This article explores one of the earliest large-scale uses of biocidal agro-chemicals in Latin America, the United Fruit Company's hand-spraying of its banana plantations to control sigitoka disease from 1938 to 1962. After discussing the environmental context of sigatoka and the early development and implications of the spray technology, the essay focuses on the thousands of workers who applied the chemicals. Using Costa Rica as a case study, it explores workers' sense of the personal costs of their work as well as their ambiguous relationship to the larger banana workers' union movement. Because of differences in ethnicity, age, and masculine status, pesticide workers were not part of the labor movement's militant core, but their participation in strikes gave unions great power for a time. This power, along with workers' individual job actions, forced fundamental changes in the pesticide program, demonstrating the importance of integrating labor into the study of environmental change in agricultural capitalism.

This issue begins the last volume of the twenty years of LARR edited at the University of New Mexico. A new team of editors at the University of Texas at Austin, led by Peter Ward, is already at work selecting and editing the articles and review essays that will appear in next year's Volume 38 (2003). The transition offers an appropriate time to reflect on the broader issues involved in the enterprise of academic publishing of a journal such as LARR.

This study evaluates the impact of state policies on forest cover in Costa Rica, focusing on the influence of public policies on private incentives for preserving forest cover. Three periods are analyzed: the “laissez-faire period” when high rates of deforestation were largely unrestrained; the “interventionist period” when state policies created protection for some wildlands, especially with the creation of parks and reserves, but when many regulatory policies produced mixed results at best; and the current “hybrid period” featuring major policy changes and mixing market-oriented and interventionist approaches but not always in a coherent design. Despite significant successes, current policies appear unlikely to provide sufficient incentive to maintain the desired amount of forest cover unless the international community compensates Costa Ricans for the benefits that their forests provide the world.

Two radical revolutionary governors of Yucatán, Salvador Alvarado (1915–1918) and Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922–1923), as well as many Yucatecan men and especially women considered prohibition as the key to reform, as was the case in many other regions of Mexico. Scholars, however, have long ignored the crucial role of alcohol in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. This article examines the linkages among prohibition, gender, and politics in Yucatán from the revolution to the eve of the Cardenista era. It also considers the role of alcohol as a lubricant in machine politics.

Globalization has exacerbated the impact of three Northern-driven forces on Central American unions. Transnational firms have restructured or enhanced their levels of subcontracting. Governments, while weakening labor-code implemention, have launched extensive privatization schemes. And international supporters of unions have espoused new priorities and rechanneled funding. Although all three trends have caused major difficulties for unions, this article assesses whether or not their traditional spirit of “social-movement unionism” has been undermined. Based on extensive interviews and primary and secondary data, the study documents union resilience in the banana and maquila sectors despite problematic corporate behavior and market conditions. Stung by state privatizations, unions that fragmented following the Central American Peace Accords have partially regrouped to resist public-health takeovers and labor-code harmonization. Facing losses in Northern funding, unions have painfully adapted to fresh organizing strategies and sensitivity to women's issues, which they found to be fundamental to successful collaboration with corporate campaigns, trade pressure, and NGOs. Despite losses, unions have tapped a broader solidarity in their struggle against the demons of globalization.

This article examines relations between the Mexican state and transmigrants through an analysis of migrant- and state-led transnational practices and policies. It addresses discussions of the strength and extent of Mexican state control and hegemony as well as debates in the transnationalism literature on the potential autonomy of transmigrant groups and the role of subnational linkages. The analysis is based on information on transmigrant organizations and Mexican political authorities in Los Angeles and Mexico and focuses on Zacatecas. Mexican transmigrant organizations predate current state initiatives aimed at Mexicans in the United States, but state involvement has been crucial to the institutionalizing of transnational social spaces. The state's hegemonic project involves the largely symbolic reincorporation of paisanos living abroad back into to the nation but depends on provincial and municipal authorities and transmigrant organizations for implementation. Because these vary, the project has been implemented unevenly. The complexity of these processes can be captured only by examining transnational social spaces at a subnational level. The case of Zacatecas shows how a corporatist and semi-clientelist transmigrant organization has managed to gain concessions that broaden opportunities for participation. It remains to be seen whether and how promises of political representation will be fulfilled.

For many who thought of Venezuela as a consolidated democracy, the 1992 coup attempts came as a complete surprise. Those familiar with the deterioration of its democratic regime, in contrast, were more surprised that the coups did not succeed. This article provides an institution-centered explanation of the puzzle of why the 1992 coup attempts occurred, why they failed, and why the Venezuelan military has remained quiescent in the years that followed. Institutions of civilian control created during the post-1958 “Punto Fijo” period, particularly those based on fragmenting the officer corps, prevented the collapse of the democratic regime in 1992. These same institutions allowed civilians to regain authority over the armed forces during the Rafael Caldera administration and have ensured the subordination of the armed forces to elected authorities to the present. It is also argued that the institutional basis for civilian control has been dismantled during the Fifth Republic, heightening the likelihood of future civil-military conflict and threatening regime stability.

The U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 radically altered patterns of social and economic development. Examination of census and archival data on land tenure reveals that contrary to generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years from 1898 to 1915. Instead, and despite massive agro-industrial investments by U.S. sugar corporations, more small farmers owned land in 1915 than at the end of the Spanish colonial period in 1898. This surprising revelation contradicts the findings of all previous studies, and it prompts us to research further the social and economic impact of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In the twentieth century, big business in Mexico invested much more in voluntary encompassing associations than business did elsewhere in Latin America. Multisectoral associations like the CCE, the CMNH, Coparmex, and COECE are rare in the other large countries of the region. Three primary factors gave Mexican business stronger incentives to invest in these associations. First, Mexican business was excluded from elections, PRI politics, and appointments to top government positions and therefore relied more on associations to channel business's organized participation in politics and policy making. Second, in some periods, government actions were threatening to business interests and prompted defensive organization. Third, in other periods of closer cooperation between business and government, government officials relied heavily on these associations to mediate relations with business, giving big business further incentives to invest in associations.

