In Lima in the seventeenth century, both free and enslaved black women held elected leadership roles in black confraternities (corporate bodies of lay Catholics). These women occupied a public position generally reserved for men; their Spanish and indigenous counterparts did not hold comparable roles. Though their experiences have not been documented in scholarly literature, they were highly visible in their own lifetimes. In ecclesiastical court, they acted as the confraternity's legal agents. In everyday operations, they were primarily responsible for collecting and managing funds. This gave them a large say in how money ought to be spent, whether on festivals, members’ funerals, medical aid, or financial support for imprisoned members. Though black limeños made up a majority of the city's population, other forms of mutual aid were often inaccessible to them. Confraternity leaders in general, and these women in particular, managed one of their community's only officially recognized spaces for civic organization. As the century wore on, men successfully challenged the women's authority in court, and militia officers became more and more central to leadership. Yet even with that curtailment, these positions gave black women in Lima a degree of publicly acknowledged power highly unusual for early modern women.

Scholars often assume that women's exclusion from the modern civil-religious cargo system in Mexico is a colonial legacy. But an analysis of Chiapas's surviving colonial cofradía books, approximately 200 in all, reveals that formalized female religious leadership was widespread in this region during the colonial period. Close to 50 cofradías in over 20 different towns elected female officials. Indigenous cofradías were clearly at the forefront of this practice; however, it also became remarkably popular among ladino, Black, and even Spanish cofradías during the eighteenth century. Not just symbolic figures, female cofradía officers managed finances and cared for the spiritual and physical welfare of fellow members and the community. Their labors often overlapped with the work of town councils to ensure community well-being and survival in the face of extreme economic exploitation, migration, and forced resettlements. These findings challenge the common generalization, based on studies of central Mexico, that women in colonial New Spain were excluded from officeholding and the prestige and authority it provided. By shifting focus beyond central Mexico, this article illustrates the diversity of female experience and the ways in which gender shaped native communities, cross-cultural exchanges, and dynamic adaptations in religious organizational leadership and Church policy.

This article examines popular participation in the making of Brazil's 1988 post-authoritarian “Citizen Constitution.” In 1987, Brazilians submitted 122 popular amendments (emendas populares) supported by over 12 million signatures to the National Constituent Assembly (1987–88). As this article contends, this extraordinary experiment in popular constitution-making problematizes notions of Brazil's transition from authoritarian to democratic rule as the most conservative of those that swept Latin America at the end of the Cold War. The popular amendments emerged amid a nationwide campaign for popular participation that saw millions of Brazilians participate in letter-writing campaigns, protests, and debates over the constitution that carried over into the halls of the Constituent Assembly itself. I argue that the popular amendments countered the arbitrary authoritarianism of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship (1964–85) with a constitutionalism in which everyday Brazilians would safeguard democracy through popular participation in government. While only partially consolidated, this vision offered diverse marginalized groups an opportunity to claim full citizenship in Brazil's nascent democracy, especially in ways that more overtly addressed issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and disability. This article thus shows that far from being the exclusive province of political elites, everyday people meaningfully shaped the constitutional restorations in late twentieth-century Latin America.

This article deals with the politics of Peruvian rural electrification during the Cold War years. In 1964, the inhabitants of the Mantaro Valley established the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro Ltda. 127, with the help of the central government and American aid agencies in the context of the Alliance for Progress. At first, this rural electric cooperative was seen as a legitimate way to channel traditional communal practices through an institution that was seen as modern, capitalist, and Western. However, in the fluid context of Peru's Cold War, electric cooperative development quickly became a heated political battleground. After a “revolutionary” military regime took power in 1968, the armed forces eventually defined the cooperative as an obsolete institution and quickly adopted their own cooperative model, free from any capitalist “vices,” as they sought to implement their own “revolution from above.” While the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro represented a successful combination of local discourse, foreign aid, and modern technology, its history also shines a light on the volatile politics of infrastructural development: as its political and economic meaning changed wildly as different political regimes oversaw its expansion and eventual downfall.