This article takes a governance perspective to examine the contemporary revitalization of Guaraní, a “repressed” language that is spoken by a majority of the population in Paraguay. A historical overview highlights the striking endurance of the language in spite of two centuries of official subjugation. The article traces the positive impact of political democratization since 1989 on the revitalization of Guaraní by examining four interrelated areas that are closely linked to the governance agenda: the education system, the media, the political system, and popular culture. However, the absence of a comprehensive language policy continues to limit progress in improving governance, as the weak impact of the official poverty reduction program exemplifies. The case of Guaraní demonstrates the need for wider recognition of the importance of language policy in promoting good governance through citizen empowerment and accountability of the state.

This article complements existing scholarship on religious transformation in Guatemala's western highlands by focusing on the important and often overlooked role played by Maryknoll women religious. The Maryknoll Sisters' hospital in Jacaltenango in the department of Huehuetenango became the center of a medical program that included eighteen clinics, a nursing school, a midwifery program, and a health promoters program. Mayas selectively embraced Maryknoll Sisters'medicine and actively sought opportunities to disseminate it. Evenas Maya health promoters and midwives introduced "Western" preventative and curative medicine and promoted a Romanized practice of Catholicism, they transformed the Maryknoll Sisters' medical programs to parallel an existingMaya leadership composed of chimanes and mid wives responsible for rituals of faith and healing. Mayas appropriated, interpreted, and synthesizedMaya and Catholic religious concepts and practices with Maya and Western health-care practices and beliefs. By incorporating Maryknoll women religious and their medical programs into studies of religious transformation in Guatemala's western highlands, we gain new insight into this process of change and into the central role that womenplayed in it.

Scholarly literature has often characterized the popular bandit Chucho el Roto (1835?–1885) in terms of his legend as Mexico's urban Robin Hood, yet no study has attempted to discern how this legend took root and changed over time. This investigation brings together historical documents and literary texts about Chucho el Roto from the 1880s to the 1920s to analyze changing cultural perceptions of social class tensions in Mexico. It finds that Chucho provided a vehicle for both lower and upper classes to critically reflect on the morality of dominant society and to unite behind the resiliency and dignity of the oppressed working class. While the earliest literary text from 1889 criticizes Chucho for refusing to submit to dominant social norms and accept his place in the socioeconomic hierarchy, two post-1910 novels celebrate Chucho's banditry as a socialist-inspired political rebellion that resists assimilation into dominant political paradigms, including that of revolution.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the book of kings, or dynastic history, was the dominant mode of historiography in Europe and the Americas. This article explores the as-if or in-theory dimension of colonial dynastic history by way of a reading of Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo's early-eighteenth-century histories of Spain and Peru. Peralta's histories have been read as sycophantic, premodern texts that not only do not live up to the modern standards of historiography but moreover are in bad taste, that is, rhetorically prone to the excesses of Lima's colonial court culture. In contrast, I argue that Peralta's poetics of history reveal the subtle and ingenious rhetorical means by which history came to occupy, via imitating the figure of the prince, a sovereign and prognostic position of critique as the prince's simulacrum, that is, as a copy that has no original other than itself. In the case of Peralta's histories, this position of critique was colonial and postcolonial.

Este artículo problematiza la construcción de las categorías de víctima y victimario en el Informe Rettig (1991) y el Informe Valech (2004) desde la óptica de la teoría de género. El estudio de estas construcciones discursivas compele a mirar hacia atrás y adelante: atrás en el sentido de localizar las raíces de ciertos discursos en los nuevos movimientos sociales y la lucha democrática de los años setenta y ochenta, y adelante en el sentido que la hegemonía de ciertos discursos elegidos por la Concertación como legítimos siguen estableciendo los parámetros del actual escenario político chileno y probablemente lo seguirán haciendo en el futuro cercano. Esta investigación propone que una de las grandes desventajas de la política actual y su forma de enmarcar los discursos, es su capacidad de producir una falsa ruptura entre la violencia de antes y la violencia de hoy, particularmente en relación a la violencia de género.

