In 1912, a small department store called Harrods opened in Buenos Aires, one that by the 1920s expanded to almost a city block. Although named after the founder of the London store, the manager of Harrods London, Richard Burbidge, his son Woodman, and a few board members planned the purchase of land and opened the business, and then presented it to the entire London board. Unfamiliar with Buenos Aires, believing that women consumed more than men, and presuming that upper-class women there had the same consumer desires of those in England, the store opened catering to the upper-class female population and focused on readymade dresses. And, to the great surprise of the local manager, women of all classes did not want these dresses because they preferred to purchase cloth and take it to their dressmakers.

The dilemma facing Harrods Buenos Aires, detailed in company reports in the archive of Harrods London and in scans of Buenos Aires Harrods archives in the possession of British bookseller Jennifer Wilton-Williams, show that sales reports, rather than studies of the Argentine market like those published by the US Department of Commerce, shaped the new department store's response. Until the 1940s, Harrods Buenos Aires focused on the sale of less expensive articles that came from its dining room, its cosmetics department, and infants’ and children's clothing. Furthermore, employees purchased more than 40 percent of the clothing. Originally imagined as the flagship of the upper-class female shopper, it ended up as a store for the middle class, especially women who bought gifts and enjoyed being seen in the dining room. It closed in 1998.

Over the course of the sixteenth century in Mexico (New Spain), alphabetic writing replaced pictography as the chosen form of written expression in indigenous communities. A new social role, that of the native language escribano (notary), emerged, eventually to become a principal cultural broker in the colonial period. Despite the indigenous escribano's importance, his origins and the source of his authority within the native sphere are poorly understood. This article offers a close reading of a corpus of hybrid pictographic-alphabetic documents, written in Nahuatl and created between 1553 and 1572 in the indigenous cabildo (town council) of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Within this important body, escribanos appear early in the documentary record; it was within the established indigenous ecosystem of governance that escribanos first found a niche.

Here, pictography flourished, as did performances unique to the indigenous sphere. The corpus reveals how escribanos worked side by side with indigenous tlahcuilohqueh, or painters, who drew on a long-established tradition of manuscript painting and cartography to create property maps. These maps adhered to established codes, both social and visual. Initially preeminent in itself, the work of the tlahcuilohqueh came to supply meaning and public authority to the work of the escribano in this crucial formative period.

The jíbaro—the emblematic figure of Puerto Rico—has long been at the center of the archipelago's political and professional discussions. Building on the work of scholars who have traced the jíbaro's history, this article complicates the tension between the politically nationalistic definition of humble jíbaros working in the countryside and scientific observations of jíbaros within the confines of the criminal-legal system. By the mid twentieth century, mainstream understandings of jíbaros were increasingly fashioned by psychiatry, social science, and social work, all of which connected jíbaros to other rural identities. These projections of the jíbaro powerfully materialized in Puerto Rico's premier biosocial laboratory, the Insular Penitentiary at Río Piedras (popularly known as Oso Blanco). An analysis of the work of penitentiary psychiatrists and social health professionals with prison inmates reveals a more complex, troubling image of redeemable Puerto Rican men with rural roots and sensibilities than the idyllic representations of jíbaros circulating at the time suggest. Oso Blanco health practitioners pathologized the jíbaro to identify and mend his perceived psychosocial shortcomings, and to diminish any defiance he harbored. In so doing, they reinforced the notion that jíbaros were racialized living artifacts central to colonial-populist designs and constituency-building.

This article analyzes a 1969 education reform in Mexico that resulted in the closure of 14 of the then 29 escuelas normales rurales (rural teacher-training colleges) and the annihilation of their internal student organizing structures. I argue that the reform was politically motivated and impelled by the anxieties produced by student politics in the Cold War era. I show also how the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) participated in the authoritarian surveillance of students during the presidency of Díaz Ordaz and in a long campaign to delegitimize the Federación de Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas de México (FECSM), the federation that united the students from these schools.