Los resultados de una etnografía multisituada desarrollada en 2015 y 2016 entre los saraguros, indígenas del Ecuador, permiten describir nueve factores que intervienen, con paradójicas relaciones, en el turismo místico andino. El neoincaismo esencialista, la concepción de una naturaleza prístina con lugares energéticos, el auge de la medicina ancestral, la idealización de lo comunitario como opuesto al estilo de vida occidental, el reconocimiento institucional de la interculturalidad y las culturas de los pueblos originarios, la ampliación internacional de las redes de la galaxia neoindia, el sincretismo new age, el capital cultural de los yachaks y la posibilidad de mercantilizar lo espiritual bajo formatos de fast rituals muestran la multidimensionalidad de un tipo de turismo que escapa a su simple categorización como auténtico o simulacro, y nos hace comprender —a la luz de un fenómeno glocal— el lugar en el mundo que ocupan actualmente muchos grupos indígenas en Latinoamérica.

This study assesses the deployment of blackface in a performance of the Danza de Caporales at La Fiesta de la Virgen de la Candelaria in Puno, Peru, by the performance troupe Sambos Illimani con Sentimiento y Devoción. Since blackface is so widely associated with the nineteenth-century US blackface minstrel tradition, this article develops the concept of “hemispheric blackface” to expand common understandings of the form. It historicizes Sambos’ deployment of blackface within an Andean performance tradition known as the Tundique, and then traces the way multiple hemispheric performance traditions can converge in a single blackface act. It underscores the amorphous nature of blackface itself and critically assesses its role in producing anti-blackness in the performance.

Este trabajo aborda un capítulo clave en la historia de persecución de los sectores radicalizados en Argentina: la represión del comunismo durante los primeros años de la década de 1930, encabezada por la Sección Especial de la Policía. Se trata de sistematizar y caracterizar la actuación de esta sección, denunciada ante la Justicia y el Parlamento, e indagar hasta qué punto implicó (o no) un quiebre con respecto a los procedimientos y concepciones de la fuerza y al marco legal involucrado. Para eso, repaso las concepciones y el accionar represivo desde principios de siglo, atendiendo a la orientación de documentos policiales de distintos períodos, y analizo en particular las reacciones de los distintos bloques de la Cámara de Diputados, inexploradas hasta el momento. La evidencia indica que en base a desarrollos previos se inició una nueva etapa signada por el resquebrajamiento del estado de derecho.

Este artículo explora el mundo de las botánicas —consideradas como farmacias invisibles— en la Ciudad de Nueva York en donde practicantes de las religiones afrocaribeñas, especialmente Santería, ejercen un doble rol como líderes religiosos y consejeros espirituales. Las botánicas atienden a una población latinoamericana, a menudo migrante e indocumentada, que llega a ellas buscando soluciones efectivas a una plétora de problemas (ej., desde trastornos orgánicos hasta maltrato laboral y conflictos familiares). Los consejeros entienden los síntomas individuales como una disrupción con el mundo social y espiritual, a menudo provocado por “maleficios” y energías negativas circundantes. Las respuestas terapéuticas mas frecuentes combinan la consulta con el uso de plantas en infusiones, baños espirituales y oraciones (resumidos en la tríada: beber, limpiar y orar). El tema pone en evidencia el rol de los servicios terapéuticos que ofrecen las botánicas por cuanto proveen de respuestas rápidas, prácticas y económicamente accesibles a una población vulnerable.

This article reports on the current state of collective migrant organizing for two Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Strained relations between migrant organizations and village authorities combine with small active memberships to limit the level and type of fund-raising in support of village development and governance. These findings highlight the difficulties that communities face to maintain effective translocal institutions over time, particularly as first-generation migrants “retire” and a lack of new arrivals hinders organizational renewal.

In 1926, the Fox Film Corporation held a “Masculine and Feminine Photogenic Beauty Contest” to find Hollywood’s newest “Latin” star in Brazil and other countries. North American film representatives asked for contestants who were “white with Latin blood.” The exotic allure of this racialized category contradicted Brazilian elites’ preference for eugenic, chaste, white beauty. Brazilian film critics, advertisers, and beauty contestants negotiated transnational standards of beauty as they sought faces, bodies, and sexual appeal that would conquer Hollywood. Ultimately, Brazilian films intellectuals forged their own meanings of “white with Latin blood” even as they upheld the supremacy of white beauty. However, the contest demonstrates how the transnational contours of cinema offered a liminal space for competing standards of racialized beauty in Brazil.

Jews of Latin America, from the colonial period to the present, have been branded heretical, inauthentic, or treasonous and perceived as threats to the colonial domination of Spain’s Counter-Reformation and modern iterations of nationalism in the region. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s El divino Narciso (1689) and Jorge Luis Borges’s “El milagro secreto” ([1944] 1993) indicate the salience and pervasiveness of the figure of the Jew, experientially and conceptually, in the region’s literary conversations about power, collectivity, and legitimacy vis-à-vis colonial and modern Europe. The two works reflect a transatlantic, multigenerational, and multigendered conversation that approaches the elimination of the Jew as a bargain that involved a simultaneous loss of American agency on a world stage. Sor Juana emerges not only as Latin America’s first female intellectual; she is Borges’s precursor in demanding an American regional identity and global agency apropos of the metropole’s exclusionary violence toward the Jew within.

