This article compares and evaluates performance of two main current socialist economic-social models. One is Cuba’s central plan characterized by state large enterprises predominant over the market and private property, with mild market-oriented structural reforms that are ineffective in generating sustainable socioeconomic development. The other model is the successful Sino-Vietnamese “socialist market,” typified by small, medium, and some large private enterprises and the market, all predominant under a decentralized plan (a guideline rather than a central plan). In this the state regulates the economy and controls the largest enterprises. The article identifies the characteristics of the three countries, addresses potential barriers to comparison, and summarizes a history of the reforms and their five key economic policies in the three countries. It also assesses performance based on a selection of the twenty most relevant and comparable indicators, elaborates a composite average to rank the three countries, and discusses potential methodological issues. The conclusions summarize the results of the comparison, recommend reforms for Cuba based on successful Sino-Vietnamese policies, and outline the research agenda for the future. The article is an important contribution to the fields of comparative economics systems, socioeconomic development, methodology, and Latin American studies.

How do mothers deal with chronic violence and the constant presence of guns in their neighborhoods? How do they build situated meaning and discursive practices out of their experiences and relationships with armed actors? We compare the experiences of women in two poor and working-class neighborhoods in Caracas. Through this comparative ethnographic project, we aim to show how, in the midst of state-sponsored depredation and with an overwhelming presence of guns in their lives, women use their cultural roles as mothers to perform everyday forms of resistance vis-à-vis the different armed actors that impose their presence in the barrios. In the mothers’ daily struggles, dramatic discursive actions—from more openly oppositional ones, such as shouting, scolding, and talking, to more hidden ones, such as both “circulating gossip” and “captive gossip,” to more vulnerable ones, such as whispering—are main resources in the micropolitics of their neighborhoods. Our findings suggest that strategies are context dependent and most likely vary according to numerous factors, including the history of civic organizing, policing practices, and the type of armed actor with whom they cohabitate in their neighborhood.

Diverse elements have driven inflation in the Cuban economy in the early 2020s, but the big-bang devaluation of the peso in 2021—the key measure that unlocks monetary reform—stands out as the main determinant. Analysis indicates that the inflation rate ranged between 174% and 700%, well above the government’s 2021 consumer price index estimate (77%) and closer to the deflator of household consumption derived from the national income accounts (442%). Even with this larger inflation, there is room for a real depreciation of the peso in the short term. The relative rise of tradable goods prices and incomplete pass-through from the exchange rate to inflation create new incentives and enhance financial transparency in the short term. However, the absence of sufficient structural reforms, the complex macroeconomic scenario, and the persistence of high fiscal deficit, inflation, and devaluation of the peso in the informal market after 2021 put most of the potential benefits of the monetary reform at risk. Monetary instability is a deep, continuing problem.

El presente artículo examina el fenómeno del homicidio en Colombia y busca comprender las condiciones de vulnerabilidad que afectan al homicidio en las ciudades colombianas. A través de un enfoque teórico y metodológico basado en la vulnerabilidad se analizó dicha relación entre la violencia homicida con los mercados ilegales, los mercados laborales pauperizados y la repartición de la riqueza. La muestra se compuso de las treinta y dos ciudades capitales departamentales de Colombia. Se usaron herramientas estadísticas multivariadas (PLS-SEM) para analizar la relación entre estos factores y el homicidio. Los hallazgos sugieren que los bajos ingresos, la falta de empleo, la desigualdad y la violencia están asociados con un mayor riesgo de homicidio.

This article examines the construction of a multifaceted collective memory through the main female protagonists in Song of the Water Saints (2002) by the Dominican American author Nelly Rosario. By bridging memory studies, Latin American studies, and Afro-Latinx studies, the book examines racial and gendered constructs, intergenerational struggles, US imperialism, and Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship to show the interconnected nature of memorial articulations for subaltern subjects. Through a literary close reading, this article dissects the lives of three generations of female characters—Graciela, her daughter Mercedes, and Graciela’s great-granddaughter Leila—and how they challenge, reinforce, and suffer racialized, political, and gendered subjectivities. By examining intersectional and historical trauma simultaneously, this study contributes to the field of memory, Afro-Latinx, and Latin American studies by showing the muddled construct of memory for Dominicans and Dominican Americans.

This article examines the adaptive market hypothesis in the five most important Latin American stock indices. To that end, we apply three versions of the variance ratio test, as well as the Brock-Dechert-Scheinkman test for nonlinear predictability. Additionally, we perform the Dominguez-Lobato and generalized spectral tests to evaluate the Martingale difference hypothesis. Moreover, we consider salient news related to the plausible market inefficiencies detected by these four tests. Finally, we apply a GARCH-M model to assess the risk-return relationship through time. Our results suggest that the predictability of stock returns varies over time. Furthermore, the efficiency in each market behaves differently over time. All in all, the analyzed emerging market indices satisfy the adaptive market hypothesis, given the switching behavior between periods of efficiencies and inefficiencies, since the adaptive market hypothesis suggests that market efficiency and market anomalies might coexist in capital markets.

