Natural-resource-based export-oriented growth strategies have resurfaced as the dominant development approach in Latin America. While a growing literature exists on the economic, equity, gender, and environmental impacts of this development strategy, insufficient attention has been paid to its significance for labor. This article seeks to help fill this gap by analyzing its effects on Chilean workers. Based on a study of the fruit, forestry, and fishing sectors, my work shows that this type of development strategy can be very labor-absorbing and can offer significant benefits for labor when it leads to “agro-industrialization.” Nonetheless, although working conditions clearly improved after the late 1980s, it is likely that the first decade of the twenty-first century will not be a repeat of the 1990s. The hypercompetition that now characterizes these sectors is putting tremendous pressure on firms to reduce costs, including that of labor. Stripped of basic state protections and left with little social power, Chilean workers are much more vulnerable than they were before.

This issue marks the start of LARR's thirty-sixth year of publication, the twentieth year of LARR's tenure at the University of New Mexico, and the beginning of the process of moving the journal to a new host institution, yet to be determined. The history of LARR is in some ways the history of Latin American studies as an interdisciplinary field. Before LARR, research on Latin America was essentially a disciplinary endeavor, carried out primarily by historians, political scientists, and faculty in literature. LARR's establishment represented a declaration that the complex realities of Latin America and the Caribbean required the interaction of information and perspectives from many fields. It also reflected a leap of faith in the untested notion that those conducting disciplinary research on Latin America would be interested in research from other fields.

In this article, we evaluate whether Latin American participation in international arenas reinforces traditional divides between state and society in global politics or transforms state-society relations in ways compatible with the concept of global civil society. We examine the participation and interaction of Latin American nongovernmental organizations and states at three recent United Nations conferences: the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women. We conclude that Latin Americans are full participants in any emerging global civil society. Their experiences at the 1990s issue conferences closely track those of NGOs of the Northern Hemisphere, notwithstanding the much more recent appearance of NGOs in Latin America. At the same time, Latin Americans bring a regional sensibility to their participation in global processes that reflects recent political developments and debates in the region.

This essay examines the ambivalent interaction between liberation theology and notions of ‘respect’ among Quichua speakers in highland Ecuador. It focuses on three ways that notions of respect rooted in local history inform and transform current Catholic practice and ethnic politics. First, indigenous Catholic activists and mestizo priests appeal to respect for elders to argue for ethnic and religious loyalty. Second, the memory of hacienda-era discipline partly underpins current models of community authority and “indigenous law.” Finally, many villagers bring expectations shaped by hacienda prayer meetings to the Bible reflection that liberation theology promotes. This complex interaction contributes to local redefinitions of modernity.

This article reviews recent neoliberal agrarian legislation in Latin America in terms of the advances and setbacks for women's and indigenous movements. Institutional reform of the agricultural sector has been heterogenous in part because of the role of these movements. In the twelve countries studied, the new legislation favors gender equity except in Mexico. The indigenous movement scored notable successes in Ecuador and Bolivia but suffered apparent setbacks in Mexico and Peru in the defense of collective land rights. The article also explores why the slightest progress toward gender equality was made in some of the countries with large indigenous populations and strong indigenous movements.

One of the central issues in Latin American political history is the role played by oligarchies. In the case of Brazil, students of oligarchy have focused on elite family networks and coronelismo, the often violent manifestation of oligarchic politics at the local level. Drawing on the substantial body of literature on the family in Latin America, this essay proposes an interpretation of oligarchical politics in which changing family structures interacted in new political and economic contexts to produce distinctive types of oligarchy in a sequential rather than synchronic or functional manner. The dominance of traditional elite families on the Brazilian frontier was challenged during periods of social and economic change, resulting in the rise of transitional and new oligarchies with substantially different socioeconomic origins, career paths, and family structures.

