La conformación de uniones mixtas entre personas inmigrantes y nativas se ha considerado un elemento central en el proceso de integración social, sobre todo cuando intervienen atributos como la nacionalidad y la identidad étnica. Aunque este tema ha sido ampliamente investigado en otros contextos, ha recibido menos atención en México. Este artículo busca analizar las dimensiones relacionadas con el proyecto migratorio, los discursos sobre la diferencia en México y el efecto del mestizaje sobre la formación de uniones y dinámicas de socialización de las personas. A partir de un acercamiento cualitativo que comprende el análisis de treinta y dos relatos de vida de inmigrantes latinoamericanos residentes en México, se encontró que este tipo de arreglos sociales no se traducen de manera directa en el debilitamiento de fronteras sociales, sino que pueden constituirse, en algunos casos, en elementos de reforzamiento de las barreras que dificultan la integración en distintas esferas de reproducción social.

For the past several years, affirmative action policies and their implementation have constituted a field of debate and academic research, in dialog with social movements and public policies carried out by various Latin American and Caribbean states, to mitigate persistent historical inequalities related to discrimination and racism. This article presents the results of the implementation of affirmative action policies for Afro-descendants in Uruguay in the workplace between 2014 and 2019, the first five years of implementation of Law No.19122 (which establishes a period of fifteen years in total for its validity). These results were obtained through interviews with key informants and through documentary analysis of the annual reports of the National Civil Service Office for the period under consideration.

This article maps the contentious forms of political life that emerge when multicultural rights and non-formal gold extraction coincide. Specifically, it shows how, in the Colombian department of Chocó, Afro-descendant community councils have produced a unique form of mining governance that, while depending for its legitimacy on everyday uses of Afro-Colombian legislation, consists of the organisation, taxation and policing of mining activities that are in tension with official notions of extractive and multicultural law. In exploring such ‘underground’ cultural politics, the article highlights the limits of state-centric analyses of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ and, accordingly, underscores the instrumental role that governed subjects play in the on-the-ground unfolding of multicultural governance regimes.

This article examines the different meanings that rights to land and culture hold in San Basilio de Palenque, an Afro-Colombian community whose “cultural space” was declared by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to be intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2005. I investigate how the language of rights—both communal and individual—operates simultaneously at various registers and is strategically put to work in distinct political spheres. Drawing from ethnographic field research conducted between 2009 and 2013, I argue that while communal rights are invoked to garner recognition from state and transnational organizations like UNESCO, individual rights, conceived as exclusive prerogatives, serve to mark hierarchical distinctions between community members. I examine the paradoxical coexistence of two contradictory claims: one of cultural cohesion and another of social hierarchy. I conclude by questioning how a more nuanced examination of rights discourses in Palenque might contribute to understanding the multiple meanings of rights, not simply across time or space but also in relation to their perceived strategic purpose.