At a time when Cuban immigrants are seeking political asylum at historically unprecedented rates, most press and scholarly accounts consistently mirror earlier portrayals of Cubans’ mass exodus from the island in one key aspect: they ascribe to refugees a primarily economic reason for their decision to leave and offer little discussion of political factors. To illuminate the need for such analysis, this article examines the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, when approximately 125,000 Cubans, most of them thirty years old or younger, left Cuba. No other exodus of Cubans was more demonized than the Mariel, both by Cuba’s supporters and leadership and by exile opponents of the communist state. Exploring how the intensification of ideological criteria for inclusion in the Cuban Revolution undermined the quality of Cubans’ liberation under socialism prior to Mariel, this article explores state policies and the deep politicization of everyday life and identity. Key political factors explain many young people’s alienation and the degree to which the Cuban state sanctioned and directed extreme measures of repression to discredit those who wanted to leave as lazy, sexually degenerate escoria (human trash).

Why do some voters believe that there is electoral fraud when this belief contradicts the best available evidence? While the literature on public opinion has explored misperceptions’ pervasiveness and the factors that contribute to them in advanced industrial democracies, the present study analyzes motivated reasoning among voters in a young democracy, Mexico. This study highlights the important role that partisanship plays in voters’ likelihood to believe the allegations of electoral fraud in the 2006 presidential election in Mexico, which continues polarizing both political elites and the electorate even today. To understand the mechanisms at work, this research finds that it is not voters lacking information but rather voters with high levels of affective polarization and conspiratorial thinking who are more likely to believe that there was electoral fraud. The study also includes a survey experiment that fact-checked the belief in the alleged electoral fraud. Consistent with motivated reasoning theory, MORENA partisans resisted efforts to reduce their misperception. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the conditions that make some voters hold misperceptions in young democracies.

Almost a century ago, long before biodiversity expressed a scientific value for nature, Latin American countries began establishing national parks. Today, they represent over 6 percent of Latin America’s landmass. By considering national park creation across a broad regional span and six crucial decades, this article explains a mode of state formation focused on caring for nature instead of just exploiting it. It examines how national parks expanded in the region by identifying three consequent trajectories: the use of these conservation units for frontier development in Argentina and as part of a broader project seeking social justice in Mexico; the formation of more haphazard park initiatives in various countries, taking Brazil and Chile as main examples; and the development of ecologically coherent park systems through the cases of Peru and Colombia. The article also addresses the role of science (especially forestry) and international cooperation in shaping national parks. In this manner, it uncovers the paths that faded from view after the idea that parks intend to protect biodiversity took hold and illustrates a rarely acknowledged aspect of state expansion.

This essay reviews the following works:

Community of Peace: Performing Geographies of Ecological Dignity in Colombia. By Christopher Courtheyn. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2022. Pp. xx + 284. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822947141.

Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism, and Resistance in Broad Perspective. Edited by Steve Ellner. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Pp. ix + 292. $41.00 paperback, $94.00 hardcover, $39.00 eBook. ISBN: 9781538141564.

Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. By Héctor Hoyos. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii + 302. $30.00 paperback, $90.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780231193054.

Planetary Longings. By Mary Louise Pratt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. viii + 340. $28.95 paperback, $104.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781478018292.

Life without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay. By Daniel Renfrew. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. xv + 308. $29.95 paperback, $85.00 hardcover, $29.95 e-book. ISBN: 9780520295476.

Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics. By Charlotte Rogers. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xv + 340. $39.50 paperback, $79.50 cloth. ISBN 9780813942667.

The Small Matter of Suing Chevron. By Suzana Sawyer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. xv + 400. $29.95 paperback, $109.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781478017950.

Breaking Ground: From Extraction Booms to Mining Bans in Latin America. By Rose J. Spalding. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xvii + 308. $83.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780197643150.

The Three Deaths of Cerro San Pedro: Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town. By Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xiii + 307. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469671109.

This article examines the activities of Comunidades Cristianas Populares (Popular Christian Communities, CCPs) in marginalised neighbourhoods of Chile's capital, Santiago, during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. It traces how the CCPs emerged, thrived and then stopped, to showcase the uneasy co-existence between liberationist practices espoused by popular sectors and traditional ecclesiastical paradigms until their breaking point in 1990. In doing so, I argue that religious ritual is an important form of social protest against authoritarianism. Public processions exposed tensions between the Church and state, within the Church's diverse constituents, as well as between Christian community members and left-wing party militants. In the late 1980s, as the Church increasingly retreated from liberation theology, the dictatorship successfully co-opted social organisations and rendered religious rituals largely ineffective as a form of social protest.

In 2019, thousands of women took to the streets in Mexico City to protest gender-based violence. The demonstrations were characterised by the defacement of iconic monuments, which was widely condemned. But the protests also ignited widespread political mobilisation, including by a group of women restorers who, despite being designated to clean the monuments, refused to perform their work and publicly defended the protesters. By withholding their labour and their ostensible duty to the state and to the nation, the restorers’ actions helped to transform narratives around feminism, protest and the meaning of national heritage. Based on a case study of this previously depoliticised group of art restorers who went on to become one of the most important faces of Mexico's feminist movement, this article argues that political mobilisation can be rooted in and directly linked to people's labour and professional expertise.