The Bolivar Archaeological Project exemplifies the possibilities of archaeology as service, incorporating descendant communities and local stakeholders into the fabric of the research design and planning for a state infrastructure project. This collaborative, multidisciplinary project attends to marginalized histories to offer a model for how publicly funded cultural resources management archaeology can serve multiple goals. The Bolivar Archaeological Project was conceived as a public archaeology project, with dual goals of being community driven and yielding scholarly contributions. In the shifting rural–urban landscape of Denton County, a Texas Department of Transportation road improvement project has supported archaeological investigations of two nineteenth-century sites—a blacksmith shop and hotel—associated with the historic Chisholm Trail. The blacksmith shop belonged to Tom Cook, an African American freedman, whose descendants reside nearby and became active participants in the investigations, including as collaborative authors in this article. The project illustrates the importance of representation and praxis to realize inclusive community engagement, with this article outlining the development of the project and ongoing research. Informed by Black feminist archaeologies, the project works at the intersections of local communities and state infrastructure while navigating landscapes of fraught histories and presents to forge an archaeology for the twenty-first century.

La mayor parte de las mujeres traficadas para el comercio sexual por la frontera suroeste de Estados Unidos proceden de México y Centroamérica. Esta investigación, fundamentada en una metodología cualitativa, que incluye entrevistas en profundidad con cincuenta y dos traficantes de mujeres y ochenta y seis dueños de negocios de prostitución en México, analiza los vínculos entre los diferentes actores involucrados en el tráfico de mujeres de México y Centroamérica para el comercio sexual en Estados Unidos. Concluimos que estos actores ocupan lugares estratégicos dentro de una cadena de mando que tiene el propósito de proporcionar a los patrones estadounidenses una remesa ininterrumpida de mujeres. Los traficantes reclutan y transportan mujeres, mientras que los dueños de centros nocturnos de Estados Unidos se benefician de la explotación de la prostitución. Asimismo, esta actividad depende de la participación de madrotas y padrotes mexicanos, que reclutan y dan cobijo a mujeres en tránsito al norte.

The objective of this paper, based on interviews with 95 human smugglers (coyotes) involved in agriculture and 51 in prostitution, is to provide a comparative analysis of the networks transporting (mostly) male migrants intending to work in US agriculture and those recruiting women/girls for the US sex industry. Networks carrying females for sex work are bigger and use more fraudulent recruitment strategies. However, migrant smuggling for agriculture is not totally different from sex trafficking; similarities between the types of networks analysed dwarf their differences. Smugglers frequently use some form of deception to convince their would-be clients/victims to undertake risky journeys. I conclude that both networks are demand-driven. Smugglers serve the interests of US agribusinesses and sex business owners rather than those of the males and females they recruit.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arsenic was used as an embalming agent in the United States. In 1996, Konefes and McGee brought the potential danger of arsenic poisoning during excavation to the attention of archaeologists. They developed methodology that was later refined by the present authors. This article discusses the history of arsenic as an embalming agent, explores socioeconomic and demographic factors that might suggest the presence of arsenic in certain burials, and presents methods for testing arsenic in archaeological contexts. We also discuss environmental impact mitigation considerations and review examples of arsenic testing in archaeological contexts.

Scholars have paid considerable attention to the connection between Washington's withdrawal from intervention and the emergence of dictatorship in Central America during the 1930s. The current article seeks to enhance our understanding of those interconnected developments through the investigation of the US Foreign Service and its role in the early 1930s presidential campaigns in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It shows that the dynamic interaction between actors in both Washington and Central America set in motion a process that would produce decades of authoritarian rule in the isthmus.

This article examines transnational connections among anti-communist women in Brazil, Chile and the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. It explores the political beliefs and networks upon which these women drew and built in order to promote their role in the overthrow of João Goulart and Salvador Allende and to encourage other women across the Americas to join them in the fight against communism. This paper shows that these women reversed the flow of ideas, served as models for each other and for anti-communist women, and built gendered transnational networks of female anti-communist activists.

This article analyses the bilateral economic negotiations between Washington and Havana during the era of the Cuban PRCA (Auténtico) governments led by Ramón Grau San Martín and Carlos Prío Socarrás (1944–52). This work shows that, initially, the PRCA governments took advantage of the economic bargaining capacity that Cuba had developed with Washington during the Good Neighbor era, but after 1947 this declined as the Truman administration's Cold War foreign policy agenda assigned only a marginal position to Latin America and Cuba. Havana's inability to obtain further economic support from the United States had a powerful destabilising effect, complicating Cuba's economic governance and delegitimising the PRCA politically. The study of this episode enhances our comprehension of a period largely overlooked by the historiography on Cuba and our understanding of the demise of the Auténtico project, the last attempt to transform Cuba's social structures in a progressive and democratic manner.

