This article tells the story of how an important group of social scientists in Latin America turned away from the problems of underdevelopment to the possibilities for democracy. It focuses on a network of leading Latin American intellectuals and their North American counterparts brought together by material stringencies as well as intellectual and political concerns arising from the sweeping wave of authoritarianism in the region. Brokered by private institutions and mediated by personal encounters, the decade-long endeavors of the network reveal the mechanisms through which social scientific paradigms are undone and refashioned.

Based on an original US survey, this article argues that, on average, US conservatives today feel substantially cooler toward Latin American countries than liberals do. They also desire massively tougher Mexico border policies and much less foreign aid than liberals do. Averages can hide substantial differences within groups, however. Not all liberals and conservatives are alike, and their differences shape attitudes toward Latin America. For instance, our survey reveals that libertarians and economic conservatives oppose foreign aid to places like Haiti out of a belief in the Protestant ethic of self-help and opposition to income redistribution. Communitarians and economic liberals, by contrast, are more supportive of foreign aid to Haiti. Cultural conservatives fear the impact of Mexican immigration on Christian values and a WASP American national identity more than cultural liberals do. But race and racism continue to divide Americans the most consistently in their attitudes and policy preferences toward Latin America. The policy implications of ideologically divided public opinion for US immigration reform are also addressed.

En el presente artículo se analizará el modo en que las Fuerzas Armadas de Argentina utilizaron el ámbito educativo durante la última dictadura militar en Argentina a fin de consolidar su visión sobre la coyuntura social y política de ese país a través de la formación de futuras generaciones. Con este objetivo se prestará principal atención a las transformaciones en la enseñanza de la historia nacional y más concretamente, en la enseñanza de la historia reciente. El estudio de las transformaciones impulsadas por el régimen dictatorial en la enseñanza de la historia de Argentina posibilitará la reflexión acerca del modo en que se promovió mediante la enseñanza de la historia nacional una reorganización moral y educativa como parte esencial de las herramientas transformadoras que habilitaron y desplegaron la dictadura militar entre 1976 y 1983.

In this article, I explore the creation of the Mexico pavilion that opened in 1982 at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center theme park in Orlando, Florida. I show how designers created a representation of Mexico intended to be recognizably authentic to EPCOT Center visitors by drawing on established touristic images of Mexico in the United States. I then discuss Disney's decision to hire Mexican American artist Eddie Martinez to oversee the design of the pavilion's main attraction, a boat ride through Mexican history and culture. Specifically, I examine Martinez's involvement in the Goez Art Studio and Gallery in East Los Angeles to explain how Mexican Americans gained cultural authority as interpreters of Mexico in the United States. Finally, I show how the pavilion reflected ways in which Mexican Americans read and reconstructed established visions of Mexico in the United States, particularly in relation to pre-Columbian cultures.

In this article, I compare the attitudes to the recent democratic transition in Latin America in La fiesta del Chivo, the 2000 novel, and in its 2005 film adaptation. In the novel, Mario Vargas Llosa describes how Joaquín Balaguer, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's puppet president, put on the mask of a democrat, absorbed Trujillo's absolute power, and went on to serve as president for twenty-four years. In the novel, Balaguer is a stand-in for the Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, who prepares to serve as president for a third term in a row. Why do Balaguer and the artificial democratic transition that he enacted go missing in the film adaptation? The film details instead the crimes of the dictator Trujillo and his inglorious end. I argue that the director adapts the novel's message to a changed political reality in Peru: the dictator Fujimori fled, and the newly elected president is restoring democratic institutions and government accountability.

In the village of Ch'umil in northern Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, competing heritage claims to Maya archaeological sites and artifacts politicize the region's cultural and ecological landscapes. Using a geographical understanding of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991), I ethnographically unpack Ch'umil residents' definitions of cultural and ecological heritage that reflect village-level histories of living and laboring in forests and archaeology sites surrounding Ch'umil. Villagers' definitions of heritage contrast sharply with the spatial claims made by global heritage advocates who campaign to designate the region as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Analyzing the politics of scale underpinning these conservation practices reveals that when global heritage advocates speak on behalf of a universal humanity, they often render local-level heritage claims invisible and illegitimate. This article urges heritage managers and cosmopolitan theorists who debate the ethics of mitigating global and local heritage claims to reconsider this spatial binary altogether.