Debates over shifting gender roles in nineteenth-century Spanish America included the question of women’s participation in the workforce. Writers of fiction and nonfiction posed arguments about paid employment for middle-class women and often represented work itself in ways that reinforced traditional gender norms by envisioning women’s entry into the labor force as an extension of their family and household roles. Nonetheless, the tactics that allowed writers to make stronger claims for women’s right to paid employment often reimposed limitations on women. The complex rhetorical maneuvers that many authors deployed bespeak their anxieties about the potential for social change brought by newly visible options for women. This essay examines novels and nonfictional essays and argues that authors who advance progressive agendas about and for women sometimes undermine their own purported arguments when they fall back on more conventional attitudes about women’s roles in families and society. This article contends that these problematic moments in the selected texts serve to maintain a system in which privilege accrues to male elites.

O artigo visa refletir sobre as fundações raciais do Estado brasileiro através da análise da peça Anjo negro de Nelson Rodrigues. A partir de uma abordagem pós-colonial, argumenta-se que a peça de 1948 pode ser lida como uma crítica à influente visão de “democracia racial” associada à Gilberto Freyre e que seu conteúdo antecipa uma série de ideias posteriormente presentes na obra Pele negra, máscaras brancas ([1952] 2008) de Frantz Fanon. O artigo revela as tensões e violências (re)produzidas pelo Estado no Brasil a partir dos encontros e desencontros entre as múltiplas hierarquias—econômica, patriarcal e racial—exploradas por Nelson Rodrigues ao longo da trama.

The analytic paradigms of race and nation have dominated scholarship on the Dominican Republic and have framed social and cultural analysis in ways that have limited the theorizing of Dominican materials to a narrow focus on identity. These gatekeeping concepts have been especially influential in shaping Dominican studies in the United States and in defining the predominant questions of interest in the field. This article assesses the conceptual limits of race and nation as persistent modes of analysis applied to the Dominican Republic and evaluates how these restrictive themes both shape and are shaped by conventional ideas about Dominican society. We argue for deeper engagement with homegrown scholarship and voices on the ground in order to move beyond repetitive and provincial concerns with “Dominicanness” and to trouble the far-too-common portrayal of the country as a novel racial problem.

Brazil’s manguebeat of the nineties was one of the most fertile Latin American cultural scenes of recent decades, not only for its rich musical creation but also for the playful, yet profound vision of social and ecological justice it championed. Twenty-some years after the death of Chico Science, its most iconic personality, this essay explores the strikingly relational philosophical bent at its core—one molded by the collectivism typical of its origins in local and global expressions of Black Atlantic cultures. Manguebeat was swamped in everyday philosophical questions about which kinds of knowledge, power, and being served to exacerbate violence, inequality, and harm to the environment, and which could instead encourage greater peace and harmony. Analyzing Chico Science’s three music videos, I discuss the “coexistentialism” of manguebeat, not only in a pacifistic sense or one of environmental rebirth but also in its insistence that all real living is “living with.”

Today, Brazil has one of the most diverse energy systems in the world. The sugar-based ethanol industry plays a pivotal role in that achievement, yet scholars of energy development have focused little on ethanol. This article examines the history of the sugar-based ethanol industry from its beginning in the 1930s to the creation of the state-led program Proálcool (the National Ethanol Program) in 1975 and the ethanol-fueled car in 1979. This article demonstrates how federal and private actors connected nationalist goals of a modern, industrial Brazilian identity to ethanol in order to sustain the industry against the vagaries of the sugar market. Drawing from production data, the monthly sugar industry journal Brasil Açucareiro, newspapers, government funding applications for privately owned ethanol distilleries, and oral interviews, it highlights how the idea of a nationally developed technology and domestic industry etched a long-term place for the ethanol industry in the nation’s energy strategy.

Venezuela has one of the highest rates of homicide in the Americas. Those who are dying are mostly men, and most are shot. Based on ethnographic research in poor, urban neighborhoods in Caracas, where guns are abundant and the state is absent, this article focuses on the repertoire of responses of mothers of armed young men toward violence. How are mothers responding to meet the extreme challenges of safeguarding the survival of their families? In what ways do they participate in the containment but also in the dissemination of violence? We describe the safeguarding practices deployed by women, which we interpret as political survival strategies. Drawing on women’s narratives, we have identified four strategies that contribute differently to the containment and reproduction of violence: submission and taking refuge, collaborating, resisting, and negotiating or forging of pacts.

