This article analyzes the structure and the stability of Brazilian public attitudes toward foreign policy issues. It argues that Brazilian attitudes on foreign affairs are more structured and stable than has previously been believed. It asserts that deep and historical beliefs about Brazil’s role in international affairs, such as pacifism and protagonism, are responsible for creating reasonably consistent and stable public attitudes toward specific foreign policy preferences. The argument builds on the model proposed by Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley (1987) in their study on the coherence of US public opinion on foreign policy issues. The article uses survey data from two national samples undertaken in 2014 and 2019 (about 1,800 respondents each). The samples are part of the “Brazil, the Americas and the World” project, which conveys information about Brazilian public opinion on foreign policy issues.

This article reevaluates often-made assumptions of retrospective voting and voter irrationality in studies of voting behavior in political contexts colored by haphazard, apolitical events. To do so, it leverages the quasi-random 2015–2016 Zika epidemic in Brazil and the accompanying priming of “women’s issues” relating to infant health to empirically assess whether exposure to the virus increased political support for female candidates in the 2016 Brazilian local elections. Results of difference-in-difference analyses suggest that high incidences of the virus in the months immediately preceding the election increased female candidates’ vote shares. Conflicting with theories of irrational retrospective voting, the results are consistent with an understudied theory of rational prospective voting. Robustness and falsification tests and dubious support for alternative explanations lend additional support to the argument. The research contributes to an elucidation of both the complex calculations underlying voting behavior and the conditions favorable to female candidates’ electoral prospects.

Las Cortes influyen de forma directa e indirecta en el proceso legislativo. Hasta el momento, los estudios sobre Congreso en Colombia se han enfocado mayoritariamente en la influencia directa de la Corte Constitucional. Este artículo explora su influencia indirecta. Usando la Reforma Penal Militar de 2012 como estudio de caso, mostramos cómo la Corte cambia los cálculos y comportamiento de los congresistas. Debido a su independencia y accesibilidad, la Corte Constitucional amplía el abanico de estrategias disponibles a las coaliciones minoritarias de oposición en el Congreso. Aquí identificamos dos prácticas de obstrucción: invitar a la Corte (mediante la motivación o aprovechamiento y la documentación de vicios de procedimiento), y demandas ante la Corte. Juntas, estas estrategias les permiten a oposiciones minoritarias bloquear leyes adversas y avanzar su agenda en el proceso de construcción de políticas públicas.

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have spread rapidly around the world since the 1990s. In the Americas, the proliferation of trade agreements with countries from within and beyond the region have resulted in a “spaghetti bowl” of overlapping rules and regulations, some of which address behind-the-border issues such as investment, competition, labor, and environmental standards. Earlier research has linked trade agreements to increased foreign investment inflows. This article argues instead that the effects of PTAs on FDI depend on the domestic institutional capacities of member countries. Domestic institutions condition the benefits and effectiveness of PTAs by influencing governments’ external credibility as well as their ability to implement the agreements they sign. The empirical findings show that weak state capacity exacerbates the spaghetti-bowl effects of multiple, overlapping agreements. Moreover, it is not the quantity but the quality, and more specifically, the depth of trade agreements that matters for attracting FDI.

This article works to understand what happens to women working in the public sector, especially women in traditionally male occupations, such as the police. Moreover, in Latin America and in most developing countries, it is crucial to examine the interaction between precarious jobs and gender discrimination. The article finds that gender discrimination is accentuated in organizations with precarious labor conditions. To illustrate this problem, it examines the police force in Mexico. This is a crucial case study for understanding the phenomena: Mexico is an extremely violent country, but conditions in the police force are highly precarious for workers. Moreover, this labor precariousness has an even greater impact on female police officers. In addition to working in a profession characterized by instability, they also face structural barriers to the performance of their duties and greater obstacles to entry and promotion within the organization. Furthermore, women face the glass ceiling as well as a hostile work culture that expresses itself through discrimination.