This study seeks to determine the impact of remittances and nonlabor income on the duration of unemployment, and therefore on the hysteresis phenomenon in Colombia for the period between January 2010 and January 2021. The long-term unemployment rate in Colombia (LAPU) is calculated, and a vector autoregressive (VAR) model is subsequently estimated to evaluate the impact of remittances and nonlabor income on the LAPU. The results suggest that the increase in nonlabor income significantly affected LAPU in Colombia in the period analyzed. The growth of remittances instead turned out to positively and significantly impact LAPU only during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This suggests that remittances have become a fundamental income in times of crisis that allow for financing the search for work for a longer period of time, thus increasing the duration of unemployment and generating a hysteresis effect.

This article explores the workings of social and territorial stigma among residents of an stigmatized neighborhood in Santiago de Chile in the context of nationwide conflict. By attending to the narratives of social organizers, it shows how stigma framed the narratives of the Chilean revolt of October 2019 produced by two female organizers older than fifty years without tertiary education. It argues that, for those with less educational and political resources, stigma can help think through a social conflict by translating broader political issues into everyday life experiences and can both constrain and enable different forms of engagement in the revolt. The narratives were obtained by ethnographic interviews carried out in a broader project of the unfolding of the unrest in Santiago’s peripheries between November 2019 and July 2020.

This article examines the encounter of activists from the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) with African, African American, and Asian anticolonial intellectuals through the League Against Imperialism (LAI), founded at the 1927 Brussels Congress. Drawing from LADLA’s newspaper El Libertador, letters from LADLA leaders, and speeches and resolutions in the LAI archive, it studies how exchanges begun in Brussels influenced debates in radical circles in the Americas. The article builds on extant scholarship and makes two primary interventions. First, it argues that a closer look at LADLA’s participation in the LAI shifts the traditional understanding of interwar Latin American regionalist ideologies, which LADLA rejected in favor of drawing connections to anti-imperialist movements around the world. Second, it argues that the exchange in Brussels influenced LADLA to eventually expand its initial focus on Indigenous struggles to think more critically about Black communities, including Black migrant labor, in political organizing.

El siguiente artículo propone una revisión de los presupuestos temáticos y estructurales utilizados en las novelas de Lina Meruane Las infantas (1998) y Fruta podrida (2007), desde una perspectiva socioliteraria basada en algunas ideas desarrolladas por Slavoj Žižek en sus distintos análisis sobre la violencia, la ideología y el poder. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es descubrir si, a modo de actualización, Fruta podrida supone una reformulación de las premisas antisistema que movilizan a los personajes en torno a puntos centrales en ambas novelas como las corporalidades, la marginalidad o el exceso escatológico, entre otros.

This article explores the spatial politics of Peru’s gastronomic revolution and corresponding efforts to territorialize Peruvian agricultural products by tracing the spatial dynamics of quinoa’s trajectory from highland dietary staple to coveted national food. Efforts to codify Peru’s national cuisine have involved mapping ingredients and dishes onto specific regions while dramatically reshaping agricultural production geographies and culinary topographies. Because of quinoa’s success as a high-value export crop, the Peruvian altiplano is no longer perceived as a landscape useful exclusively for livestock pasture and mining. Instead, it is imagined as agriculturally productive: the country’s quinoa heartland. At the same time, quinoa’s trajectory illuminates spatial contradictions in the gastronomic boom’s purported objectives and its tangible effects. The revalorization of quinoa led to a geographical expansion of its production outside the high Andes, undermining the spatially bound concepts of authenticity promoted by gastronomic leaders in Peru. Broadly, efforts to commercialize marginalized food products and their corresponding regions can at once reconfigure territorial discourses in important ways, reinforce long-standing geographical inequalities, and generate contestations of the geographic imaginaries of food and nation.

This article explores Mexico’s overlooked importance in the Central American armed conflict, the limits of its influence, and its connection to the late Cold War. Mexico’s policy toward Central America attempted to prevent an American and Cuban military intervention in the area and avoid a Cold War confrontation along its southern border. Mexico attempted to build detente in the region and prevent a global escalation of tension between the great powers. Meanwhile, it sought to propose a “third way” for the revolutionary actors shaped after Mexico’s political system and history. Studying Mexico’s efforts to create detente-like arrangements can shed light on the efforts of peripheral actors and their projects to influence the international system despite the actions of hegemonic powers.

This article explores how Francisco de Aguirre used the Copiapó Valley encomienda to negotiate political power during the transition from conquest to colonial rule in northern Chile. Simultaneously, we analyze the circumstances of how a native society was incorporated into the Spanish Empire after a decade of fighting and resistance on the fringes of the empire. The strategic use of the fear of native rebellions to close the road from Peru to Chile gave Aguirre enough power to negotiate an important political position, which in the future would clash with the colonial authorities. Copiapó Valley’s peripheral location in the southernmost Atacama Desert constituted a political gray zone for the colonial administration. This space contributed to consolidating power for Aguirre and enabled locals some negotiation power within the possibilities afforded by the colonial system.

