A key element in the historically unprecedented advances in indigenous women’s political representation under Bolivia’s Evo Morales’s administration (2006–2019) was the influence that women coca growers played in the rural women’s indigenous organization known as the Bartolinas. Driven in no small measure by their resistance to the US-financed War on Drugs in the Chapare region, the cocaleras became both Bolivia’s strongest indigenous women’s organization and its most dedicated advocates for indigenous women’s rights. This article contends that intersectionality—of gender, class, and indigenous identities—is at the heart of understanding indigenous women’s transformation from “helpers” of a male-dominated peasant union to government ministers in the space of ten years. Not only did they effectively deploy chachawarmi, the Andean concept of gender complementarity, to advance their rights in a way consistent with their cultural identity and political loyalties, but they also benefited from the gains of a predominantly urban middle-class feminist movement even though they formally rejected the feminist movement’s composition and perceived orientation.

Indigenous peoples in Latin America have produced some of the region’s strongest and most enduring social movements, drawing on a diverse repertoire of contention to pursue their goals. In the twenty-first century, social media have transformed the landscape of collective action, compelling Indigenous movements to navigate the evolving dynamics of digital platforms. There is an ongoing debate in the literature regarding the role of social media in mobilization. But we know relatively little about how social media fit into the tactical repertoires of Indigenous actors and what tasks these platforms are used for. This article addresses this gap through an examination of how Indigenous actors use social media during protest events. We conducted a comparative analysis of social media content produced by Indigenous social movement organizations during major protest events in three countries from 2018 to 2019. We find that the most common functions include activating supporters and exposing state violence. These functions support several of the organizations’ core mobilization tasks by providing actors with tools to complement collection action.

Current research on Brazilian vacant buildings where squatters live tends to paint a familiar picture: the occupants are united in struggle, resolute in their understanding that squatting is within their constitutional, legal, and natural rights. However, drawing on new data from Rio de Janeiro, we argue that researchers have an incomplete understanding of this process. Our findings reveal considerable ideological variation among occupants regarding their rights to occupy abandoned property, including their understandings of private ownership versus the social function of property. In our analysis, we explain this ideological variation through what we call “moral economies of occupation.” Specifically, we focus on lived experiences of losing or being excluded from secure housing and the remembered role that the state played in that lived experience. This, we argue, is crucial for understanding why some occupants believe in their rights to squat while others doubt it.

José Maldonado and Manuel José Castellanos were two Cuban pardo veterans who, in search of military status, rank, and salary, petitioned the court, making arguments that would prove subversive to the racial order. As Maldonado justified his entitlement to rank and Castellanos his to rank or salary, they recovered family narratives dating from when pardo and moreno commandants had enjoyed real power. Under the guise of symbolic recognition, new regulations greatly reduced black militias’ autonomy. These militiamen acted as de facto historians, legal interpreters, and activists during times of institutional and historical change. While they did succeed in recording their families’ past, their petitions for rank and salary were denied.

This article explores “religious racism,” or discrimination against devotees of African-derived religions in Brazil, as a broader pattern of structural racism rooted in racialized religious alterity, Afrophobia, and the epistemic divide between religion and nonreligion. The term religious racism has been proposed by some devotees and anti-racist activists to emphasize that Afro-Brazilian religions are uniquely targeted in ways other non-Christian religions are not. Unlike religious intolerance, the term religious racism explicitly connects discrimination against Afro-Brazilian religions to colonization, color or racial hierarchy, and anti-Black prejudice. This article clarifies the ideological groundings of religious racism that encourage Neo-Pentecostal extremists to pursue “order and progress,” as the national motto suggests, through physical violence.

