This article argues that one of the most important contributions of Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra is its rewriting of the modern subject. Through its metafictional dimension, the novel seeks to change the legacy of the recoding of subjectivities begun in the Spanish Golden Age. More specifically, it is through the construction of its characters and the way in which the latter depend on, and grow out of, the structure of the novel that Fuentes revises modern individualist conceptions of the subject. Although critics have tended to privilege the novel's realm of myth (understood as transcendent and timeless), this reading depends on the novel's evocation of a Marxist narrative of culture as struggle driven that Carlos Fuentes never loses from sight. The novel's structure arguably promotes a diachronic understanding of history into which both the mythic and material strands feed. Myth, in this reading, is a consciously embraced worldview that grounds, and dialectically informs, this vision of history rather than shying away from it.

The article aims to identify the factors behind a series of center-left electoral victories in the 2002 and 2006 state elections, which indicate the decay of state political machines in Brazil's poorest regions. It is argued that vertical competition between the federal and state governments in the provision of public policies works as a constraint on state bosses' strategies of political control. The withering of state political machines may be understood as an indirect consequence of the national political shifts represented by the rise of Brazil's most important left-wing organization—the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores)—to the presidency in 2002 and 2006. Social and economic policies implemented by the federal government under PT rule undermined subnational patron-client networks by improving the life conditions of the poorest sections of the electorate. The article explores the interlinking of national and subnational electoral dynamics by developing statistical models for state- and municipal-level data.

The landscapes of the Greater Caribbean have been undergoing a process of ecological globalization since the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the late fifteenth century. The character of this ecological globalization has changed over time. Models of commodity-led economic development drove, directly or indirectly, the neo-Columbian exchanges of the long nineteenth century (roughly 1720–1930). The neo-Columbian exchanges differed from the Columbian exchanges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in several key ways: They were increasingly mediated by imperial and transnational scientific institutions. The geographical scope of the exchanges grew, and the Greater Caribbean saw many new direct introductions of people, plants, and animals from Asia and the Pacific, as well as from the eastern part of the Atlantic World. A parallel movement of pathogens from Asia and the Pacific also introduced new epidemic diseases—especially crop diseases—to the Greater Caribbean. The neo-Columbian exchange drove the region's dramatic expansion in agricultural production, but this constructed abundance came at the expense of ecological impoverishment and fragility.

This article analyzes the recent constituent assembly in Bolivia as a political context in which the indigenous movement and the feminist movement presented different platforms to influence the content of the new constitution. The representation of indigenous women's gender-specific claims is examined through a study of their forms of organizing at the intersection of both social movements and content analysis of the movements' constitutional reform proposals. The success of both movements and the capacity of indigenous women to position themselves as a central actor in the process are explained through reference to the strength of the indigenous movement in national politics, the history of indigenous women's mobilization, and the collaboration between indigenous women and the feminist movement. Indigenous women's collective agency has benefited from this political context to develop new organizations and spaces to claim their rights and perspectives.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the main welfare office of the city of Buenos Aires, this article dissects poor people's lived experiences of waiting. The article examines the welfare office as a site of intense sociability amidst pervasive uncertainty. Poor people's waiting experiences persuade the destitute of the need to be patient, thus conveying the implicit state request to be compliant clients. An analysis of the sociocultural dynamics of waiting helps us understand how (and why) welfare clients become not citizens but patients of the state.

Northern Veracruz has experienced dramatic transformations in its landscape over the longue durée. Geological forces shaped it into the northernmost tropical rain forest in the Americas. Paleolithic humans appeared as early as 7600 BCE and tinkered with it, exploiting it for their own survival for thousands of years. Their ecological footprint was light enough until the communities grew and adopted agriculture. At that point, around 2500 BCE, the landscape of the Huasteca Veracruzana became more humanized, but the survival of the rainforest was not at risk, even when the first towns formed in the first centuries of the Common Era. Urbanization and civilization were highly localized, collapsing for reasons not well understood. The rainforest thus endured to confront Spanish colonialism in the 1500s. Changes in the land were uneven under the Spanish, however, and the rainforest outlasted colonial rule as well as the turmoil of nineteenth-century national politics. Transformation came in the twentieth century, as a result of oil extraction. Under the oil barons, the Huasteca experienced the full impact of capitalism and industrialization. Between 1900 and 1940, the oil industry eliminated the rainforest, leaving the Huasteca open to further environmental change. In the aftermath of oil, the landscape shifted to grasslands and monocrop agriculture. Oil remained present but largely in disguise: as petrochemical inputs to force poor soils to sustain citrus production and cattle ranching.