This article reviews the environmental history of the Amazon basin from early prehistory to the 1850s, concluding at the start of the rubber boom. It argues that the Amazon's past can be understood in terms of a transition from wilderness to landscape, in a broadly similar way to the environmental history of Europe and North America. A detailed overview of the archaeological record suggests that both floodplain and upland environments were heavily influenced by human intervention during prehistory. The colonial and early republican periods also saw dramatic environmental changes. Interpretations of the Amazon that stress environmental constraints on human agency or portray it as largely virginal or unsettled prior to the modern period are at best an oversimplification.

Most studies of civil society in Latin America have focused on urban social and political actors. In the Ecuadorian Andes, however, civil society has crystallized around the institutions of indigenous rural community that developed historically in opposition to white-meztizo urban administrative centers. This article explores the evolution of indigenous communal institutions in relation to local government and national politics by focusing on the canton of Otavalo in northern Ecuador. It is argued here that over the past thirty years, Andean communities in Ecuador have played an important role in the national processes of democratization and decentralization.

This article draws attention to archival research by Brazilian historians in Portugal and Brazil and the fruits of these labors in monographs, dissertations, and articles. Following a survey of historical writing in the colonial period, this essay discusses the growing movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to preserve documents in libraries, archives, and museums in Brazil. The existence of such institutions spurred divulgation of manuscript collections through journals and published transcriptions of documents. The essay then traces Brazilian historiography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as Brazilian responses to new trends in historical writing in the 1960s. A survey of archives consulted by scholars of colonial Brazil provides the background for the main section, which uses case studies to demonstrate how Brazilian historians have used these depositories. Scholarship published between 1983 and 1999 is emphasized. The intensive use of manuscript collections and the high quality of publications testify to the vitality of studies by Brazilian scholars of colonial Brazil.

This study evaluates the role played by the legislature in one of Argentina's most important economic reforms of recent decades: the reform of tax incentives for regional development. As implemented by the last military government, this sytem of tax incentives provoked sharp distributive conflicts among provinces. Although a majority of legislators favored reform after the return to democracy in 1983, interprovincial conflicts created bargaining problems that prevented the passage of reform legislation through regular channels. Pro-reform legislators decided instead to delegate reform authority to President Raúl Alfonsín because he shared their interest in containing the fiscal cost of tax incentives. Subsequent uses of this delegated authority by two presidents promoted the interests of the enacting coalition that supported delegation. These findings support the usefulness of delegation models when carefully applied to Latin America and challenge theories that neglect the different ways that legislators shape economic reform.

The population census of 1725–1740 was one of the few general censuses to occur in Peru during the colonial period. The census left a mass of detailed demographic data recording a unique moment when the population of the viceroyalty stood at its lowest historical level. It was the centerpiece of a major body of viceregal reform that affected levels of Indian tribute and the mita labor draft and permanently changed the base population subject to both levies, incorporating a large new sector previously partially or wholly exempt. It strongly influenced Peru's Indian and mestizo peoples throughout its execution and provoked the first major wave of popular unrest under the Bourbons. Yet despite the significance of the census, it remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed introduction to the census as a major administrative reform and a source for demographic and other history.

This research note examines continuities and changes in the profile of Mexican migration to the United States using data from Mexico's Encuesta Nacional de la Dinámica Demográfica, the U.S. Census, and the Mexican Migration Project. Our analysis generally yields a picture of stability over time. Mexico-U.S. migration continues to be dominated by the states of Western Mexico, particularly Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán, and it remains a movement principally of males of labor-force age. As Mexico has urbanized, however, out-migration has come to embrace urban as well as rural workers; and as migrant networks have expanded, the flow has become less selective with respect to education. Perhaps the most important change detected was an acceleration in the rate of return migration during the early 1990s, reflecting the massive legalization of the late 1980s.

