Scholarly literature has often characterized the popular bandit Chucho el Roto (1835?–1885) in terms of his legend as Mexico's urban Robin Hood, yet no study has attempted to discern how this legend took root and changed over time. This investigation brings together historical documents and literary texts about Chucho el Roto from the 1880s to the 1920s to analyze changing cultural perceptions of social class tensions in Mexico. It finds that Chucho provided a vehicle for both lower and upper classes to critically reflect on the morality of dominant society and to unite behind the resiliency and dignity of the oppressed working class. While the earliest literary text from 1889 criticizes Chucho for refusing to submit to dominant social norms and accept his place in the socioeconomic hierarchy, two post-1910 novels celebrate Chucho's banditry as a socialist-inspired political rebellion that resists assimilation into dominant political paradigms, including that of revolution.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the book of kings, or dynastic history, was the dominant mode of historiography in Europe and the Americas. This article explores the as-if or in-theory dimension of colonial dynastic history by way of a reading of Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo's early-eighteenth-century histories of Spain and Peru. Peralta's histories have been read as sycophantic, premodern texts that not only do not live up to the modern standards of historiography but moreover are in bad taste, that is, rhetorically prone to the excesses of Lima's colonial court culture. In contrast, I argue that Peralta's poetics of history reveal the subtle and ingenious rhetorical means by which history came to occupy, via imitating the figure of the prince, a sovereign and prognostic position of critique as the prince's simulacrum, that is, as a copy that has no original other than itself. In the case of Peralta's histories, this position of critique was colonial and postcolonial.

To what extent has the Argentine party system been polarized along class lines? The political historiography gives mixed and contradictory answers to this question. We explore the social bases of Argentina's political parties using an original database, the most comprehensive database of Argentine elections yet assembled, and new methods of ecological inference that yield more reliable results than previous analyses. We identify two distinct party systems, one in place between 1912 and 1940, the other emerging after 1946. The first party system was not consistently class based, but the second was, with the Radical Party representing the middle classes and the Peronists, workers and the poor. Still, there were important exceptions. Lower-class support for the Peronists, as proxied by literacy rates, declined during Perón's exile, which implies that the party had trouble mobilizing lower-class illiterate voters. Since the return to democracy in 1983, class polarization has again found some expression in the party system.

Bolivia was the poster child for economic liberalization policies adopted throughout Latin America since the 1970s. The country is also currently viewed as a place where the neoliberal or market-oriented economic model has been exhausted, as indicated by high levels of societal protest and recent democratic instability. Using available subnational data from Bolivia, we examine the determinants of societal protest across the country's nine provinces for the 1995–2005 period. Consistent with recent literature, we find that provinces with higher levels of political competition have lower levels of societal protest. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which suggests that neoliberal reforms depoliticize and demobilize collective actors, we find that economic liberalization increases the level of protest activity. Taken together, the article draws attention to the paradoxical effect of neoliberalism to simultaneously debilitate certain types of popular resistance and activate others.

The central hypothesis derived in this article is that the ability of Brazil's central government to bypass governors determined the success of delivering public goods federation-wide in the area of noncontributory social protection policy. The Workers' Party's (Partido dos Trabalhadores) first-term administration from 2003 to 2006 successfully reformed, expanded, and implemented four previously existing cash-transfer programs designed to alleviate poverty. The central administration's flagship program Bolsa Família was implemented in all of Brazil's municipalities, delivering benefits to more than 11 million households. A nonmajoritarian political system, the constitutional autonomy of municipalities, and the gradual hardening of post-1995 subnational budget constraints facilitated the ability of the central government to live up to the aspirations and expectations of the Brazilian public by combating hunger, poverty, and misery through this program. This article shows these institutional factors to have provided incentives for successful central-local collaboration in this social policy area.