The fight against HIV/AIDS is an example of a global struggle for the promotion of sexual health and the protection of human rights for all, including sexual minorities. It represents a challenge for the understanding of its impact on political, social, and economic processes. My central goal in this piece is twofold. First, I underline the importance of a political and human rights perspective to the analysis of the global response to the pandemic, and I introduce the concept of policy networks for a better understanding of these dynamics. Second, I argue that, in the case of Mexico, the constitution of HIV/AIDS policy networks, which incorporate civil society and state actors, such as sexual minority activists and public officials, and their actions—both domestic and international—have resulted in a more inclusive HIV/AIDS policy-making process. However, serious human rights violations of HIV/AIDS patients and sexual minorities still remain.

Despite empirical findings on women's varied and often extensive participation in smallholder agriculture in Latin America, their participation continues to be largely invisible. In this article, I argue that the intransigency of farming women's invisibility reflects, in part, a discursive construction of farmers as men. Through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews with one hundred women in Calakmul, Mexico, I demonstrate the material implications of gendered farmer identities for women's control of resources, including land and conservation and development project resources. In particular, I relate the activities of one women's agricultural community-based organization and the members' collective adoption of transgressive identities as farmers. For these women, the process of becoming farmers resulted in increased access to and control over resources. This empirical case study illustrates the possibility of women's collective action to challenge and transform women's continued local invisibility as agricultural actors in rural Latin American spaces.

O índice de volatilidade eleitoral tem sido usado como um dos principais indicadores de institucionalização dos sistemas partidários em países de democracia recente. Contudo, os estudos comparados usualmente analisam esse índice num nível de agregação dos dados muito elevado, avaliando sua variação com base nas médias nacionais. Sob tal perspectiva, nosso objetivo é analisar a volatilidade eleitoral brasileira tomando os 27 entes federativos como unidade de agregação dos dados eleitorais para a Câmara dos Deputados. Na primeira parte do artigo, mostramos que há grande variabilidade no índice entre os estados e entre as sucessivas eleições; na segunda parte, realizamos um teste estatístico do impacto explicativo de variáveis políticas, econômicas e sociais na variação da volatilidade eleitoral em duas dimensões: a temporal (entre as eleições) e a espacial (entre os estados). Os resultados mostram a importância de algumas variáveis políticas na explicação da variação da volatilidade eleitoral brasileira.

The United Nations describes aquaculture as the fastest-growing method of food production, and some industry boosters have heralded the coming of a sustainable blue revolution. This article interprets the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in southern Chile (1980–2010) by integrating concepts from commodity studies and comparative environmental history. I juxtapose salmon aquaculture to twentieth-century export banana production to reveal the similar dynamics that give rise to “commodity diseases”—events caused by the entanglement of biological, social, and political-economic processes that operate on local, regional, and transoceanic geographical scales. Unsurprisingly, the risks and burdens associated with commodity diseases are borne disproportionately by production workers and residents in localities where commodity disease events occur. Chile's blue revolution suggests that evaluating the sustainability of aquaculture in Latin America cannot be divorced from processes of accumulation.

The electoral implications of conditional cash-transfer programs have been widely debated in recent years. In the particular case of Brazil analysts have argued that the social policies that President Lula da Silva's first government implemented enabled the Workers' Party to broaden its electoral clientele from middle-class and highly educated voters to low-income and poorly educated individuals from the Northeast. The conditional cash-transfer program known as Bolsa Família (BF) is said to have played a key role in this shift of electoral support and to have worked as a powerful clientelistic tool for Lula. Using survey data, this article challenges this view by showing that, despite changes in the profile of Lula's supporters, the BF program cannot account for them. Poor voters vote differently across regions; BF recipients were already Lula voters in 2002 and cast ballots for him during his reelection at the same rate as nonrecipients.

