This study analyzes variations in the incidence of state involvement in investment treaty arbitration in Latin America and the Caribbean over the 1987–2014 period. Its main contributions are fourfold. First, by focusing on the balance of incentives and opportunities facing political leaders and foreign investors, the study establishes a new basis for understanding the reasons actors opt for the risks and uncertainties of international arbitration instead of resolving international investment disputes via alternative means. Second, by restricting the focus of research to the Latin American region, the study is able to move beyond the analysis of relatively time-invariant structural and institutional conditions and crude indicators to address the role played by the preferences of political actors. Third, by disaggregating disputes by sector of investment, the analysis documents the variable role of ideology and electoral incentives in investment treaty arbitration. Finally, by underlining the distinctiveness of the Latin American experience with investment treaty arbitration, the study offers new insights into the global backlash against investment treaty arbitration, which has gone farther in the region than anywhere else. Overall, the results underline the potential payoffs of breaking down the international experience with investment treaty arbitration into regional patterns to obtain a deeper and more granular understanding of the political economy of investor-state dispute settlement.

This article investigates the sources of foreign ministries’ policy-making capacity in presidential regimes. Using the concept of family resemblance, we argue that professionalization of the diplomatic corps is a necessary condition, whereas the institutional attributions of the ministry and the degree of presidential delegation are relevant but substitutable elements. The higher the scores on either of the latter dimensions, the stronger is the capacity of the foreign ministry to influence the chief executive and to contest other players’ policy preferences. To empirically validate our concept, we measure the three dimensions in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico between 1946 and 2015 using data on diplomats’ recruitment and career paths, influence of diplomatic schools and doctrines, appointment patterns of foreign ministers, and relevance of presidential diplomacy, with an emphasis on travels abroad. Our analysis indicates that Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico enjoy a high level of professionalization of their diplomatic corps; however, differences—both across countries and over time—remain regarding institutional attributions and presidential delegation.

América Latina es la región más afectada por la delincuencia en el mundo. Poco, sin embargo, se sabe sobre los costos sociales que esta genera. En este estudio, se emplearon seis rondas del Barómetro de las Américas (2004–2014) y el método de emparejamiento estadístico con el objetivo de estimar el costo de la victimización sobre la percepción de inseguridad, capital social y percepción de la democracia para 16 países de la región. Los resultados muestran que el costo de la victimización se expande a diversos aspectos sociales, afectando en mayor proporción a las mujeres. Además de incrementar la percepción de inseguridad y reducir la legitimidad y confianza en las instituciones encargadas de luchar contra la delincuencia, la desconfianza se desplaza a instituciones sin este rol, a terceros y afecta la propia percepción del barrio. En lo positivo, la victimización incentiva la participación en organizaciones, aunque especialmente en los grupos de menores ingresos y mayores recursos comunales.

We analyze class structures in Latin America from a sociological perspective, defining social classes as labor market positions. We propose an adaptation of the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP) class schema, which has become a standard in advanced industrialized countries but presents some limitations in accounting for labor relations in Latin America. Then, we use recent survey data for nine Latin American countries to delineate a map of current class structures and explore the association between social class and social/economic conditions. Our results indicate that class structures differ significantly not only between Latin America and advanced industrialized nations but also among Latin American countries. There is also a close association between class membership and socioeconomic conditions, including social protection and the risk of poverty. These results suggest that a sociological approach to social class is still pertinent to understanding the relationships among productive structures, labor markets, and living conditions in Latin America.

Importantes protestas laborales ocurrieron en la minería latinoamericana en la última década. Este articulo compara las movilizaciones de contratistas en Chile y Perú, analizando por qué, a pesar de varias similitudes entre países, surgieron diferencias en sus dinámicas sindicales. En el primer caso, los sindicatos perduraron en el tiempo y coordinaron a nivel nacional, mientras que en el segundo las protestas no culminaron en organizaciones sólidas o articuladas. Sobre la base de entrevistas y trabajo de archivo, argumento que es crucial entender la permanencia de los líderes sindicales y sus redes políticas en Chile, y la precariedad no sólo laboral, sino organizativa, del caso peruano.

Este artículo explora el mundo de las botánicas —consideradas como farmacias invisibles— en la Ciudad de Nueva York en donde practicantes de las religiones afrocaribeñas, especialmente Santería, ejercen un doble rol como líderes religiosos y consejeros espirituales. Las botánicas atienden a una población latinoamericana, a menudo migrante e indocumentada, que llega a ellas buscando soluciones efectivas a una plétora de problemas (ej., desde trastornos orgánicos hasta maltrato laboral y conflictos familiares). Los consejeros entienden los síntomas individuales como una disrupción con el mundo social y espiritual, a menudo provocado por “maleficios” y energías negativas circundantes. Las respuestas terapéuticas mas frecuentes combinan la consulta con el uso de plantas en infusiones, baños espirituales y oraciones (resumidos en la tríada: beber, limpiar y orar). El tema pone en evidencia el rol de los servicios terapéuticos que ofrecen las botánicas por cuanto proveen de respuestas rápidas, prácticas y económicamente accesibles a una población vulnerable.

