El uso de Recursos Forestales No Maderables (RFNM) puede crear oportunidades de desarrollo para poblaciones locales; pero ello requiere de determinadas condiciones. En México, el uso de RFNM considerados oficialmente como “amenazados” es regulado por Unidades de Manejo para la Conservación de la Vida Silvestre (UMA), un instrumento que busca conciliar la conservación biológica con desarrollo local. Sus resultados varían en función de las características del contexto en que se aplica. La mayoría de las UMA del sur del país, especialmente de RFNM, muestran resultados poco alentadores, pues no consideran en su diseño e implementación, la complejidad y diversidad de condiciones presentes en los espacios rurales de esta región. Aquí analizamos la implementación de una UMA de palma camedor en dos comunidades rurales de la Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, México, a través de registro etnográfico, entrevistas a profundidad y cuestionarios socioeconómicos. Argumentamos que las UMA de palma parten de una concepción simplificada de la realidad compleja de las comunidades en donde se implementan y trastocan su equilibrio de poder; su diseño burocrático y sobre-regulatorio fomenta discrecionalidad, simulación y corrupción, lo que acentúa la exclusión y favorece a las élites locales.

This article analyzes student mobilization and public discourse on higher education during the June 2013 protests in Brazil in an effort to situate the protests historically. I argue that higher education was a major, yet overlooked, component of the 2013 protests, and that concerns over the failings and shortcomings of Brazil’s university system had deeper roots in institutional problems and student discourses on education, society, and democracy. These historical inequalities combined with institutional memories that offered students models and examples of past mobilization and allowed them to tie their present-day concerns to past examples of student politics. I consider the ways in which the often-overlooked question of educational reform offers insights into ongoing social inequalities in Brazil, the failure of various regimes to address structural issues, and how students in 2013 looked to the past while simultaneously drawing on their own particular educational contingencies. This article situates 2013 historically while exploring the ways in which higher education in the twenty-first century has transformed, even as it remains an important part of political and social struggles between society and the state. Finally, this article explores how the 2013 protests in Brazil reflect ongoing struggles to define the role of the state in society, not just in Brazil but in the Americas more generally.

El artículo analiza la elección presidencial de 1964 en Chile. Dicha elección fue protagonizada por dos candidaturas reformistas, encabezadas por Eduardo Frei Montalva, representante de la Democracia Cristiana, y por Salvador Allende, representante de la coalición de partidos de izquierda Frente de Acción Popular. Mediante la documentación de diferentes instancias de elaboración programática participativa y un análisis de la estrategia electoral en su conjunto, el artículo propone la necesidad de complejizar la comprensión que se ha tenido hasta el momento de una elección fundamental para el desarrollo político chileno. Dado que la mitad de los votantes participaba por primera vez de comicios presidenciales, no puede comprenderse el triunfo de Frei Montalva y la magnitud de la votación que alcanzó solamente por la campaña del terror y el apoyo de las cúpulas partidarias de la derecha. La campaña presidencial de la Democracia Cristiana se caracterizó por la introducción de nuevas prácticas políticas, cuyo efecto en el escenario social y político chileno va incluso más allá de la propia elección.

The study developed by Stock and Watson (1991) has served as a catalyst for the construction of monthly indicators of economic activity. However, its application has been focused on national statistics. In this article we develop a new empirical strategy of three steps to build regional economic indicators on a monthly basis that can be replicated in provinces or municipalities in Latin America. We apply this empirical strategy to develop the Monthly Indicator of Economic Activity (in Spanish, IMAE) for one of the main regions of Colombia: Valle del Cauca.

Despite renewed interest in Central American migration, little attention has been devoted to understanding the diversity of migration pathways within the region. This article explores the tensions in the complicated connections between migration, land, consumption, and love in the case of migration between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations with members of transnational families in Achuapa, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, I examine how migrants and nonmigrants talk about remittances to make arguments about both abandonment and connection—that is, love for the land and people. Houses and land mediate local understandings of both the absence and presence of migrants in Achuapa. However, those who send and receive remittances, women and men, and young people and old all understand the relationships between migration and care or abandonment differently. At the community level, discourses around remittances tie in to nation-building projects through the resurgence of revolutionary discourses of solidarity under the Sandinistas. In this context, migration has become a new way for poor Nicaraguans to participate in the global economy and care for loved ones, even as it threatens nationalist longings for solidarity.

