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.

By the end of the nineteenth century, railway expansion had led to the formation of a technocratic bureaucracy in Chile and other countries in Latin America. Central to this formation were the engineers who oversaw and regulated both public and private railways. Recently, historians have begun to re-examine engineers’ roles in this period. By employing methods and theoretical framings from the history of technology, this article argues that engineering was an important framework through which state–capital relations evolved, making engineers pivotal actors in the evolution of political economy at the time.

This article analyses efforts by the state of Oaxaca to mark its border from 1856 to 1912. State officials hoped to demarcate a permanent border along the frontier as a way to delineate a peaceful ending to on-going boundary disputes, some of which allegedly dated to pre-Columbian times. The activity of marking Oaxaca's boundary effectively represented a literal process of Mexican state formation. Oaxaca officials attempted to negotiate the state's jurisdictional limits in cooperation with other federations as well as with their own citizens as they located the parameters of the state and the limits of its authority during the era.

In 1868 a cholera epidemic erupted in the north-western Argentine province of Tucumán. Urban-based doctors and politicians argued that fruit cultivated primarily in the south of the province was responsible for the spread of cholera. Hoping to avoid cholera, they advocated the complete prohibition and destruction of fruit in Tucumán as both a prophylactic measure, but also to prepare new land for sugar cultivation. Through a reading of governmental memos, medical journals, and public health reports, this article examines how agriculture, disease, and contagion mediated the interaction between Tucumán's urban minority and rural majority. This article offers a window into grassroots politics and state formation during one of Argentina's most formative periods.

Studies on the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) have tended to emphasise popular support for the Cardenista regime while underestimating the domestic opposition to the president. The story of Enrique Rodríguez (‘El Tallarín’), a former Zapatista militant from the state of Morelos, reveals the breadth and complexity of the opposition to Cárdenas. The rebellion led by Rodríguez from 1934 to 1938 forced Cárdenas to renegotiate the terms of Zapatista loyalty to the federal government in order to secure peace in Morelos and represented a broad critique of the post-revolutionary state's advancement during the 1930s. Rodríguez stood as a defender of agrarian self-reliance, traditional chieftainship and pueblo religious liberty.