In 1926, the Fox Film Corporation held a “Masculine and Feminine Photogenic Beauty Contest” to find Hollywood’s newest “Latin” star in Brazil and other countries. North American film representatives asked for contestants who were “white with Latin blood.” The exotic allure of this racialized category contradicted Brazilian elites’ preference for eugenic, chaste, white beauty. Brazilian film critics, advertisers, and beauty contestants negotiated transnational standards of beauty as they sought faces, bodies, and sexual appeal that would conquer Hollywood. Ultimately, Brazilian films intellectuals forged their own meanings of “white with Latin blood” even as they upheld the supremacy of white beauty. However, the contest demonstrates how the transnational contours of cinema offered a liminal space for competing standards of racialized beauty in Brazil.

Today, Brazil has one of the most diverse energy systems in the world. The sugar-based ethanol industry plays a pivotal role in that achievement, yet scholars of energy development have focused little on ethanol. This article examines the history of the sugar-based ethanol industry from its beginning in the 1930s to the creation of the state-led program Proálcool (the National Ethanol Program) in 1975 and the ethanol-fueled car in 1979. This article demonstrates how federal and private actors connected nationalist goals of a modern, industrial Brazilian identity to ethanol in order to sustain the industry against the vagaries of the sugar market. Drawing from production data, the monthly sugar industry journal Brasil Açucareiro, newspapers, government funding applications for privately owned ethanol distilleries, and oral interviews, it highlights how the idea of a nationally developed technology and domestic industry etched a long-term place for the ethanol industry in the nation’s energy strategy.

This article explores the cases of two satirical publications—The Clinic (Chile, 1998–) and Barcelona (Argentina, 2003–). Through critical humor, visual subversions, and parody, these independent magazines challenged mainstream journalism and official political discourse, offering alternative interpretations about the ruling class and society after traumatic periods—Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile and the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina. Through interviews with the editors and content analysis, this article examines how these satirical publications responded to their respective national contexts by questioning the functioning of power on several levels of society, and how they evolved after they became popular, negotiating their space within the national mediascape. This study also suggests the notion of hybrid alternative media to describe these publications, which became part of a liberating process of collective healing. Initially perceived in opposition to mainstream media in contexts when the press’s credibility had decreased, they filled gaps in their society’s political communication.

In this research note, we introduce congressbr, an R package for retrieving data from the Brazilian houses of legislature. The package contains easy-to-use functions that allow researchers to query the Application Programming Interfaces of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, perform cleaning data operations, and store information in a format convenient for future analyses, making a previously difficult task fast and convenient. Congressbr downloads data on legislators, submitted and ratified law proposals, Senate and Chamber commissions, and other information of interest to social scientists across various fields. We outline the main features of the package and demonstrate its use with practical examples.

This essay introduces the three essays in this collection, “Latin American Studies and the Humanities: One Year Later.” This collection follows our first dossier, “Latin American Studies and the Humanities: Past, Present, Future,” which was published in September 2018 (https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.521). The essays here—all written by historians—address current questions in humanistic research in Latin American and ethnic/area studies, including object-centered analysis, comparative methodologies, and archival formation and practices. Our introduction situates the essays in the dossier within three critical contexts, suggesting how new work in Latin American studies can engage with diverse scholarly paradigms, frameworks, and methodological approaches, specifically oceanic worlds and science studies, ethnic and area studies, and Latinx studies.

Drawing from a combination of the author’s own research on Portugal’s empire and recent work across a range of disciplines, this essay discusses the growing dialogue between Latin American studies and science and technology studies (STS). It discusses key similarities and differences in the questions, methods, and theoretical frameworks which have guided research in both areas. It focuses particular attention on the divergent ways in which the two interdisciplinary arenas of scholarship have handled objects and materiality. The author argues that despite important differences in orientation, a focus on objects and materiality informed by STS perspectives can broaden the archive available to scholars of colonial Latin America, challenge and extend critical insights of colonial research, and call into question the adequacy of conventional Latin American and Atlantic spatial frameworks.

Across Latin America, mestizo nationalism became a common response to postcolonial independence, revolt, and revolution in the twentieth century. These different mixed-race nationalisms have been the subject of continuous debate in Latin American studies. The field of Asian American studies offers a different approach that highlights the political and cultural function of anti-Chinese politics beyond their targeting of racialized Chinese subjects. This article examines the anti-Chinese politics and mestizo nationalisms of Mexico and El Salvador to question if and when popular Orientalist racism aided indigenous and peasant consent to state-sponsored mestizo nationalism. This methodology underscores the historical role that ideological formations of Asia and Asians have contributed to the political and cultural life of race in Latin America even when actual populations remained small or nonexistent. By understanding racial formations in a multiracial context I underscore the notion that anti-Chinese racism is not only important in that it discriminated against Chinese, but also that it served non-Chinese Latin Americans remarkably well and helped build an unstable equilibrium of mestizo hegemony.