The changes men and women in a rural community in Nicaragua say they have implemented over the past decades differ in ways that relate to their vulnerability to drought. Short-term coping was more common among the women, especially the female heads of households, while adaptive actions were more common among the men. The Community Capitals Framework offers a tool to understand the differences. A gendered culture meant that the division of other types of capital (natural, human, social, financial, built, cultural, and political) as well as the division of labor in the case study area were also highly gendered. These gendered inequalities in access to and control over different forms of capital has led to a gender-differentiated capacity to respond to climate change, men being able to adapt and women experiencing a downward spiral in capacity and increasing vulnerability to drought.

This article explores the role of the samba subgenre partido alto as a mode of resistance to modernization and the Brazilian military regime’s disfiguration of samba music in the 1970s. This resistance ultimately led a handful of samba musicians to create the Grêmio Recreativo de Arte Negra Escola de Samba Quilombo in 1975. While it is true that Quilombo nurtured Afro-Brazilian music and culture, the author demonstrates that its leader and cofounder, Antônio Candeia Filho, acted as a samba preservationist and a pioneer, referencing music of the African diaspora, but also as someone who drew the line when it came to espousing Pan-Africanism. The aversion to Pan-Africanism in Rio de Janeiro’s samba community heightened in the late 1970s, as Black Soul, among other foreign sounds and cultural presences, was perceived as a threat to the primacy of samba.

This article seeks to shift the framework of decades-long debates on the nature and significance of machismo, debunking the commonly held notion that the word describes a primordial Iberian and Ibero-American phenomenon. I trace the emergence of machismo as an English-language term, arguing that a tradition of unself-consciously ethnocentric scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s enabled the word’s entrance, by the 1960s, into popular sources. In fact, machismo was rather a neologism in Spanish, but midcentury US scholarship presumed the category’s empirical validity and applied to it to perceived problems in the “Latin” world. Much of machismo’s linguistic purchase—the reason it has become a global shorthand for hypermasculinity—stemmed from mid to late twentieth-century anxieties about hemispheric security, the Cold War, immigration, and overpopulation, particularly vis-à-vis the United States’ near neighbors, Mexico and Puerto Rico. I have sought out the word’s earliest appearances in various English-language media (books, scholarly articles, newspapers, magazines, and television) and explained how it has long escaped scrutiny as a construct in and of itself. As a result, machismo has resisted the most earnest and well-intentioned of challenges to its scholarly primacy and remains a pathologizing point of departure in approaches to Latin American gender systems.

Municipalities in nineteenth-century Brazil bore the responsibility for providing public services that enhanced economic exchange, particularly physical infrastructure that facilitated the circulation of goods and services. Therefore, the question of whether the resources to pay for these services were abundant or scarce matters greatly to our understanding of Brazil’s history of economic development and socioeconomic inequality. Although ex ante budgets regularly predicted financial abundance, ex post financial statements repeatedly reported chronic deficits and financial instability. In the face of unanticipated revenue shortfalls, municipalities cut investments in essential public infrastructure, thereby dampening domestic economic exchange and perpetuating municipal poverty.

This article connects two seemingly unrelated globalized processes of mobilization: the anti-FIFA demonstrations in Brazil and Brazil’s diplomatic offensive around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The purpose is to explore the tension between these two global arenas and analyze how claims about inequalities were articulated and circulated, and how the Brazilian state eventually used them as leverage for its own multilateral agenda. The first section dwells on the anti-FIFA mobilization in Brazil, focusing on the way in which the World Cup became an opportunity of global reach for citizens to express their discontent and indignation vis-à-vis structural problems and entrenched inequalities that extended well beyond all things FIFA. Here, I focus on the way claims were articulated through online resources and social media, as well as through graffiti and street art. The second section explores the way Brazil’s mobilization around the SDGs created a space for citizens and civil society to articulate a series of technocratic and technocratized claims around inequalities. I analyze the way these claims made their way into the Brazilian government’s position for the SDG negotiations—as an instrument to elbow its way to the “grown-ups” table and tackle broader geopolitical concerns.

