Mucha de la literatura académica concibe la deportación como un proceso de eliminación de deshechos. Sin embargo, la existencia de una clase significativa de personas deportadas de los Estados Unidos trabajando como agentes de call center en países como México, Honduras, Guatemala y El Salvador sugiere mejor la metáfora del reciclaje, una muestra de las eficiencias cínicas y crueles del capitalismo global neoliberal. Este artículo se basa en entrevistas con trece individuos quienes migraron a los Estados Unidos como menores de edad, fueron deportados a El Salvador después de largas residencias en Estados Unidos, y encontraron empleo en la creciente industria de call center salvadoreña donde brindan servicios virtuales en inglés para clientes norteamericanos. Argumento que este reciclaje laboral se posibilita a través de una extensión de la condición de deportabilidad, que sigue produciendo una población de trabajadores vulnerables para la explotación del capital norteamericano en El Salvador aún después de la deportación, y que este proceso de reciclaje actúa como proceso disciplinario que reproduce un discurso neoliberal de responsabilidad personal, en el cual el trabajo de call center emerge como el instrumento para reformar los deportados transgresores y convertirlos en sujetos neoliberales productivos.

In the context of increasing prosecution by victims of domestic violence, this article compares professionals’ responses to specific cases in two different institutional settings in São Paulo, women’s police stations and hospital emergency services. The article focuses on the first encounter of victims with policewomen and health care popular legal advocates. We take “interpretive relativism” (Geertz 1983) as a fundamental framework for comparing, ethnographically, two contrasting cognitive methods for adjudicating truth to the events narrated by the victims: the skeletonization of facts, typical of police officials, and the schematization of social action, typical of human rights practitioners. We conclude that while policewomen are ambivalent regarding women’s capacity to decide for themselves how to use the legal resources offered to them, popular legal advocates, in contrast, seek to empower women by improving their capacity to make well-informed decisions.

Sumak kawsay, a vision of good living originating in the thought of indigenous intellectuals, has attracted many commentators since its incorporation into Ecuador’s 2008 constitution. But it remains unclear in much of the secondary literature how the discourse of sumak kawsay and its Spanish derivative buen vivir relate to the day-to-day experiences of indigenous people. We address this lack of clarity through a three-part exploration of Kichwa perspectives on the good life. First, we describe how day-to-day discussions are more likely to revolve around the actually existing life of struggle. Then we analyze an artistic genre that illustrates how decolonized indigenous lives might look. Finally, we examine how the decolonial political philosophy of sumak kawsay has emerged out of concerted collective efforts to overcome the life of struggle. We consider how these three instances of discourse relate to a long Andean history of looking to the past for an alternative to the hardships of the present, and conclude with a call to take indigenous perspectives more fully into account when concepts such as sumak kawsay are invoked by nonindigenous actors.

In this article I focus on the nexus of urbanization, the environment and public health that was exposed by the 1912 bubonic plague epidemic in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I utilize the concept of “urban health penalty,” developed by demographic historians of the industrial revolution in Europe, to account for the declining health of the working class in cities. While in Europe poor health among the urban poor was associated with industrialization, I argue that in San Juan chaotic, unplanned urbanization reflected the effects of colonialism. I further examine how the epidemic exacerbated the class and racial divisions that contributed to the disastrous living conditions, and speculate as to whether the environmental neglect of the neighborhood by authorities was due to the fact that it was home to many poor people of African descent. I also highlight the varying understandings of the causes and appropriate responses to plague.

This article explores oral histories about the foundation of the Mosetén Indigenous People’s Organization (OPIM) in Bolivia. In so doing it aims to add nuance to scholarship on Bolivian social movements from 1990 to 2010 by focusing on connections and continuities between indigenous organizations and the systems of political association that predate them. Efforts to organize Mosetén communities were spurred at least in part by indigenous desire to establish order within their communities and to resolve local problems. They adopted strategies associated with models of social organization that were already familiar to them, particularly the Franciscan missions and agrarian unions, and adapted them to meet their needs. This process involved ongoing interactions between Mosetén yearnings, a particular political and historical context, and the creative capacities of Mosetén leaders.