This article focuses on the oral and artifact-filled archive of a working-class Afro-Cuban family to create an intimate set of histories that illuminates the Americas as deeply connected and challenges the limits of national borders. The article explores the ways in which national identities assert themselves in the “private spaces” of migratory life through storytelling and the creation of collective memories, and how gender functions within these spaces. This family has created a master narrative about its own racially conscious, respectable, revolutionary Cuban working-class identity and practice that denies the centrality of international marriage and diasporic experiences to its making. Women’s whispered stories, marginalized from the familial narrative, illuminate alternative meanings and motivations for the strategies that propelled their family into the center of the great conflicts of Cuban history.

This essay reviews the following works:

Staying Afloat: Risk and Uncertainty in Spanish Atlantic World Trade, 1760–1820. By Jeremy Baskes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 381. $54.57 hardcover. ISBN: 9780804785426.

The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. By Robert S. DuPlessis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 332. $29.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107105911.

The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. By Adrian Finucane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 1 + 211. $45.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248128.

Guiana and the Shadows of Empire: Colonial and Cultural Negotiations at the Edge of the World. By Joshua R. Hyles. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Pp. ix + 185. $76.56 hardcover. ISBN: 9780739187791.

The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts. By Darlene J. Sadlier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 314. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477311486.

Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil. By Michiel van Groesen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xx + 272. $47.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248661.

This essay reviews the following works:

Jews and Jewish Identities in Latin America: Historical, Cultural, and Literary Perspectives. Edited by Margalit Bejarano, Yaron Harel, Marta Topel, and Margalit Yosifon. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 411. $129.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781618116482.

Sephardic, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880–1960. By Adriana M. Brodsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 281. $20.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780253023032.

Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature: A Diaspora. Edited by Dario Miccoli. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp. ix + 163. $150.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781138233836.

Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith. By Ronnie Perelis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 178. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780253024015.

The Lima Inquisition: The Plight of Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth-Century Peru. By Ana E. Schaposchnik. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 291. $21.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780299313449.

The Perils of Living the Good and True Law: Iberian Crypto-Jews in the Shadow of the Inquisition in Colonial Hispanic America. By Matthew D. Warshawsky. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2016. Pp. 176. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781588712769.

This essay reviews the following works:

From Lenin to Castro, 1917–1959: Early Encounters between Moscow and Havana. By Mervyn J. Bain. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Pp. vii + 159. $55.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9780739181102.

Cuba’s Revolutionary World. By Jonathan C. Brown. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. vi + 586. $35.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780674971981.

Cubans in Angola: South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991. By Christine Hatzky. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Pp. v + 386. $39.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780299301040.

Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity. By Margaret Randall. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 272. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822369042.

U.S.-Cuba Relations: Charting a New Path. By Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna S. Kassab. Baltimore, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. vii + 164. $36.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781498537759.

This essay reviews the following works:

Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil. By Benjamin A. Cowan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 311. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469627502.

Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil. By Christopher Dunn. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xi + 251. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469628516.

Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement. By George F. Flaherty. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 299. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520291072.

Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil. By Victoria Langland. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 307. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822353126.

Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during the Long Sixties. By Jaime M. Pensado. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 213. $32.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780804797252.

A Persistent Revolution: History, Nationalism, and Politics in Mexico since 1968. By Randal Sheppard. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 359. $39.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826358370.

This essay reviews the following works:

¿Quienes deciden la política social? Economía política de programas sociales en América Latina. Edited by Alejandro Bonvecchi, Julia Johannsen, and Carlos Scartascini. Washington, DC: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, 2015. Pp. xx + 200. Digital open access. ISBN: 9781597822190.

Crafting Policies to End Poverty in Latin America: The Quiet Transformation. By Ana Lorena De La O. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 175. $84.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107089488.

Sistemas políticos y bienestar social: Estudios comparados: Brasil, Colombia y Venezuela (2000–2010). By Augusto De Venanzi. Almagro: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 2015. Pp. 238. $22.99 paperback. ISBN: 9788416345144.

The Political Logic of Poverty Relief: Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. By Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Federico Estévez, and Beatriz Magaloni. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 236. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107140288.

Social Policy Expansion in Latin America. By Candelaria Garay. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii + 256. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316606407.

Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America. By Alisha C. Holland. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 398. $35.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316626351.

The Quest for Universal Social Policy in the South: Actors, Ideas, and Architectures. By Juliana Martínez Franzoni and Diego Sánchez-Ancochea. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii + 256. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781107564893.

This essay reviews the following works:

Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940. By José Amador. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 219. $39.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826520210.

Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History. By Marcos Cueto and Steven Palmer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 306. $32.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781107633018.

A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru. By Raúl Necochea López. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 234. $37.50 paperback. ISBN: 9781469618081.

Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850–1945. By Okezi T. Otovo. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. x + 273. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477309056.