Ethnographic research has established the centrality of markets to Andean rural livelihoods, but understandings of fairness and different market actors' power relations in these markets are less clear. Using ten months of ethnographic research in Bolivia's Altiplano, this case study reveals strategies and moral narratives of peasant producers and market traders in an emerging pea market. While traders attempt to deceive producers, the latter have their own means of exploiting competition between traders and advancing their own moral narratives about how the market should operate. Thus, the market is an economic field and a moral one, and traders can be punished for excessively prioritizing profit maximization. The moral nature of the pea trade should be viewed not as a quirk of Andean culture but as an illustration of the embeddedness of all markets and the need for critical examination of the moral economies of market interactions across the capitalist world.

This article analyzes the image of Brazilian Indigenous minority groups as a figurehead in media discourse, which is based on racializing logics that celebrate historical performances of Indigeneity but minimize attention to the political activity and grassroots movements of the existing population. Using cultural studies as a starting point, this study draws on Diana Taylor's understanding of identity and on postcolonial thinker Homi Bhabha's theorizing on nation to conduct a reading of discourses and performances of Indigeneity as part of cultural memory. I propose an analysis of the limited scenarios allowed in this construction of a nation in Brazilian media outlets, which often claim there is political motivation for identity and are incapable of dealing with contemporary Indigenous groups. Overall, this analysis highlights the need to rethink the way we discuss ethnic identity so as to foster a larger dialogue about identity, heritage, and minority cultures in such a way that we avoid falling into a paradigm of modernization and acculturation when discussing ethnicity, and to promote better understanding of the different ongoing political and cultural movements in contemporary Brazil.

Este artículo discute la relación entre el Fondo Común Municipal (FCM) y la convergencia de ingresos municipales en Chile entre 2001 y 2011. Utilizando cuasi experimentos y ecuaciones dinámicas, se demuestra que este instrumento no tiene un efecto significativo en la velocidad de convergencia. El débil desarrollo de la descentralización y los bajos incentivos de las municipalidades para obtener fuentes propias de financiamiento, podrían promover diversos comportamientos estratégicos que distorsionarían el efecto redistributivo del FCM en las municipalidades, disminuyendo su impacto en la reducción de las disparidades territoriales en Chile.

In the past fifteen years, many Latin American cities have sponsored programs that promote reading through their city's public transportation systems. This article analyzes two of these programs, Libro al Viento in Bogotá, Colombia, and Santiago en 100 Palabras in Santiago, Chile, framed with examples from Buenos Aires, Argentina. These programs insert stories into public space to enhance social interaction and develop a positive sense of local belonging. Literary reading is harnessed as a socially embedded practice that can facilitate change, in response to previous periods of censorship and repression under dictatorship (in Chile) and political violence (in Colombia). Shifting the view of reading from an individual to a collective experience rather than focusing on functional literacy, these initiatives put literary reading to the service of civic and community development. The programs emerged during a period of increased investment by municipal governments in public space, including renovated subways and new bus rapid transit systems, and rely on a combination of public and private sponsorship. The intricate relationship between urban infrastructure and literary culture in these contemporary programs challenges but also perpetuates the role of the “lettered city.”

This article examines the effect of perceived ethnoracial identity on electoral politics in the Dominican Republic and provides an explanation for the low salience of race and ethnicity in political behavior in Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, individuals will deal with ethnoracial discrimination and stratification through exit rather than voice —that is, they will reclassify their way out of marginalized ethnoracial categories instead of voting for candidates or parties that share their ethnoracial identities. This tends to be the case where ethnoracial group identity is inchoate and group boundaries are permeable. I also argue that where ethnoracial group loyalties are weak and immigration is widespread, citizens may emphasize national origin over race or ethnicity. Findings from an original field experiment and survey in Santo Domingo show that candidates did not consistently support candidates that shared their ethnoracial attributes, but they did slightly favor candidates perceived as white. Respondents strongly discriminated against candidates of Haitian origin.