Using recent data from southern California and Mexico, we challenge the notion that the demographic profile of Mexican migrants to the United States since 1970 has remained constant. We find that more recent cohorts of migrants are more likely to settle permanently in the United States, to have higher proportions of females, to be younger, to have more education, to be increasingly likely to originate in southern Mexico and the Mexico City metropolitan area, and to be increasingly likely to depart from urban areas within Mexico. Although we find no direct evidence that the legalization programs mandated by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 has led to a stronger propensity to settle permanently in the United States, logistic regression analyses demonstrate the importance of the other three main explanatory factors suggested by Wayne Cornelius in 1992: economic crisis in Mexico, the changing character of U.S. demand for labor, and social networks.

The literature on the cycle of studies on Brazilian race relations written in the 1950s, supported by UNESCO, has considered it a milestone that offered solid findings about the variety of such relations and the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination in Brazilian society. Some evaluations of these studies have asserted that the results of the UNESCO Project frustrated expectations that Brazil could be used as a positive example for race relations and an instrument in the struggle against racism in the period following the Holocaust. This research note takes a different stand in arguing that from the early stages of the organization of the project, Brazilian, French, and U.S. social scientists favored broadening the geographical scope under investigation because they were aware of several patterns of race relations and racial prejudice in Brazil. Originally, a limited and idealized regional focus was to center on the state of Bahia, but soon the scope of investigation became almost national in including Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Pernambuco.

This research note assesses how surnames in a Bolivian Quechua-speaking peasant community were transmitted and distributed from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth to show that parish register data can allow anthropologists to uncover the impact and significance of larger political, economic, and historical processes at the local level. I argue that patterns of surname transmission underwent a momentous shift between the early 1800s and the mid-1900s, from high percentages of illegitimate infants carrying their fathers' surname to virtually none doing so, an upshot of sweeping changes in sociocultural practices spawned by the revolution and agrarian reform in 1952 and 1953. This transformation in the allocation of patronyms to baptized infants reflected a new importance attached by both peasants and church officials to legitimate birth status and its coupling with genealogical reckoning via surname transmission. Such a coupling was important for peasants in order to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity in the midst of shifting and uncertain contexts structuring access to land and resources. It was also important for parish church officials, who probably thought it necessary to adhere more closely to national legal codes in a revolutionary setting.

Over the past three decades, tourism has become integral to the Mexican economy. Mexico easily leads Latin America in tourism exports, the provision of tourist-related services to foreigners visiting the country. Today tourism also serves as the second-largest employer in Mexico and ranks consistently among the top three earners of foreign exchange. This study traces the origin of Mexico's tourism boom by examining state policies and private-sector activity during the last thirty years. It also presents data on distributional patterns associated with tourism in an effort to evaluate Mexico's tourism record within the larger context of development.

This study addresses the provincial origins and role of the reactionary party that legislated the reconstruction of the Brazilian monarchy, perhaps Latin America's most stable nineteenth-century political regime. The study locates the party in terms of regional power, taking into account social, economic, and political factors. It analyzes the party's ideology in the historical context of the Regency (1831–1840) and its immediate aftermath, an era of destabilization, social war, and secessionism. The study also demonstrates how the party mobilized partisan support nationally to consolidate party and state power, the unexpected impact of patronage, and the increasingly autonomous quality of state power over time.

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a relação entre os agentes estatais e umafração da classe economicamente dominante da economia cafeeira paulista—o “capital cafeeiro”—durante a Primeira República brasileira (1889–1930). Para tanto, escolhi como objeto de análise a política tributária promovida pelo governo do estado de São Paulo durante o período. A minha intencão é mostrar que os agentes estatais ao promoverem uma política tributária essencialmente calcada no imposto de exportação serviram-se de parte significativa do excedente pro-duzido pelo capital cafeeiro para financiar as atividades ordinárias do aparelho estatal paulista (educação, polícia, saúde, judiciário), o que muito desagradou aos membros daquela fração de classe. Estes reagiram à política oficial tanto pela via corporativa como pela via política, sem, contudo, conseguir revertê-la. Por fim, afirmamos que os conflitos políticos oriundos desse embate foram importantes para a configuração da cena política do final da Primeira República.