This article analyzes the power of select political actors in the social networks of New Spain (colonial Mexico), from 1700–1755. Examining the participation of these actors in successful political and economic coalitions allows for assessment of the additional (or marginal) contribution of each politician. His or her chance of altering decisions of a coalition is called the power index, delivering a quantification of the idea of power. A second step then examines how the number of communicative links with other actors changes a politician's influence and modifies the power index. A large amount of contacts significantly increases the power of an actor. Drawing on this model, I argue that the viceroy's sway increased somewhat in this period because of his improving social connections. In addition, historians who have pointed out that the Bourbon dynasty reduced the role of the Council of the Indies to that of an appellate court have underestimated the council's lasting informal influence. This interdisciplinary article introduces game theory to Latin American historical scholarship by analyzing a period that scholars have largely neglected.

Born free in 1766 along the American frontier separating the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the Afro-descendant Jacinto Ventura de Molina grew up to become a tireless writer of history, religious philosophy, and petitions for black nations and poor residents in Montevideo, Uruguay. After serving in black militias in the early 1800s and working as a shoemaker, he began a long career as a lawyer and was recognized with the title “defender of the poor.” Most impressive about this little-known prolific writer was that he operated in and moved between different social registers and contexts. He was a black letrado working in a white world of letters and knew well how to navigate multiple discourses and manipulate codes of the lettered city. His personality led in part to his popularity in 1820s and 1830s Montevideo. But he was best known for his writing, which spurred attacks from several contemporaries.

Using the 2006 Mexican Social Mobility Survey, this article evaluates the influence of parental wealth on several outcomes of adult children, including educational attainment, consumption level, asset holdings, home ownership, and home value. Three main findings emerge from the analysis. First, parental wealth is a strong determinant of educational attainment, net of the standard indicators of socioeconomic advantage. Furthermore, the influence of parental wealth appears to be stronger among the most disadvantaged children—those with low cultural capital residing in rural areas. Second, the mechanism of parental influence on adult children's economic well-being differs depending on the outcome: in the case of consumption level, the influence is largely indirect, mediated by offspring's human capital, while the opposite is true for children's asset holdings, where a direct transfer of resources predominates. Third, access to homeownership is only weakly stratified by economic resources, but parental wealth significantly affects home value. The findings here highlight the critical but largely neglected impact of wealth on inequality and mobility in Latin America.

To what extent has the Argentine party system been polarized along class lines? The political historiography gives mixed and contradictory answers to this question. We explore the social bases of Argentina's political parties using an original database, the most comprehensive database of Argentine elections yet assembled, and new methods of ecological inference that yield more reliable results than previous analyses. We identify two distinct party systems, one in place between 1912 and 1940, the other emerging after 1946. The first party system was not consistently class based, but the second was, with the Radical Party representing the middle classes and the Peronists, workers and the poor. Still, there were important exceptions. Lower-class support for the Peronists, as proxied by literacy rates, declined during Perón's exile, which implies that the party had trouble mobilizing lower-class illiterate voters. Since the return to democracy in 1983, class polarization has again found some expression in the party system.

Does race influence political behavior in Brazil? Using data from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, we explore whether an individual's propensity to take part in a political association is affected by race, independent of socioeconomic position and of the availability of resources derived from this position. We found that white individuals participate more in political associations than do black individuals; however, after taking into account the differences in all types of resources, we found no difference in participation by racial groups. Nevertheless, by interacting race, skills, and income, it turns out that different racial groups use the same resources differently. A white individual's propensity to participate politically is significantly more affected by income than a similar black individual's propensity. Therefore, we argue that race mediates the effect of resources on political participation, which means that either different groups may use different resources or different groups can differ in how intensively they use resources.

Bolivia was the poster child for economic liberalization policies adopted throughout Latin America since the 1970s. The country is also currently viewed as a place where the neoliberal or market-oriented economic model has been exhausted, as indicated by high levels of societal protest and recent democratic instability. Using available subnational data from Bolivia, we examine the determinants of societal protest across the country's nine provinces for the 1995–2005 period. Consistent with recent literature, we find that provinces with higher levels of political competition have lower levels of societal protest. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which suggests that neoliberal reforms depoliticize and demobilize collective actors, we find that economic liberalization increases the level of protest activity. Taken together, the article draws attention to the paradoxical effect of neoliberalism to simultaneously debilitate certain types of popular resistance and activate others.