This article explores Latin American genomic studies of mestizaje and the way mestizaje’s inherent contradiction between equality and hierarchy—a contradiction typical of liberalism—is managed in genomics. In Latin America, ideologies and practices of mestizaje may be seen as an antidote to hierarchies of race and class, but also as a terrain for the enactment of these hierarchies. Mestizaje mediates this contradiction between equality and hierarchy first by deploying the idea of sexual intimacy and family kinship across racial difference, and second by representing blackness and indigeneity as spatially peripheral and temporally backward-looking, thus naturalizing them as other. Multiculturalism can be seen as a recent variant on these themes, as well as a departure from them. Recent genomics research in Latin America strongly reiterates these ideas, while also adding some new twists. Despite its apparent connection with progressive politics and policies (antiracism, better health for all, protection of human rights for victims of oppression), genomics here appears as a mainly conservative force.

This article explores the reality of entrepreneurship in the favela of Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro. It contrasts the prescriptions of federal and state training programs and support policies for entrepreneurship with the reality of the practice of entrepreneurial activities in Rocinha. It shows that the logic of effectuation can explain microentrepreneurial trajectories in favelas, expanding its original reach from expert entrepreneurs in large firms. It also exposes the severe shortcomings in the training programs and support policies of the Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas (SEBRAE). It points to the urgency of reform of the very foundation of entrepreneurship policies in favelas.

This article examines two cases of folklorization led by teachers in Peru between 1939 and 1971, and characterized by the participation of the indigenous and mestizo subjects whose local cultures were transformed into folklore. These cases show teachers as active agents of cultural change in Andean schools, who were responding to de-Indianization by promoting a serrano (pertaining to the Sierra) regional identity among their students. In this fashion, teachers were reinventing “local traditions” to produce a new popular identity based on a common regional bond, through which indigenous and mestizo populations could negotiate new waves of cultural interaction with modernity and national society. The first case analyzes the projects of José María Arguedas and Emilio Barrantes to bring local folklore to the school curriculum and to promote an Andean popular culture. The second case explores school folklore competitions organized autonomously by provincial teachers, in which traditional dances were folklorized and turned into a popular spectacle. While framing both folklorization cases within the study of teachers as local intellectuals, the article also highlights the importance of a magisterial culture in Peru that, drawing from the progressive education movement, viewed teachers as agents of sociocultural change and nationalism.

Este trabajo analiza tres momentos entre las décadas de 1930 y 1940 que permiten comprender el proceso por el cual el Estado, los empresarios cinematográficos y el clero y el laicado católico se consolidaron como los actores más influyentes del cine en Argentina. Se abordan la redefinición de los vínculos entre las ramas del empresariado y el surgimiento de una producción cinematográfica industrial en el marco de las transformaciones provocadas por la implementación del sonoro y el impacto de la crisis económica mundial; el desarrollo de oficinas de moralidad católicas en el marco de la experiencia de imbricación institucional de Estado e Iglesia católica; y la elaboración de una política estatal de protección y fomento cinematográfico que produjo una identificación de intereses de empresarios productores y Estado, en el contexto de las sanciones de Estados Unidos a Argentina durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El trabajo discute el concepto de autonomía relativa relacionada a la teoría de los campos de Bourdieu y la problematización de este concepto a la luz de un arte industrial como la cinematografía, proponiendo entender la participación de estos actores en el campo cinematográfico a partir del análisis de modos concretos de reestructuraciones internas de influencias externas.

Weberian sociological approaches dominate the contemporary study of inequality in Latin America. Theoretically, the major works in the area suffer from a conflation of liberalism and democracy and offer flawed conceptions of capitalism, class, and other social relations of oppression. This article offers an exegesis and critique of several recent influential texts written within the Weberian tradition. It then proposes as an alternative a Marxian-decolonial theoretical framework for understanding inequality and the totalizing power of capital. It demonstrates how such a framework can better account for the complexity of class relations and other internally related forms of social oppression—such as gender, sexuality, and race—in Latin America today. Finally, the article shows the utility of the Marxist-decolonial framework by way, first, of a concrete investigation into the highly contested dynamics of twenty-first-century extractive capitalism in the region, and, second, through an exposition of the life story and activism of Luis Macas, an indigenous activist and intellectual in Ecuador. The core element of Macas’s political subjectivity is an underlying utopian-revolutionary dialectic through which he draws on elements of a precapitalist past in looking forward to an anticolonial and socialist future.