At a time when Cuban immigrants are seeking political asylum at historically unprecedented rates, most press and scholarly accounts consistently mirror earlier portrayals of Cubans’ mass exodus from the island in one key aspect: they ascribe to refugees a primarily economic reason for their decision to leave and offer little discussion of political factors. To illuminate the need for such analysis, this article examines the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, when approximately 125,000 Cubans, most of them thirty years old or younger, left Cuba. No other exodus of Cubans was more demonized than the Mariel, both by Cuba’s supporters and leadership and by exile opponents of the communist state. Exploring how the intensification of ideological criteria for inclusion in the Cuban Revolution undermined the quality of Cubans’ liberation under socialism prior to Mariel, this article explores state policies and the deep politicization of everyday life and identity. Key political factors explain many young people’s alienation and the degree to which the Cuban state sanctioned and directed extreme measures of repression to discredit those who wanted to leave as lazy, sexually degenerate escoria (human trash).

This article analyzes the sketches of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and fellow guerrillas made by the Argentine Ciro Bustos during his captivity in Bolivia in 1967. Many of the references to Bustos in biographies of Guevara and in writings about the latter’s failed Bolivian campaign depict Bustos, because of those sketches, as “the man who betrayed Che.” The tensions and discrepancies in those accounts suggest instead that Bustos’s sketches should be seen not merely as documents of betrayal but as artworks embedded in the period’s wider revolutionary visualities. The article argues that Bustos’s drawing of Che Guevara, who is usually depicted visually as “heroic guerrilla” or “saintly martyr,” introduces an affective, intimate gaze of armed struggle in all its complications.

At the crossroads of scholarship scrutinizing digital religion and pilgrimage, this article analyzes the use of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram by devotees of Our Lady of Juquila, a Marian image in Oaxaca, Mexico. It combines the close reading of content and descriptive online ethnography with web scraping and data analysis. The article sketches these platforms’ role in pious expression, virtual community building, pilgrimage group communication, and devotional marketing, tracking closely the intertwining of religion and commerce, particularly religious tourism promotion. The data reveal that Facebook serves as the most popular platform for Juquila’s devotees, thanks to its open, pro-sharing design and flexibility regarding group formation. As a result, it has become the essential hub of devotee expression. YouTube, thanks to its particular affordances, has become an ideal niche for narrating travel to Juquila’s shrine and a showcase of the networked nature of devotion as users borrow tools, tropes, and expressive techniques from many sources, religious and secular. Instagram is the least popular platform among devotees because its design is less open and amenable to group communication. It does, however, facilitate both smaller, more intimate community formation, as well as shallow but significant community building on popular public pages run by religious tourism promoters hosting attractive, easily sharable, free stockpiles of images, memes, and devotional slogans. In the end, social media use appears to be stoking pilgrimage in Mexico and setting the stage for significant cultural change in the future as new tools, emerging shared devotional aesthetics, and media logics reshape religious expression and devotee communication. It is also becoming an unparalleled historical archive of popular religious culture.

This article examines the emergence, consolidation, and influence of the Cristianos por el Socialismo (CpS, or Christians for Socialism) movement as part of the overlapping political and religious transformations of the 1960s. The election of self-declared Marxist Salvador Allende in 1970 inspired a sector of the clergy to creatively converge the tenets of Marxism and Christianity. The notion of transcendence and the construction of a “New Man” appealed to the utopian aspects of both religious and Marxist thinking. The Chilean CpS had a Latin American impact, as evidenced by the First Latin American Encounter of Christians for Socialism in Santiago in 1972, and a transnational impact, as seen in the formation of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians in 1976. The analysis of CpS and its influence within and outside of Chile reveals an often-overlooked component of the Chilean road to socialism: the work of Catholics in Marxist-Christian rapprochement.