Mikhuspa ukyaspa ima tinkuyku is Quechua for “eating and drinking, we encounter one another.” Food and drinks have historically been important mediators in the development and renewal of relationships of reciprocity in the Andean region. This article demonstrates how contemporary Andean people continue to use food and drinks to mediate encounters where knowledge transmission and community building take place. In particular, the article explains how members of a dance troupe in Cusco, Peru, use food and drinks to integrate its new members into the dance troupe, teach them the traditions of the group, and explore and (re)define their relationships of reciprocity. By sharing food and drinks, dancers connect their Quechua heritage with their lived experiences to explore and (re)shape their own identities. The article employs a research methodology that centers local epistemology, particularly the Quechua concept of tinkuy, defined as an encounter of different elements that creates something new.

This study reconstructs remittances from different regional haciendas to the main treasury of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, located in Buenos Aires, between 1800 and 1810. It estimates the extent and periodization of the decline of the situado of Potosí during the last colonial decade, determining whether the contributions from regional treasuries made up for it. It also estimates the impact of transfers on the regional treasuries. By drawing on the accounting books of various treasuries, the article identifies the main mechanisms that the Royal Treasury of Buenos Aires implemented to seize surplus resources of the viceroyalty’s interior haciendas at the end of the colonial period. The ability of the Royal Treasury to seize those surpluses was significant and implemented through various mechanisms of the ancien régime.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Alzate family, of Medellín, Colombia, grasped the magnetism of the Natural Man (a malleable myth with porous edges that combines both the Edenic and the cannibalistic visions of indigenous peoples) and its economic potential and orchestrated a family craft business of fake pre-Columbian pottery. They created pieces that would engage in dialogue with collectors’, anthropologists’, museums’, and tourists’ desires and imaginaries, as well as authenticity criteria, about indigenous pre-Columbian peoples. This article shows the relationship between these forgeries’ production, circulation, and consumption and the ways Latin American indigenous peoples have been conceived of by others. Moreover, this research stresses how authentic fakes, together with official and popular discourses and images, certain exhibition and validation rhetorics, and other mises-en-scène construct what is sacralized as uncontaminated, original, and traditional. Such fakes operate politically by undermining social hierarchies linked to essentialized race and identity.

This article explores contemporary discourses of deviation in early twentieth-century Colombia. Through analysis of a presidential assassination attempt in 1906, known as the Crime of Barrocolorado, it discusses the social construction of notions of criminality and danger in the light of the history of emotions. The assault on the president triggered a series of commentaries and reactions that revolved around anarchism, medicine, and criminology, topics that are dissected and connected here in search of their emotional components. In this way, the study brings forth the importance of emotions in the construction of social and political ideas in the past.

Este ensayo discute el arte de Brus Rubio, artista amazónico huitoto-murui, quien en sus trabajos informa cómo su cultura entiende su historia, incluidos sus momentos de explotación, tradiciones, creencias y presente. Para ilustrar las diferencias entre sus obras y el discurso de la Amazonía más común en el pasado, incluyo, también, una discusión sobre la manera en que se caracterizaba a las poblaciones indígenas en la zona a principios del siglo XX —en torno, principalmente, al debate de los crímenes del Putumayo. En Rubio se evidencia un choque entre “historias oficiales” —saberes verticales que explican una realidad sin ser parte de ella ni aceptarla como interlocutora válida— y la de la comunidad —reflejado en estas obras como un saber horizontal, en que se incluye las voces que suelen no ser escuchadas. Así, la obra de Rubio presenta un nuevo modelo para entender la historia y el presente de la Amazonía.

Este artigo busca compreender o legado autoritário brasileiro e sua relação com os recentes episódios de censura às artes. Para tal, o estudo realiza um levantamento das produções culturais censuradas e/ou alvo de ataques de grupos conservadores no período entre junho de 2017 e março de 2020. Foram consideradas as produções que se enquadraram em três critérios: foram alvo de ação conservadora de julgamento ou criminalização da arte; tiveram repercussão nacional na mídia mainstream; envolveram reação e/ou mobilização em defesa das manifestações artísticas. Argumentamos que o atual cenário de ruptura democrática aflorou o passado autoritário do país, o que contribuiu por desencadear diversos episódios de censura. Partimos dos conceitos de autoritarismo, censura e liberdade de expressão aliados à análise de conteúdo para empreender tal reflexão.

Studies of the “people’s spring,” the period of unprecedented social mobilization in Argentina in the early 1970s, frequently omit rural women even though they were among the sectors that rallied for social justice. In most of Latin America at the time, rural women were prevented from equal participation in social movements; in contrast, rural women in northeastern Argentina actively participated in the Movimiento Agrario Misionero (MAM). This article uses letters and newspaper articles in Amanecer agrario to answer two questions: First, what did womanhood mean for rural women in northeastern Argentina during the early 1970s? Second, what did the “people’s spring” mean for these same women? Although the movement split, with women from small farms generally wanting MAM to expand its efforts to broader societal problems and women from medium farms generally wanting MAM to stay focused on the concerns of Misiones farmers, throughout it all, rural women communicated their hopes, desires, and concerns for themselves, their families, and their communities.