The varying colors that distinguish each year's issues of LARR from the preceding year's numbers are a practice inherited from the early years of the journal, as well as a rough guide to the contents (“that article was in one of the yellow issues”) and a source of visual pleasure. The editors were once told by a subscriber that one of her colleagues, on seeing a deep lavender LARR, observed, “Any journal that color must be worth reading!”

This article revisits debates concerning poverty, inequality, and development in Latin America and explores a possible “high road” to globalization capable of achieving both more rapid economic growth and significant and lasting reductions in poverty and inequality. In reconnoitering the contours of this path, the authors probe a partial convergence in theory, concepts, and policies that may offer new opportunities for bridging the yawning chasms that heretofore have divided multilateral financial organizations, local governing elites, and academics as well as Center-Left political parties, organized labor, social movements, and NGOs. The article concludes with an assessment of the capacity of this emerging political agenda and attendant “polycentric development coalitions” to deepen and extend democracy effectively beyond the electoral arena to include basic issues of justice and equity.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a shantytown in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, this article studies the workings of Peronist “political clientelism” among the urban poor. It analyzes the web of relations that some slum-dwellers establish with local political brokers to obtain medicine, food, and solutions to other everyday concerns. The article also explores the main functions of the “problem-solving networks,” which are resource control and information hoarding, and pays particular attention to an underexplored dimension of the operation of clientelism: clients' own views on the network.

This article examines one formative moment in the making of a working class in Brazil to show how workers refashioned multiple identities in response to interlocking structural transformations from artisanal to factory production, from homogeneous to heterogeneous ethnic communities, and from a male labor force to one that was increasingly female. Anarchist labor organizers contested the myth of the happy artisan and conflated the exploitation of artisans and factory workers to advance class consciousness. Ethnic ties that had initially fostered organization began to hamper class solidarity, now strained under new ideological conflicts, and facilitated effective resistance from employers. As appeals to ethnicity became problematic, appeals to gender emerged: women workers made themselves visible and audible and played an important role in the evolution of the movement. The ways in which they were seen and heard in the streets, however, contrasted with their representations in elite discourse, which sought to use gender to manipulate divisions within the emerging working class.

This article focuses on environmental protection issue networks (EPINs), defined here as networks among domestic and international environmentally concerned actors that seek to protect local environments. EPINs may be important agents in efforts to promote environmentally sustainable development in Latin America, but their effectiveness has varied considerably. The article presents a model for assessing the effectiveness of EPINs based on their strategic capacity, the environmental visibility of the issues with which they deal, and the nature of their opposition targets. The model was inspired by hypotheses generated in comparing three EPINs established to address environmental and social problems created by development projects financed by the World Bank in Brazilian Amazonia between 1981 and 2000.