La cifra de desaparecidos en Argentina motiva debates recurrentes. Durante la última dictadura militar (1976–1983) sus denunciantes elaboraron diversas cifras y estimaciones pero el número de 30 mil desaparecidos adquirió un carácter canónico. Tras retornar la democracia, la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas registró 8.960 casos. En los años noventa, en un contexto de impunidad, grupos de la sociedad civil elaboraron sus propias cifras y en los dos mil el Estado ofreció nuevos registros. El resurgimiento del negacionismo y la relativización del crimen revitalizaron este debate. Este trabajo historiza las cifras de desaparecidos y víctimas de desaparición forzada elaboradas por diversos actores y propone una aproximación académica sobre el tema. Comprende a estas cifras en su doble dimensión: como fruto de la elaboración de conocimiento sobre las desapariciones y como expresión de los combates por la memoria sobre las violaciones a los derechos humanos sucedidas en el país.

This essay reviews the following works:

Indianidad evanescente en los Andes de Ecuador. By Víctor Bretón Solo de Zaldívar. Quito: FLACSO Ecuador; Ediciones Universitat de Lleida, 2022. Pp. xxxix + 372. €22.00 paperback, free downloadable e-book. ISBN: 9789978676301.

Indigene Autonomie in Lateinamerika: Zwischen Selbstbestimmung und staatlicher Kontrolle. By Michael Fackler. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2021. Pp. 322. €60.00 hardcover, €60.00 e-book. ISBN: 9783837657982.

Indigene Resistencia: Der Widerstand der bolivianischen TIPNIS-Bewegung. By Maximilian Held. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2022. Pp. 276. €45.00 hardcover, free downloadable e-book. ISBN: 9783837663686.

La revolución del arcoiris y su escala de grises: Movimiento indígena del Ecuador. By Stalin Herrera Revelo. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2022. Pp. 135. Free downloadable e-book. ISBN: 9789878133799.

Indigenous Civil Society in Latin America: Collective Action in the Digital Age. By Pascal Lupien. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. vii + 284. $29.95 paperback, $99.00 hardcover, $22.99 e-book. ISBN: 9781469672625.

¡Así encendimos la mecha! Treinta años del levantamiento indígena en Ecuador: Una historia permanente. Edited by Floresmilo Simbaña, Adriana Victoria Rodríguez Caguana, and Mateo Martínez Abarca. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala, 2020. Pp. 220. $15.00 paperback, free downloadable e-book. ISBN: 9789942884107.

This essay reviews the following works:

Health in the Highlands: Indigenous Healing and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador. By David Carey Jr. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Pp. viii + 384. $34.95 paperback, $85.00 hardcover, $34.95 e-book. ISBN: 9780520344792.

Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1910–1945. By A. Kim Clark. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023. Pp. 200. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822947820.

La última guerra del Siglo de las Luces: Revolución Liberal y republicanismo popular en Ecuador. By Valeria Coronel. Quito: FLACSO Ecuador, 2022. Pp. xiv + 419. $18.00 paperback, $12.00 e-book. ISBN: 9789978676202.

Global Governance of the Environment, Indigenous Peoples and the Rights of Nature: Extractive Industries in the Ecuadorian Amazon. By Linda Etchart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Pp. xxxv + 270. $109.99 paperback, $109.99 hardcover, $84.99 e-book. ISBN: 9783030815219.

In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador. By A. J. Faas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. Pp. ix + 246. $34.95 paperback, $120.00 hardcover, $34.95 e-book. ISBN: 9781978831568.

A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador. By Christopher Krupa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 328. $39.95 paperback, $99.95 hardcover, $39.95 e-book. ISBN: 9780812225129.

Transforming Ethnicity: Youth and Migration in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes. By Jorge Daniel Vásquez. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. xix + 105. $44.99 hardcover, $34.99 e-book. ISBN: 9783031300967.

Extractivism and Universality: Inside an Uprising in the Amazon. By Japhy Wilson. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2023. Pp. x +132. $128.00 hardcover, $42.36 e-book. ISBN: 9781032386126.

This essay reviews the following works:

Orozco: The Life and Death of a Mexican Revolutionary. By Raymond Caballero. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. vii + 343. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780806157559.