For the first time within living memory, the rural Roman Catholic parish of Talavera in the south-central Peruvian Andes features only native clergy. By placing the Talaveran Catholic priests in theological and historical context, this article shows how this current generation of Catholic priests in Talavera must be understood within the context of the post–Vatican II Catholic Church in Latin America, which explicitly encouraged the training of native clergy and recast the relationship between the sacramental and the human as mutually compatible and constitutive. Although such initiatives are generally associated with liberal parishes unlike Talavera, the nouvelle theology that shaped Vatican II nevertheless meant that the dual nature of the Roman Catholic priesthood—as concretely human but also ineffably sacramental—fundamentally shapes the lay relationship with the Catholic priests in Talavera, too. The resulting tension between the priest as a sacramental mediator to the divine and the priest as a human man is continually renegotiated by laity and clergy alike, and is essential to understanding Catholic priests in Latin America and how lay parishioners experience the Catholic priesthood.

Mano de obra is one of the most studied novels written by the Chilean author Diamela Eltit (b. 1949). Scholars have paid particular attention to the novel’s socioeconomic commentary at the level of the plot. They have not, however, conducted a close examination of how the novel expresses this criticism through its narrative form. Nor have they explored the relationship of the novel’s literary techniques to the politico-cultural context that it portrays. This article engages in a close reading of the literary techniques that Mano de obra employs to depict a certain social context. It also addresses some politico-cultural implications of the novel’s narrative form in the context of Chile’s contemporary society to demonstrate that the novel foregrounds a sense of pessimism and hopelessness about linking Chilean workers’ subversive past with their submissive present.

This article analyzes Jorge Luis Borges’s views on race, as he expressed them in personal conversations with Adolfo Bioy Casares and vis-à-vis his fiction. In the conversations recorded by Bioy Casares, Borges emerges as a man of his time and his social class in the worst sense possible: racism, bigotry, and his self-constructed whiteness inform almost all of his controversial statements on blackness and on Brazilian people. The article aims to expose a cohesive racial discourse underlying not only Borges’s private conversations but also his narratives. The goal is to challenge the enduring views of Borges as a “universal” author, dissociated from history and society.

Este artículo analiza la prensa satírica producida por obreros tipógrafos en Chile entre finales del siglo XIX y principios del siglo XX. A partir de la revisión de archivos de prensa y utilizando la conceptualización sobre “cultura popular ausente”, los principales resultados revelan características diferenciadas del objeto de estudio respecto de la autorrepresentación de lo popular y del rol jugado en la esfera pública, que por un lado lo apartan de la sátira chilena del siglo XIX centrada en las disputas de los partidos oligárquicos, al tiempo que visibilizan un sujeto popular (emisor y receptor) más complejo y paradójico que el de la prensa obrera dominante, generando hallazgos relevantes para un debate actual sobre los otros populares, el modo en que han permanecido ocultos históricamente y cómo traerlos a escena para la reflexión sobre proyectos políticos del presente.

En la primera parte de este artículo trazaremos la genealogía de la razón comunal indígena, la cual busca rastrear las condiciones de emergencia, existencia y transformaciones discursivas y de poder que hicieron posible plantear teóricamente la comunalidad como forma de vida de los pueblos indios en Oaxaca, México. Posteriormente, haremos dialogar el pensamiento comunal indígena con el giro descolonial latinoamericano, para examinar los aportes que puede generar la comunalidad en el diseño de una salida viable a la crisis civilizatoria del actual sistema-mundo moderno-colonial-capitalista. Finalmente, vamos a analizar los alcances epistémicos y políticos de la opción comunal para contribuir a la descolonización de las ciencias sociales y la construcción inter-civilizatoria del pluriversalismo transmoderno descolonial como nuevo proyecto universal de vida.

Este ensayo reseña los siguientes trabajos:

The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. By Orlando Bentancor. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 416. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822944607.

Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. By Allison Margaret Bigelow. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 376. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9781469654386.

Living in Silverado: Secret Jews in the Silver Mining Towns of Colonial Mexico. By David M. Gitlitz. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 432. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826360793.

Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World. By Kris Lane. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 272. $32.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780520280847.

Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, México, 1546–1810. By Dana Velasco Murillo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 308. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780804796118.

Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. By Lisa Voigt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 235. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477310977.

This essay reviews the following works:

The Oxford Handbook of the Brazilian Economy. Edited by Edmund Amann, Carlos R. Azzoni, and Werner Baer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 813. $150.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190499983.