We examine here two Ecuadorian towns and the state's efforts to support their development through competitiveness initiatives. Neoliberal, economic globalization is often equated with the insecurities of market competition. However, economic policy makers do not foment competition as much as competitive advantage. Whereas competition requires individual know-how, competitive advantage often involves cooperating to improve the underlying factors that help whole groups of firms. In Ecuador, policies have sought to engineer competitive advantage by creating industrial clusters. In our study, the town of Atuntaqui embraced the idea of clusters, uniting firms to work with international consultants and the Ministry of Industry. The economy has improved, but wealth shows signs of consolidation. The comparative case is a mechanized indigenous craft economy in Otavalo. Exploring how Otavalo's development has generated a set of shared resources anchored in a market plaza, we argue that its economy is best understood as a cultural commons. The experiences of both places have shown that economic development must take explicit measures to defend such commons if the gains of strategic cooperation are to be sustained in the long run.

I examine how domestic workers have fared legally and politically in post-transition democracies in Latin America. Paid domestic work employs more than 15 percent of the economically active female population in Latin America, yet national labor codes tend to mandate lower salaries and benefits and longer working hours to those working in this sector. They also suffer from race, gender, and class discrimination. Although organizations advocating for domestic workers have demanded equal rights, political actors in the region have been extremely reticent to respond to these demands. By analyzing domestic workers' legal rights across the region and process-tracing political reforms in Chile and Bolivia, I find that although elite resistance to change is a constant, under the right circumstances, domestic workers can gain legal reforms. Domestic workers' social allies are labor, feminist, and indigenous organizations; however, to get the attention of these allies, and consequently to pressure politicians, they must first organize autonomously and publicize their cause. Although leftist parties are more likely to be receptive to their cause, they need pressure to act on behalf of the needs of such a marginalized group. Once they do, however, they need not be majority parties to get the issue on the agenda. The key political battle is getting and keeping the issue of domestic workers' rights on the political agenda; once it goes to a vote, it is unlikely to be rejected.

In a recent article, Montero (2008) sought to clarify the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America. Testing a number of competing hypotheses, he found that macroeconomic stability, as measured by the current account, had the most consistent effect on FDI flows across countries in the region. Although Montero was interested in the role of macroeconomic stability, he also explored the impact of governance factors, including human rights and regime type. His results suggest that the effects of rights and regime type are inconsistent. Briefly, in his models that focused on governance and cost-related factors, the coefficient for the terror scale (rights abuse) had a positive and significant effect in two of three trials; in the same trials, the coefficient for Polity IV (regime) was negative and statistically significant, which suggests that politically competitive regimes received less FDI. Nevertheless, when Montero modeled the effects of economic reform, rights abuse and regime type were no longer statistically significant (Montero 2008, Table 1). Given the inconclusive nature of his findings with regard to rights and regime type, and the ongoing controversy in the literature, a brief comment on his article is potentially instructive.

Aunque Nicaragua sea el país más pobre de Centroamérica, no cuenta con la tasa de mortalidad infantil más alta de la región. La más igualitaria distribución del ingreso en Nicaragua, en comparación con otros países centroamericanos, es un factor que favorece la relativamente baja mortalidad. Empero, la población indígena nicaragüense afronta grandes desventajas en casi todos los aspectos, aunque esto no se refleja en la desigualdad nacional por ser una población minoritaria. Aprovechando el censo de 2005 y la regresión binomial negativa, modelamos la mortalidad infantil. Mostramos cómo los niños indígenas tienen 33 por ciento más riesgo de muerte, e incluso controlando otros factores, la diferencia del riego es casi del 5 por ciento. Hasta ahora no existían investigaciones cuantitativas que compararan la mortalidad entre grupos étnicos en Nicaragua. En nuestro estudio mostramos que los indígenas nicaragüenses están en desventaja a pesar de la baja desigualdad a nivel nacional.

We present a new data set on the left-right placement of major Brazilian political parties serving in the first five legislatures under democracy. On the basis of survey responses of more than 850 federal legislators from 1990 to 2005, we generate party placements on an ideological scale where 1 = “left” and 10 = “right.” The data are rescaled to account for idiosyncrasies in responses as well as variation in use of the survey scale across time. We discuss both the validity and the reliability of our new measures by comparing them to other data sets. We further discuss three substantive issues that the data reveal. First, ideological polarization has moderated over time. Second, the median legislator has shifted noticeably to the left and now stands equidistant from the influential PT and PSDB, the parties that have anchored recent presidential elections. Third, Brazilian political elites continue to shun self-identifications associated with political conservatism or neoliberalism.