En este trabajo analizo la novela Boarding Home (1987) del escritor cubano Guillermo Rosales a partir de su inscripción dentro de las coordenadas que signaron el éxodo cubano por el Mariel en 1980. Exploro cómo Mariel se vuelve un espacio simbólico de significación desde donde se ofrece una mirada mucho más compleja al evento estigmatizado tanto por la revolución, como por los medios de prensa y la comunidad norteamericanos. La operación de “basurización del otro”, de la “escoria” que lleva a cabo el gobierno cubano (Castillo Durante) tiene como consecuencia inevitable a la abyección (Kristeva), y ambos fenómenos se hacen visibles, materiales, en la espacialización del margen, del exilio en la vida del protagonista como se comprueba con su vida en un home de Miami, y tras sus recorridos por la ciudad. Tanto el home como La Pequeña Habana son lugares heterotópicos (Foucault) en donde opera una distorsión de las dos utopías (o distopías) que entrañan la revolución y el exilio. Concluyo que Rosales apela a la literatura como acto de resistencia ante la invisibilidad y el estigma del éxodo.

En el presente artículo vamos a trazar un recorrido crítico a través de dos grandes corrientes de pensamiento, a saber, la teoría de la dependencia y todos los estudios vinculados al problema de la colonialidad. Esa colonialidad, que constituye la forma última de la subyugación material y de la violencia epistémica ejercidas sobre los pueblos sojuzgados, también compondrá un cuerpo de relatos hegemónicos que constituirán la matriz misma en la que se insertan los regímenes coloniales del saber y del poder. Colonialidad que, por cierto, debería ser pronunciada en plural, toda vez que múltiples son los ámbitos que ella vertebra y determina. Dependencia y colonialidad, por otro lado, constituyen dos desarrollos teóricos que evidencian un gran potencial a la hora de desentrañar las diferentes dimensiones de esos complejos procesos políticos, económicos y culturales que conforman la dominación neocolonial.

There is a forceful new impetus toward mega-hydraulic projects in Latin America, which are booming but also highly controversial. They bring benefits to some social groups while many others are negatively affected. Technocratic discourses are dominant in the region; they strategically mobilize institutions, infrastructure, money, and knowledge to present particular hydrosocial territorial imaginaries—such as multipurpose dams—as natural, universal, and politically neutral. Meanwhile, affected local communities commonly envision and practice different discourses, values, and worldviews, based on contextualized notions of well-being and territoriality. Using a political ecology perspective, this article examines how the Daule-Peripa mega-hydraulic scheme—Ecuador’s “hydraulic heart”—has de- and repatterned the territory, producing new hierarchical relations and unequal distribution of socioenvironmental impacts. Though political discourses have changed throughout state-centralist and neoliberal époques, governmental policies and practices have continued and renewed their defense of mega-hydraulism. In turn, affected communities and families, through everyday territorial politics, respond and aim to rearrange the hydrosocial network in order to regain control over water, land, and territorial services.

In the film Coronel Delmiro Gouveia (1978), Brazilian director Geraldo Sarno uses historical fiction about “the coronel of coronéis” to negotiate the limits of government censorship and discuss the domestic and international policies of the military dictatorship, including its relationship to the state cinema enterprise Embrafilme, through a portrayal of a progressive but authoritarian businessman of the sertão who died in Brazil’s first global war of the twentieth century. The film is one of the few Brazilian films about the country’s oft-overlooked role in World War I. Close analysis of the work reveals Sarno’s deft use of allegory for social commentary on class conflict and the film industry.

This essay focuses on the dynamics of (dis)embodiment between national love and the body of the black woman in Cuba. This very discussion lies at the center of Sandra Álvarez Ramírez’s blog Negra cubana tenía que ser, where the black woman’s body becomes an ideal in itself. Álvarez Ramírez’s intellectual interventions impress this body with love and assemble a community whose members share the black feminist goal of a sexual (polyamory) revolution. I propose that Negra cubana’s revolutionary matrix resides in the blog’s networking: a cyberfeminist agenda to connect Cuban black women’s voices with other voices around the world. Contrary to the utopian promise of the Cuban Revolution, Negra cubana’s black feminist promise is that of enactment in the present—in both physical and virtual realms.