História económica de la Argentina en los siglos XX y XXI. By Claudio Belini and Juan Carlos Korol. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2020, rev. ed. Pp. 7 + 396. ARS $1,290. ISBN: 9789878010380.

State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: The Rise and Fall of the Developmental State. Edited by Agustin E. Ferraro and Miguel A. Centeno New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. ix +436. $140.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107189829.

The Political Economy of Taxation in Latin America. Edited by Gustavo A. Flores-Macías New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp vii + 282. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108474573.

The Public Good and the Brazilian State: Municipal Finance and Public Services in São Paulo, 1822–1930. By G. Anne. Hanley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 290. $60.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780226535074.

Feeding the World: Brazil’s Transformation into a Modern Agricultural Economy. By Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp viii + 468. $32.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781108460972.

The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000. By John Tutino. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp 512. $39.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780691174365.

This essay reviews the following works:

The El Mozote Massacre: Human Rights and Global Implications. By Leigh Binford. Revised and expanded ed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Pp. 400. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780816532162.

Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory. By Erik Ching. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 362. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469628660.

The Politics of Transitional Justice in Latin America: Power, Norms, and Capacity Building. By Ezequiel A. González-Ocantos Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. $18.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781108799089.

The Feathers of Condor: Transnational State Terrorism, Exiles and Civilian Anticommunism in South America. By Fernando López. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Pp. 375. £57.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781443897099.

Eruptions of Memory: The Critique of Memory in Chile, 1990–2015. By Nelly Richard. Translated by Andrew Ascherl. Pp. xxvi + 189. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Pp. 224. $22.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781509532285.

Exile, Diaspora, and Return: Changing Cultural Landscapes in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By Luis Roniger, Leonardo Senkman, Saúl Sosnowski, and Mario Sznajder. Pp. 304. $82.00 hardcover. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780190693961.

Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina. By Barbara Sutton. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. v + 325. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781479829927.

Memory, Truth, and Justice in Contemporary Latin America. Edited by Roberta Villalón. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Pp. vi + 274. $41.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781442267251.

This essay reviews the following works:

La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades. Edited by Melissa Castillo-Garsow and Jason Nichols. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016\. Pp. ix + 317. $89.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780814213155.

On Site, in Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina. By Kirstie A. Dorr Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 241. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822368670.

Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires. By Victoria Fortuna. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 256. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780190627010.

Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America. By Marcela A. Fuentes Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 164. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780472054220.

Power in Practice: The Pragmatic Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira. By Sergio González Varela. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Pp. viii + 166. $135.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781785336355.

Staging Brazil: Choreographies of Capoeira. By Ana Paula Höfling. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 225. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780819578815.

Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow. By Hannah Kosstrin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 255. $38.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780199396931.

The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles. Edited by Josh Kun. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Pp. vii + 303. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520294400.

The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History. By Pablo Palomino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 259. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780190687410.

Laban plural: Arte do movimento, pesquisa e genealogia da práxis de Rudolf Laban no Brasil. By Melina Scialom. São Paulo: Summus, 2017. Pp. 192. $8.99 e-book. ISBN: 9788532310712.

This essay reviews the following works:

Vulnerabilidad y violencia en América Latina y el Caribe: Paisaje cultural y diseño urbano. Edited by Markus Gottsbacher and John De Boer. Mexico City: Proyectos Estratégicos Consultoría; Siglo Veintiuno, 2016. Pp. 432. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9786070307447.

Violence and Resilience in Latin America Cities. Edited by Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt. London: Zed Books, 2015. Pp. ix + 195. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781780324562.

The Punitive City: Privatized Policing and Protection in Neoliberal Mexico. By Markus-Michael Müller. London: Zed Books, 2016. Pp. vii + 179. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781783606962.

Violence and Crime in Latin America: Representations and Politics. Edited by Gema Santamaría and David Carey Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. vii + 320. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780806155746.

Votes, Drugs, and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico. By Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xix+ 349. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781108795272.

Homicidal Ecologies: Illicit Economies and Complicit States in Latin America. By Deborah J. Yashar New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 250. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781316629659.

Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá. By Austin Zeiderman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 290. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822361626.