descendants predominantly as members of single-ethnic colectividades (communities) illustrating ties to co-ethnics and country of origin. To broaden this perspective, I examine the possibilities of a panethnic and domestic “Asian Argentine” approach. Conceptualizing an Asian Argentine category can be problematized by ongoing theoretical discussions regarding the limitations of multiculturalism and nation-based inquiries. Situating these critiques in Argentina's particular context—from its historical insistence on whiteness to its newly ethnicized political arena today—I argue that an Asian Argentine approach can be a useful analytical and political tool to understand this group's position in Argentina and serve as a starting point to challenge the discourses that marginalize Asian Argentines as nonexistent or irreversibly foreign.