The article examines how La Pata de Cabra (The Goat's Hoof ), an over-the-top fantastical Spanish comedia de magia (magic play), came to figure centrally in serious debates about Mexican politics and society between 1845 and 1857. The article explores the play's popularity and its resonance in the press – it spawned at least half a dozen satirical newspapers – to argue that satire became a critical political language and form of expression that broadened and sustained debates in an era marked by volatile and often heavily restricted press freedoms. The article's focus on the La Pata phenomenon brings two fields of study, theatre and the press, into productive and necessary conversation.

This article uncovers the myriad ways Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo destabilised Venezuelan politics between 1945 and 1948, the period known as the Trienio Adeco. In contrast to works focused on Trujillo's personal animosity towards Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt, this article argues that Trujillo sought to sabotage Venezuela's governments under Acción Democrática as part of his regional foreign policy targeting bastions of Dominican exiles, anti-Trujillo critics and democratic institutions. Trujillo financed an informal network of Venezuelan conspirators who produced propaganda and launched plots undermining the Adeco governments. With the 1948 military coup, Trujillo derailed democracy and gained a reliable ally in Latin America as those he had long backed entered influential posts and remained beholden to their former benefactor.

This article presents a social history of the Coalición de los Pueblos Mixtecos Oaxaqueños (Coalition of Mixtec Oaxacan Communities, CPMO), a grouping of mutual-aid associations formed by Indigenous migrants in Mexico City during the middle of the twentieth century. It draws on the coalition's archives to demonstrate how years of migration to Mexico City eroded traditional inter-village conflicts and created the conditions for a broader ethnic identity among Mixtec migrants in the capital. In addition, the coalition's collaboration with the federal government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenous Institute, INI) challenges common depictions of Indigeneity and modernisation as being inherently antagonistic with one another. The coalition's collaboration with the INI led its members to more consciously and visibly identify with their Indigenous roots; they had to become more Indigenous in order to become more modern.

On 24 March 1976 a military junta deposed President María Estela Martínez de Perón and assumed power in Argentina. From the first days of the takeover, the authorities worked vigorously to restore what they defined as legitimate Argentine values. This article shows how the family became a focal point of the government's efforts because of its double function as an agent of and a target for renovation. A microcosm of the Argentine nation, the family was considered the basic building block of society, a guarantor of the civic well-being of the nation and, as such, an important ally of the authoritarian state in the fight to restore Argentina's ‘traditional’ values. The analysis focuses on the civic-military regime's efforts to fashion a family canon, which would become the only legitimate version of the Argentine family, and the broad repertoire of strategies used to impose it on the Argentine population.

In May 2010, Julián Miranda, an Indigenous Asháninka shaman, died hours after killing a jaguar-shaman. Despite knowing that it could kill him, he killed a jaguar-shaman to protect his cows, an investment to support the much-desired progreso (‘progress’) of his children and grandchildren through education. Julián's choice was one of personal sacrifice driven by the hardships he experienced in the degraded forests of the Bajo Urubamba valley in the Peruvian Amazon. My examination of his decision to kill the jaguar-shaman engages with the multi-disciplinary literature on how local peoples engage with the expanding extractive frontier in Latin America. The emphasis most literature places on social movements and – to a lesser extent – on the ontological characteristics of these conflicts needs to be counterbalanced by individual experiences like Julián's for a deeper understanding of the multiple local experiences of large-scale resource extraction and the different strategies through which people pursue their desired futures.

On 20 November 2016, residents of Gran Chaco Province in south-east Bolivia voted by popular referendum to approve a statute that established Gran Chaco as Bolivia's first autonomous region. This article examines regional autonomy in the Chaco as an example of how identities, territory and political power are being remapped at the intersection of an extractivist development model and competing visions of a plurinational state. I chart how regional autonomy, an elite-led project centred on demands for a fixed share of departmental gas royalties, has been institutionalised under the framework of plurinationalism and used to bolster central state power in this gas-rich region. The article considers the historical evolution of this regionalist project, its intersection with broader processes of state formation under the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS) government and its implications for the Chaco's Indigenous peoples, who have achieved significant representation within the regional assembly while seeing their own visions of territorial autonomy sidelined by an extractivist development agenda.