This article studies the growth and decline of Argentine exports of manufactured goods during the 1940s and 1950s. In a context that was favourable due to the global scarcity of manufactured goods, Argentine industry managed to sell its products in several foreign markets, especially in Latin America, during the Second World War. In the post-war period, however, exports declined and returned to the levels of the 1930s. After 1950 the Peronist administration again tried to stimulate exports through the use of various incentives, but they did not revive. The article examines the reasons for this decline, the role played by the economic, commercial and industrial policies of the Peronist era, and the problems that Argentine industry faced in remaining competitive. Based on this analysis, the paper questions the interpretation that argues that exporting manufactured goods was a viable path for development for import substitution industrialisation countries in the post-war world. In this respect the paper contributes to the discussion of different paths towards economic development in Latin America.

This paper focuses on the analysis of weak states in the international trading system during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic crises, especially on Portugal's trade relations with the United States. We argue that the previous studies of the trade flows during these conflicts have not paid enough attention on smaller actors. Even though the Peninsular War caused severe disruption of agricultural production in Portugal, the United States, despite its strained relations with an ally of Portugal, Great Britain, became a key supplier for the Portuguese market. Clearly, the threatened position of the peninsula, and the need to supply the troops, awarded the Portuguese some room to manoeuvre in the international markets. Total war was not a constraint for all states — economic necessities trumped political and diplomatic concerns during the era of the first real-world wars. This situation was a temporary one, only to change after the conflict.

The differing perspectives and actions of US government, business and labour towards the Guatemalan government and Guatemalan trade unionists themselves in the half-decade or so following the overthrow of the Arbenz administration in 1954 are the focus of this study. Few areas were more important to the US project for Guatemala following the Castillo Armas invasion than helping the Guatemalans to create a ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ labour movement – and few areas would prove more frustrating. Part of the problem was the intransigent stance of Guatemalan elites. An additional challenge was strong opposition from the major US-based companies operating in Guatemala, most notably the United Fruit Company and its affiliates. This work contests interpretations that regard US policy towards countries like Guatemala at the time as simply beholden to business interests or as seeking domination. Rather, as Washington's interest in the transition diminished, officials in the US embassy and representatives of US labour in Guatemala were left isolated, unable to fulfil their vision for a democratic labour movement in the teeth of such opposition.

This essay, part history of ideas and part history of international relations, examines Brazil's relationship with Latin America in historical perspective. For more than a century after independence, neither Spanish American intellectuals nor Spanish American governments considered Brazil part of ‘América Latina’. For their part, Brazilian intellectuals and Brazilian governments only had eyes for Europe and increasingly, after 1889, the United States, except for a strong interest in the Río de la Plata. When, especially during the Cold War, the United States, and by extension the rest of the world, began to regard and treat Brazil as part of ‘Latin America’, Brazilian governments and Brazilian intellectuals, apart from some on the Left, still did not think of Brazil as an integral part of the region. Since the end of the Cold War, however, Brazil has for the first time pursued a policy of engagement with its neighbours – in South America.

This paper studies the links between the evolution of Spain's balance of payments and Spanish-American economic diplomacy along 1917 and 1918. The development of these relations may be useful to explain a great deal about the downturn in Spanish foreign commerce during the last year of WWI. After their entrance into the conflict, the United States toughened their commercial policies and made the Spaniards work hard to keep both their international trade and the freedom of their merchant marine. Contacts between the two countries dealt also with the repatriation of Spain's foreign debt and the use of its extraordinary profits to make loans to the Allied nations. The negotiations ended up in March and August, 1918 with the signing of two bilateral agreements, whose consequences can be followed using the monthly figures of trade between America and the Iberian Peninsula.

This article examines some effects of the political and military alliance between Spain and the United States on the Spanish business community in the 1950s and 1960s. The technical aid is taken to be the set of official programs and private contracts and investments that helped disseminate in Spain the techniques and ideas associated with the American model. The articulation process of the economic interests of the United States in Spain is quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. Our research reveals that technical aid and the pro-American circles formed around it, which were partially based on existing business relations, were essential to such process. The Spanish case shows therefore, first, that US foreign economic policy favoured, even if only indirectly, American business during the Cold War. Second, this work provides material and ideas to analyse the Spanish «miracle» as a rather exogenous growth process.