By the time the English translation of Juan Bosch’s story “The Indelible Spot” was published in the Saturday Evening Post on November 16, 1963, his eight-month presidency was over. Bosch’s brief tenure was punctuated by growing unrest among Dominicans on the Left and mounting suspicion from those on the Right. Central to this tension was the question of his loyalties to US-style democracy, Soviet communism, and/or Castro’s Cuba. Against this backdrop, the tale of how his short story came to be translated and published is emblematic of the complex, contradictory, and confusing cultural and political discourses surrounding the future of the Dominican Republic within the sphere of US Cold War policies. Central to this analysis is the unique affiliation between two authors: Juan Bosch and John Bartlow Martin, the first US ambassador to the Dominican Republic after Trujillo’s assassination. Ultimately, the communiques and notes about the translation and two distinct versions of the final published story found in Martin’s papers at the Library of Congress reveal the ideological impasse between Cold War and Caribbean discourses of culture and power.

Los manuales de conducta surgieron durante el siglo XIX cubano como un instrumento de la élite criolla en ascenso, para imponerse como modelo de un sujeto nacional imaginado en construcción. Estos textos, también llamados de “urbanidad y buenas maneras” fueron importantes símbolos de las aspiraciones de la élite criolla, en tanto tecnologías para la conformación de un tipo de cuerpo —burgués, blanco, heterosexual, cubano— moldeado para habitar las nuevas configuraciones espaciales urbanas que trajeron consigo las tendencias modernizadoras de inicios de siglo. El presente artículo examina las formas sinérgicas en que los manuales de conducta, y su ideología motora, la urbanidad, se desarrollaron en estrecha relación con otra importante tecnología de gobierno y diferenciación de cuerpos en el espacio: el ornato. Bajo la premisa de adecentar, las políticas de ornato tenían como objetivo transformar La Habana en una elegante capital, colonial y moderna a la vez, concebida como una imagen limpia de referencias sensoriales a cuerpos negros y femeninos marginales. Al examinar las conexiones discursivas entre el ornato y la urbanidad se evidencian las formas en que la respetabilidad moderna burguesa se negociaba, no sólo en un plano simbólico sino también a través de la regulación de las sensaciones y emociones.

This article focuses on how two Spanish American Creole writers perceived their port city as a symbol of national prestige, devoted patriotism, and utilitarian significance, at a time when the military and economic status of the port was undergoing transformational changes. It centers on the works of two eighteenth-century Cuban writers, José Martín Félix de Arrate’s Llave del Nuevo Mundo, antemural de las Indias Occidentales: La Habana descripta (1761) and Ignacio José de Urrutia y Montoya’s Teatro histórico, jurídico y político-militar de la Isla Fernandina de Cuba y principalmente de su capital La Habana (1791), to show the ways in which these authors articulated their love for their country while endowing the port and the port city with local political power and cultural prestige. This sense of “topophilia,” a concept described by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan as the “affective bond between people and place,” is what guided the aforementioned authors’ geographic view of the port.

Since the late 1960s TV Globo, Brazil’s largest and most commercially successful broadcast network, has been producing long-form serial narratives known as telenovelas. Followed by millions of domestic viewers and exported to more than 130 countries worldwide, these melorealist serials have served as a primary source for what it means to be Brazilian in both the domestic and global social imaginaries. A number of excellent studies, however, have shown that the country’s most important fictional television genre has historically underrepresented Brazilians of color while at the same time producing a symbolic good that emphasizes whiteness as the ideal social marker. This article shifts the focus from the telenovela to an examination of the series, an emerging and understudied area of Brazilian television fiction. By analyzing representations of blackness in two contemporary Brazilian serial comedies: Mister Brau (TV Globo, 2015–) and The Great Gonzalez (O Grande Gonzalez, Fox Brasil and Porta dos Fundos, 2015), the article reveals the initial stages of recent developments that have the potential to significantly alter both the field of television production and the way Brazil is portrayed on the small screen.

This article proposes an affective turn in scholarship on colonial Latin American literature, focusing on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios as a case study. Through an engagement with embodied, intersubjective, and circulatory affects in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, it sketches out a critical framework that investigates what I call the exteriority of feeling in the colonial Americas. My reading focuses on three main areas: the theory of the humoral body as the cultural referent that shapes the externalization of embodied affect in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, the description of forms of affective transmission precariously established between European and indigenous communities, and the emergence of affective minefields and emotional untranslatables in colonial contexts. In this way, this article works toward a broad investigation of the meanings, functions, and circulation of affect and emotion in the colonial Americas.