El intenso proceso de descentralización de algunas políticas sociales observado en Brasil desde la década de 1980 no ha dado lugar a la disminución de las desigualdades regionales en términos de la atención de las necesidades locales por dichas políticas. Por otra parte, en los últimos años, el éxito del programa Bolsa Familía—de gestión centralizada y cobertura focalizada en los mas pobres—ha despertado el interés por valorar qué estrategia de suministro resulta capaz de ofrecer los resultados más eficientes en términos de la relación gasto-necesidad. El examen de las políticas sociales con base en dos dimensiones centrales (centralización-descentralización y universalización-focalización) ha revelado que tanto la centralización como lafocalización presentan mejores resultados que la descentralización y universalización.

Most Brazilians believe that racial and socioeconomic inequalities tend to overlap—in other words, blacks are poorer because they have less education and worse jobs. In the past few years, however, several quantitative studies have presented an interesting puzzle: racial inequalities are strongest among those at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy. This article explores the “elitist profile” of racial discrimination through eighty in-depth interviews with black professionals in Rio de Janeiro. The results show that interviewees describe their trajectories of social mobility through mechanisms that involve both socioeconomic and racial exclusion. Their perceptions of injustice, however, are more directly related to experiences of racial discrimination. In narrating incidents of discrimination, interviewees stress the distinction and tensions between what we call generalized prejudice and particularized universalism.

En este trabajo se revisan los principales factores que permiten explicar la emergencia del movimiento piquetero argentino en una de las regiones donde se manifestó más tempranamente: las localidades salteñas de Tartagal y Mosconi. A diferencia de lo que se ha venido afirmando, la idea de la existencia de un estado de bienestar antes de las contrarreformas neoliberales de la década de 1990, y la caracterización del movimiento piquetero, las rebeliones populares (puebladas) y las asambleas populares de la zona como nuevas formas de organización y protesta vinculadas al efecto de las contrarreformas, resultan inadecuados. Con respecto a la primera, se mostrará que nunca existió en la zona algo parecido a un estado de bienestar; sobre la segunda, que existían experiencias de lucha previas dentro de las que el corte de ruta y la Asamblea Popular ya habían sido implementadas, y que esas experiencias nutrieron los acontecimientos posteriores.

The article is a schematic cultural-historical analysis of a major genre of regional popular music in Brazil, baião (the precursor to today's forró). Using Gramscian terminology appropriate to a discussion of hegemony and resistance, I argue that the early proponents of baião had to wage a cultural war of maneuver to challenge the existing hegemony of the Rio de Janeiro culture industry and to gain new respect for the northeastern Brazilian people and their culture. After success in this initial endeavor, subsequent generations of musicians have carried on a war of position to maintain baião's, and later forró‘s, prominence on the national stage. The article also analyzes certain common themes in forró (e.g., saudade, or nostalgia, for the home region and a critical view of the urban Southeast) as tactics that have contributed to forró‘s continuing relevance to Northeasterners and to its successful struggles of maneuver and position.

Conservation-development interactions intensified as a consequence of environmental and land-use changes in Latin America during the 1985–2008 period. This study examines predominant changes in five countries (Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia). Multifold increase of protected areas for environmental conservation occurred together with agricultural growth and intensification. Conservation and agricultural trends were fraught with conflicts and contradictions, yet they also showed partial compatibility in the search for sustainability. Conservation, indigenous, and social movement organizations operating at multiple scales (local, national, and international) contributed to distinctly configured national conservation “booms” and sustainability discourses in the five countries. Neoliberal governments and global organizations sanctioned protected-area conservation via increased state institutions, national and subnational administrative mechanisms, widely publicized sustainability rationales, expanded territorial management and a property rights focus, spatial devolution, and official multiculturalism—the 1990s were a heyday of these activities. Subsequently Latin American conservation and sustainability efforts have evolved both as a global center of governance through payment for environmental services and under increased and diverse social agendas.

Global health-care models for developing countries urge integration of traditional medicine with Western biomedicine. This article shows how residents of a remote Peruvian village negotiate among biomedicine, traditional medicine, lay indigenous medicine, and local knowledge of medicinal plants. Villagers' health-care choices reveal that they often resort to medicinal plants before modern pharmaceuticals. Their discourses show that these choices reflect social and cultural processes beyond the medical: the revitalization of Andean identity, the conflictual relationship that villagers have with modernity, and the desire to evade or subvert the power that Western medicine has over them. This article elaborates the concept of the healthscape as an individual's subjective vision of a landscape's medical resources and institutions, limited by cost and accessibility and shaped by the uneasy coexistence of Western and indigenous medical systems.