En los últimos treinta años, la asignación masiva de soluciones habitacionales vía subsidios estatales ha redefinido la relación entre los pobladores (pobres urbanos) chilenos y el Estado. Dichas transformaciones han tensionado los enfoques tradicionales sobre las movilizaciones por la vivienda, erigidas fundamentalmente desde el examen del llamado “Movimiento de Pobladores”, que tuvo lugar en los años sesenta e inicios de los setenta. Usando material etnográfico recabado entre 2010 y 2014, buscamos subsanar tales vacíos analíticos mediante el examen de la reconfiguración histórica de las protestas por derecho a la vivienda y, en este marco, la rearticulación del poblador como subjetividad política; y la relación de la demanda por vivienda digna con la reivindicación del derecho a la ciudad y la vida digna. Así, mostramos cómo el carácter subsidiario y segregador de las políticas de vivienda desarrolladas durante las últimas décadas es cuestionado por la acción colectiva de los pobladores y los procesos de subjetivación política asociados.

Este artículo explora la representación del amulpüllün, o ritual funerario mapuche, en el poemario Reducciones del autor mapuche-huilliche Jaime Huenún. Examina varios poemas en los que el sujeto lírico, asumiendo el papel de orador del amulpüllün, realiza una invocación ritual a los espíritus de mapuche muertos para asegurar su transición al más allá. También analiza cuatro collages creados a partir de fotografías y documentos archivados en el Museo de La Plata en Argentina, en tanto constituyen un canal alternativo de enunciación de los rituales funerarios. Estos poemas y collages recuperan las historias de las personas representadas en ellos, simbólicamente integrándolas a la memoria histórica de sus sociedades por medio de la estrategia literaria del amulpüllün. Además, los textos establecen paralelos entre las historias de las personas, denunciando como estas, de diferentes modos, fueron atravesadas por la violencia, la exclusión y el olvido.

Israel’s historical relationships with Argentina, Nicaragua, and Guatemala during the Cold War in the 1980s provides one context for understanding the parameters of Israeli foreign policy in the region. These relationships allied Israel with right-wing military regimes suppressing a variety of subversive others in Argentina and Guatemala, and also a right-wing counterinsurgency in Nicaragua. In the post–Cold War era, the Colombian case is distinctive because conflict is shaped by a number of different armed actors, including the state, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing insurgents, and the narcotics industries. Israel’s role in the complex Colombian milieu involves relationships with both the state and the parastate, both the military and the paramilitaries. The Israeli and Colombian states are substantively and conceptually intertwined around a common obsession with national security and armed conflict with subversive others of many types. I ask whether a special relationship sutures Israel to Colombia linked to the expanding interventions of paramilitaries and parastate apparatuses. This article provides historical and analytic contexts to elaborate the Colombia-Israel relationship, toward a future in which “peace” may play an important role.

Trade in consumer electronics and household appliances in Bolivia operates mainly from popular marketplaces. Multinational corporations enter these once informal, now enhanced economies. This article analyses the expansion of global brands into urban street markets, together with the local branding of electronics and the advancement of popular traders along transnational commodity chains. I argue that these socio-spatial transitions offer a counterintuitive articulation between the informal and the formal. Looking at specific localities along the commodity chain from East Asia to Chile and Bolivia, one sees not mere formalization of informal economies as often expected nor a rampant informalization as attributed to current economic globalization, but piecemeal formalization of traders as much as a partial informalization of all actors involved.

In order to analyze the gender performance and empowerment of Brazilian female drug traffickers, this article compares the character of Marta in Patrícia Melo’s novel Inferno (2000) with the testimonies of four real female drug traffickers collected in MV Bill and Celso Athayde’s book Falcão: Mulheres e o tráfico (2007). It argues that while female drug traffickers highlight their experience and use their kinship relations, Marta’s access to power and gender transgression are temporary because her community and other drug traffickers do not support her. The article also proposes the term “the most desired positions” to replace “hegemonic masculinities” because of the prominence that cisgender and trans women have begun to have in the world of drug trade.