This article is an effort to update a discussion of Argentina’s international financial relations during the late 1970s that is lagging behind recent scholarly developments on the cases of Mexico and Chile. It focuses on the early restoration of Argentine credit standing with multilateral financial institutions, as well as their loans and technical assistance, achieved by Minister Martínez de Hoz and his team during their early years in office. So far this stage had not elicited detailed analyses of its differences with the controversial and better-known monetary balance of payments approach adopted in December 1978 to finally curb inflation, and which gave international private bankers a leading role in the financing of Argentina’s foreign exchange needs.

Este artigo objetiva analisar representações do indígena na literatura ficcional brasileira da década de 1930, buscando compreender sua incorporação ao imaginário nacional naquele momento. Trata-se de um contexto de aprofundamento do debate sobre a modernização social, produtiva e institucional do país, sobretudo no sentido da promoção da industrialização nas áreas de economia mais dinâmica e da ampliação da presença estatal na vida do país, particularmente através de sua expansão em direção ao interior e às regiões de fronteira. Buscamos observar as formas de sua percepção como objeto, obstáculo e sujeito histórico e para tal foram selecionadas manifestações literárias bastante diversas: a literatura de entretenimento de Menotti del Picchia, a escrita neorrealista de Graciliano Ramos e a ficção mística e introspectiva de Cornélio Penna. Por meio de tal diversidade, intentamos alcançar um amplo horizonte de possibilidades em torno do problema exposto. Observamos, enfim, nos romances em debate, que os indígenas surgem mais frequentemente como figuras ou símbolos que como pessoas ou povos reais e contemporâneos, e que sua imagem participa dos projetos modernizadores, mas também contribui para o debate sobre a formação histórica do país.

This study uses the hedonic wage method to estimate the value of statistical life (VSL) in Chile and then extrapolates this value to different Latin American countries. The data are obtained from the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional, CASEN 2013), which includes information on socioeconomic and labor variables at the individual level. Records of fatal and nonfatal occupational risk in each economic sector are obtained from the Superintendency of Social Security (Superintendencia de Seguridad Social). The results of the best hedonic wage estimate for the Chilean case (which corrects for endogeneity and selection bias) show that the VSL is US$3.7 million, with a confidence interval of 95 percent ranging between US$3.4 million and US$4.0 million. A meta-analysis that relates the VSL to GDP per capita is conducted to extrapolate the findings to other Latin American countries, with average values ranging from US$0.01 million for Haiti to US$5.2 million for Puerto Rico.

This essay reviews the following works:

Native Wills from the Colonial Americas: Dead Giveaways in a New World. Edited by Mark Christensen and Jonathan Truitt. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 276. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781607814160.

Strange Lands and Different Peoples: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala. By W. George Lovell, Christopher H. Lutz, with Wendy Kramer and William R. Swezey. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 339. $34.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780806143903.

Indians and the Political Economy of Colonial Central America, 1670–1810. By Robert W. Patch. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 284. $36.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780806144009.

The Mixtecs of Oaxaca: Ancient Times to the Present. By Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 328. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780806143811.

Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico. Edited by Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 257. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780826354624.

El boxeo mexicano ha generado una larga tradición literaria y gráfica que ha sido poco estudiada. Este ensayo analiza las crónicas “La última gigantomaquia,” de José Juan Tablada, “Las glorias del gran Púas,” de Ricardo Garibay, y “La hora del consumo de los orgullos,” de Carlos Monsiváis. En ellas el boxeo sirve como espacio donde se representan y resuelven simbólicamente tensiones políticas y sociales, nacionales y transnacionales. Además, como industria deportiva el boxeo es el espacio en donde se experimentaron las prácticas y condiciones a las que se enfrentará el deportista profesional dentro del capitalismo global. Por otra parte, debido a la violencia que conlleva, el boxeo ha sido el espacio donde se representa la masculinidad moderna. Las tres crónicas que conforman este ensayo crean un arco temporal que recorre el siglo XX mexicano y muestran la relación del deporte con el periodismo, la política y el mercado global.