Many cross-national surveys examine the extent to which citizens of new democracies believe that democracy is always preferable to any other form of government. There is little evidence, however, regarding how such attitudes affect citizen behavior. This article examines the case of Bolivia, asking whether and how Bolivians' attitudes toward democracy affect participation, including contacts with public officials and involvement in political parties and social movements. Through analysis of nationwide survey data, I show that preferences for democracy have little effect on participation in party meetings or protests. Examining the relationship more carefully, I then show that, for Bolivians who favor institutional methods of representation, support for democracy increases attachment to the traditional political system and decreases protest; for citizens who favor popular methods of representation, it has the opposite impact. I conclude by discussing the implications for scholarship on democratization, which often conflates preferences for democracy with political stability.

This article examines trajectories of nationalism in twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru through the analytical lens of schooling. I argue that textbooks reveal state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood. In turn, the outlooks and practices of teachers provide a window for understanding how state ideologies were received, translated, and reworked within society. During the late nineteenth century, textbooks in Mexico, Argentina, and Peru conceived of the nation as a political community, emphasized civilization for having achieved national unity, and viewed elites as driving national history. During the twentieth century, textbooks eventually advanced a cultural understanding of the nation, envisioned national unity to be achieved through assimilation into a homogeneous national identity, and assigned historical agency to the masses. Yet teacher responses to the textbooks varied. In Mexico, under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), teachers predominantly embraced textbooks that promoted a popular national culture. Teachers in Argentina under Juan Perón (1946–1955) and in Peru under Juan Velasco (1968–1975) largely opposed the texts.

Durante los últimos años, varios países de América Latina han bajado las tasas de impuesto a las utilidades de las empresas, entre otras razones, con el objetivo de atraer más inversión extranjera. Sin embargo, dicha política sólo puede tener resultados significativos si la inversión extranjera es relativamente sensible a la tasa de impuestos. De lo contrario, el efecto principal se limitaría a una fuerte reducción en la recaudación tributaria. Desafortunadamente, para América Latina no hay evidencia empírica en la literatura económica que indique la magnitud de dicha elasticidad. Una primera contribución de este trabajo consiste precisamente en estimar la magnitud de los efectos tributarios en la inversión extranjera en América Latina. Una segunda contribución consiste en considerar explícitamente en el análisis empírico el hecho de que los inversionistas extranjeros tienen una outside option en sus alternativas de inversión y pueden decidir no invertir en ningún país de América Latina. La evidencia empírica en este trabajo, utilizando un modelo de elección discreta y un panel de once países en Latinoamérica para el período 1990–2002, muestra una elasticidad impuesto de la inversión extranjera entre –0.8 y –1.

The central hypothesis derived in this article is that the ability of Brazil's central government to bypass governors determined the success of delivering public goods federation-wide in the area of noncontributory social protection policy. The Workers' Party's (Partido dos Trabalhadores) first-term administration from 2003 to 2006 successfully reformed, expanded, and implemented four previously existing cash-transfer programs designed to alleviate poverty. The central administration's flagship program Bolsa Família was implemented in all of Brazil's municipalities, delivering benefits to more than 11 million households. A nonmajoritarian political system, the constitutional autonomy of municipalities, and the gradual hardening of post-1995 subnational budget constraints facilitated the ability of the central government to live up to the aspirations and expectations of the Brazilian public by combating hunger, poverty, and misery through this program. This article shows these institutional factors to have provided incentives for successful central-local collaboration in this social policy area.

En el articulo analizaré las conmemoraciones del Primero de Mayo en la ciudad de Porto Alegre, capital de Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil, pensándolas como momentos privilegiados de la construcción de la identidad obrera en los cuales el proletariado, ganando las calles, presentaba orgullosamente sus símbolos y la fuerza de su cohesión frente a los otros sectores de la sociedad, y también como momentos de disputas en torno al significado de la fecha, a través de los cuales es posible observar tanto la influencia de la circulación de las ideas como las contradicciones del movimiento obrero internacional en el paso del siglo XIX al siglo XX

This article analyzes Salvadoran newspaper coverage of a social movement struggle that emerged in 2002 to prevent the privatization of the health-care system. Movement groups pursued their policy goals through both extrainstitutional protest and formal legislative channels. Through an analysis of news content, this article examines whether these different components of the movement's claims-making repertoire influenced the portrayal of the movement's goals, actors, and actions by one of the major Salvadoran news dailies. The analysis reveals that, compared to protest events, legislative processes that the movement set in motion generated coverage that was more sympathetic to the movement and that presented greater interrogation of government and elite plans for health-care reform.