This article explores the cases of two satirical publications—The Clinic (Chile, 1998–) and Barcelona (Argentina, 2003–). Through critical humor, visual subversions, and parody, these independent magazines challenged mainstream journalism and official political discourse, offering alternative interpretations about the ruling class and society after traumatic periods—Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile and the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina. Through interviews with the editors and content analysis, this article examines how these satirical publications responded to their respective national contexts by questioning the functioning of power on several levels of society, and how they evolved after they became popular, negotiating their space within the national mediascape. This study also suggests the notion of hybrid alternative media to describe these publications, which became part of a liberating process of collective healing. Initially perceived in opposition to mainstream media in contexts when the press’s credibility had decreased, they filled gaps in their society’s political communication.

O artigo apresenta um recorte de uma investigação sobre os “brasiguayos” na mídia paraguaia. A abordagem metodológica procede a uma análise de discurso sobre os sentidos produzidos em matérias jornalísticas e em seus comentários. Dentre os resultados encontrados, há cinco formações discursivas identificadas e aqui apresentamos a primeira, a qual denominamos “subimperialismo brasileiro”. Ela está constituída por sentidos que colocam o Brasil num projeto subimperialista que busca subjugar ao Paraguai em seu projeto político, ideológico e cultural. Tais sentidos estão calcados nas relações históricas entre o Brasil e o Paraguai. Aspectos linguísticos, políticos e econômicos, principalmente no que tange à pose da terra permeiam o discurso do sujeito jornalista e do sujeito leitor para produzir sentidos que colocam os “brasiguayos” como uma extensão do projeto subimperialista do Brasil.

Urayoán Noel’s poetry has garnered much attention for its promotion of hemispheric politics and poetics, along with its interrogation of technology’s structural and narrative interventions into diasporic cultures. This article investigates the role of sound in the Puerto Rican poet’s articulation of contemporary struggles against overwhelming hypertechnology. The analysis focuses on three poems: “Lino: Employee of the Month,” from Kool Logic/La lógica kool (2005); “babel o city (el gran concurso),” from Hi-density Politics (2010); and the live-recorded version of “Boringkén,” from Boringkén (2008). Drawing on Aldama’s (2013) concept of poetic estrangement and Dowdy’s (2013) analysis of Latinx poetic critiques of neoliberalism, this article examines how exclusionary soundscapes are built through repressive understandings of sonic modernity, and how countersounds attempt to decolonize those spaces. Noel’s poetry shows how creative voices and the reappropriation of sound technologies can help position the diasporic subject and subvert dominant sonic structures.

Latin American scholars in the twentieth century often pointed to the agrarian question and the dominance of the large latifundio estates as the key to explaining their countries’ underdevelopment. Yet, in more recent years, the emphasis on agrarian structures has declined and the latifundio is no longer seen as a relevant factor to economic development. In its place have emerged explanations that emphasize international trade relations, institutions, or the capacity of local states. This study makes a case for bringing the latifundio “back in” to explanations of underdevelopment in Latin America, and points to the persistence of particular property relations, low-intensity land use, and low-risk productive strategies throughout the region as barriers to development. Agricultural census data and various other sources on land use suggest that large latifundio estates are still a relevant factor throughout the region, and I argue that they continue to represent a significant barrier for the deepening of industrialization.

In this research note, we introduce congressbr, an R package for retrieving data from the Brazilian houses of legislature. The package contains easy-to-use functions that allow researchers to query the Application Programming Interfaces of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, perform cleaning data operations, and store information in a format convenient for future analyses, making a previously difficult task fast and convenient. Congressbr downloads data on legislators, submitted and ratified law proposals, Senate and Chamber commissions, and other information of interest to social scientists across various fields. We outline the main features of the package and demonstrate its use with practical examples.

Years before Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced a “thaw” in US-Cuba relations on December 17, 2014 (17D), Cubans were intensifying ties through the transnational circulation of popular culture. To understand Cuba and its diaspora in the twenty-first century, it is essential that we attend to the transnational networks in place before 17D that continue to shape quotidian life for people on and off the island. I begin in Miami, with the “afterlives” of a comic variety show called Sabadazo—popular on the island during the 1990s—to illustrate how what it means to be Cuban, politically and culturally, has shifted away from the exile generation that arrived in the 1960s and 1970s. I complement this analysis with attention to generational tensions within the diaspora and representations of race and sexuality. I then move to the island to examine el paquete (the package), a terabyte’s worth of mostly foreign media updated and distributed across the island weekly. I contend that the economic and cultural impact of el paquete cannot be fully understood without careful consideration of the role of the Cuban diaspora.

Conspiracy theories are central to political discourse in Venezuela and are widely supported. In the Americas Barometer Venezuela survey from 2016 to 2017, 54 percent of respondents expressed agreement for at least one of three political conspiracy narratives unsupported by evidence. Political loyalties to Chavismo or to the anti-Chavista opposition drive much conspiracy theory belief, but not all. Politically motivated reasoning pushes some citizens toward a given conspiracy narrative but others away. Other factors that are distinct from political loyalties, including low education levels, predispositions toward Manichaeanism and fatalism, and belief in the supernatural are associated with conspiracism. This article presents new data on conspiracy theory beliefs in Venezuela as well as analysis of its individual-level correlates, then discusses how the current Venezuelan political environment fosters conspiracy and what changes might mitigate this phenomenon.