El criollismo ha sido elaborado—desde diversos géneros—como espacio del consenso identitario aún en momentos de graves tensiones simbólicas. Se trata de un lugar construido sobre la capacidad de desplazamiento de la voz letrada, en función de adaptarse a los cambios producidos en la esfera cultural. Con el fin de trazar algunos de los hitos de este proceso de apelación identitaria en el caso específico de Venezuela, revisaré textos, publicados en su mayoría en la prensa, a lo largo del siglo XIX y principios del XX. La lectura de este corpus mostrará la trama de discursividades sobre la cual se asienta la autoridad letrada que emitió el discurso criollista.

This essay analyzes the impact of an indigenous counterpublic sphere in contemporary Bolivia, arguing that it functions as an arena of differential consciousness for Aymara intellectuals and activists. In examining the work carried out by the Aymara nongovernmental organization known as the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), the essay highlights this sphere's importance as both a discursive and territorial arena where agency is expressed in the collaborative spirit of community. THOA's work is significant in strategically formulating a methodology of decolonization based on revisionist Andean historiography, territorial demands, and collective political action.

This study discusses the responses of Mexican intellectuals to the 1968 massacre in the Plaza de Tlatelolco. Several published studies and anthologies have covered the poetry, narrative, and essays written on the subject, but no such consideration has been given to the theatrical works written and staged since 1968. Jeanette Malkin's theory on memory-theatre, Pierre Nora's “lieux de mémoire,” and Michel Foucault's concept of countermemories all shed light on how these dramatic works function in a changing Mexico, now moving toward authentic democracy and ready to revive a segment of history suppressed and distorted but never forgotten. Of the many plays commemorating the events of 1968, four that focus on the process of memory are analyzed in this essay. Because of the slow democratization of Mexico, the growing maturity of former participants and witnesses, and the postmodern craving for testimony, the repressed memories of Tlatelolco have not faded into oblivion but continue to inspire the dramatic imagination.

The Mexican Constitution was revised in 1992 to foster privatization of agrarian reform lands. Legal inheritance protections for spouses were removed, and individual title holders (85 percent male) obtained rights to sell land formerly considered family patrimony. State disinvestment contributed to economic crisis in the land-reform sector. This longitudinal study of four communities in northern and central Mexico explores the counterintuitive effects of agrarian law, customary inheritance norms, and women's changing roles in household economies and community sociopolitics on the material and ideological bases for women's entitlement to land. Quantitative and qualitative data show that women's rights to land under customary inheritance norms were upheld locally and that women's control of family land increased along with growing responsibility for production and community activism. Women's property rights were enhanced rather than eroded as families and communities struggled to meet the economic and social challenges posed by the neoliberal agenda.

Observers have argued that as indigenous peoples become more acculturated and their reserves more populous, they begin to exploit tropical rain forests much as colonists and other outsiders do. The history of changes in land use between 1950 and 1980 among the Shuar, an indigenous group in the Ecuadorian Amazon, would appear to support this convergence thesis. The Shuar began to clear land, plant pastures, and acquire cattle, much like their mestizo competitors for land. Using survey and remote-sensing data for a later period, from 1987 to 1997, we demonstrate that convergence has given way to divergence in land-use trends among the two groups. While mestizo smallholders throughout the region continue to rely on cattle ranching, Shuar smallholders close to roads have begun to reforest their lands and cultivate former garden crops like coffee and cacao as cash crops. These recent trends in Shuar land use suggest that even when Amerindians become more acculturated, they still maintain more biologically diverse landscapes than their mestizo neighbors.

This essay comments on the “new cultural history” of Mexico and the debate recently conducted between critics and protagonists of the genre in the Hispanic American Historical Review. After a scene-setting preamble, the essay consists of three substantive parts. First, in considering what the new cultural history is and what degree of novelty it might claim, the essay identifies and critiques seven features of the genre: its concern for subalterns, agency, political engagement, the reinsertion of politics, mentalities, texts, and interdisciplinary influences. Second, the essay addresses the style and semantics of the new cultural history, in particular its penchant for buzzwords and jargon. Third, the article turns to the major critic of the genre, Stephen Haber, and considers his preferred alternative (so-called scientific history). The essay argues that while Haber's critique is often persuasive, it is also in places misconceived, perhaps exaggerated, and tending toward a narrow positivism. Historiography, the essay unoriginally concludes, need not be falsely polarized between narrow positivism and fashionable postmodernism.

Costa Rica has been the real success story of Latin American democracy. For the last half-century, this small country has held free, fair, and competitive elections, experienced regular rotation of rulers and parties, and rarely violated human or civil rights. Consistent voter turnout rates of 80 percent and a firmly entrenched two-party system appeared to be unalterable features of the electoral landscape since the late 1950s. While democracy still seems securely entrenched, the 1998 elections brought a major shift. Abstention increased by 50 percent, and votes for minor parties in the legislature doubled, reaching one-quarter of the electorate. This research note presents evidence that the shift is the result of long-term forces, using cross-sectional survey data collected from 1978 to 1999. Notable declines in the legitimacy of the political system explain the drop in turnout and the rise of minor parties. The study then attempts to explain why this decline may have occurred.