Unrevolutionary Mexico: The Birth of a Strange Dictatorship. By Paul Gillingham. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 464. $42.30 hardcover. ISBN: 9780300253122.

Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency, and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926–1929: Fighting Cristeros. By Mark Lawrence. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. viii + 196. $112.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9781350095458.

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910–1940. By Nathaniel Morris. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 371. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780816541027.

Los Mensajeros de Job: Otra cara de la revolución en Yucatán. By Marisa Pérez de Sarmiento. Mexico City: UNAM, 2017. Pp. 292. $77 hardcover. ISBN: 9786073032995.

Edición y comunismo: Cultura impresa, educación militante y prácticas políticas (México, 1930–1940). By Sebastián Rivera Mir. Raleigh, NC: Editorial A Contracorriente, 2020. $30.00 paperback. Pp. ix + 286. ISBN: 9781945234781.

In Combat: The Life of Lombardo Toledano. By Daniela Spenser. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020. Pp. xiv + 422. $28.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781642593341.

For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. By Robert Weis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 200. $80.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108493024.

This essay reviews the following works:

Dealing with Peace: The Guatemalan Campesino Movement and the Post-Conflict Neoliberal State. By Simon Granovsky-Larsen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 275. $70.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781487501433.

Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954. By Patricia Harms. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2020. Pp. xii + 409. $75.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826361455.

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala: Cultural Collapse and Christian Pentecostal Revitalization. Edited by John P. Hawkins. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research, 2021. Pp. xxv + 448. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826362254.

Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala. Edited by Stephen Henighan and Candace Johnson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. v + 263. $36.95 paper. ISBN: 9781487522971.

Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution: A History of Religious and Social Reform, 1920–1968. By Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 254. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780268104412.

Cuando el indio tomó las armas: La vida de Emeterio Toj Medrano. By Emeterio Toj Medrano and Rodrigo Véliz Estrada. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021. Pp. 504. $354.00 paper. ISBN: 9786073043175.

This essay reviews the following works:

Cooking Technology: Transformations in Culinary Practice in Mexico and Latin America. Edited by Steffan Igor Ayora-Díaz. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. vii + 196. $39.95 paperback, $114.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781474234689.

Taste, Politics, and Identities in Mexican Food. Edited by Steffan Igor Ayora-Díaz. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xii + 228. $42.95 paperback, $131.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781350066670.

Food and Revolution: Fighting Hunger in Nicaragua, 1960–1993. By Christiane Berth. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 283. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780822946045.

Sancocho de Mico. By Felipe Castilla Corza. Bogotá: Universidad de la Sabana, 2018. Pp. 82. $13.68 paper. ISBN 9789581204458.

Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile. By Joshua Frens-String. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. ix–xiv + 322. $34.95 paperback, $85 cloth. ISBN: 9780520343375.

Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru. By María Elena García. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. $30 paper, $85 cloth. Pp. ix + 320. ISBN: 9780520301900.

Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal. By Hanna Garth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. Pp. ix + 232. $26 paperback, $105 cloth. ISBN: 9781503611092.

Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity. By John Hartigan Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Pp. xxviii + 346. $27.00 paperback, $108.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780816685356.

Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity. By Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 388. $40 paperback. ISBN: 9781469608822.

The Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People. By Gerardo Otero. Translated by Russ Davidson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 256. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477316986.

Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba. By Louis A. Pérez Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xii-xiv + 264. $35.50 paperback, $99 cloth. ISBN: 9781469651422.

Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica. Edited by Stacey Schwartzkopf and Kathryn E. Sampeck. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. xvii + 220. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477313879.

Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands. By Linda J. Seligmann. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. xvi + 201. $25 paperback. ISBN: 9780252086885.

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States. By Heidi Tinsman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 363. $29.95 paperback, $104.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780822355359.

Migrant Marketplaces: Food and Italians in North and South America. By Elizabeth Zanoni. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 273. $32.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780252083297.