Indigenous peoples belong to the most underprivileged groups worldwide. To address this situation, countries in Latin America and beyond increasingly recognize Indigenous rights constitutionally. However, these constitutional rights are not implemented equally everywhere. This could relate to the corresponding ordinary law—or lack thereof. Here I ask, under which conditions are Indigenous peoples represented in ordinary legislation? To answer this question, I collected the original INDILEX dataset on the status of Indigenous peoples and their rights in the legislation of sixteen Latin American countries (1979–2018). Building on the political representation literature, I contrast descriptive representation with political allies, social movements, and favorable context factors as determinants of the substantive representation of Indigenous peoples. The analysis shows that leftist presidents and a broad constitutional mandate are key predictors of Indigenous rights legislation. The role of Indigenous civil society and democracy depends on the time frame and operationalization choice.

Centrándose en Brasil, este artículo examina los mecanismos coloniales de imposición de la identidad y estética hegemónicas que ocasionaron la invisibilización y silenciamiento de historias y saberes de los grupos colonizados ubicados en situación marginal. Se propone que, como respuesta a este proceso, las identidades marginadas utilizan herramientas insertadas en la estrategia decolonial —desprendimiento y desobediencia— para transgredir la lógica normativa hegemónica en la elaboración de su producción cultural. El texto analiza artistas, obras, acciones y eventos brasileños recientes que, mediante sus poéticas lograron pervertir y concienciar hacia la epistemología impuesta por la colonialidad. Se estudian propuestas transgresoras que se filtraron en las instituciones legitimadas, como las obras de Rosana Paulino, Denilson Baniwa o la exposición Queermuseu, así como otra nacida fuera de los límites institucionales —la pixação— que, debido a su fricción con el modelo social normativo, escapa a cualquier imposición reglamentaria.

This essay reviews the following works:

Reflections on Uneven Democracies: The Legacy of Guillermo O’Donnell. Edited by Daniel Brinks, Marcelo Leiras, and Scott Mainwaring. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 422. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 9781421414607.

Problems Confronting Contemporary Democracies: Essays in Honor of Alfred Stepan. Edited by Douglas Chalmers and Scott Mainwaring. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 487. $75.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780268023720.

The Resilience of the Latin American Right. Edited by Juan-Pablo Luna and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 377. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 9781421413907.

Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall. By Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán. Pp. xiv + 353 pages. $35.99 paper. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN: 9780521152242.

Democracy in Latin America: Between Hope and Despair. By Ignacio Walker. Translated by Krystin Krause, Holly Bird, and Scott Mainwaring. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 262. $38.00 paper. ISBN: 9780268019723.

It is a paradox that historians of the Mexican Revolution have paid so little attention to the complex social phenomenon that has come to be called caciquismo. Caciques—for the moment, let us identify them as local bosses, strongmen, or chiefs—were such a plague on the Mexican rural populace during the porfiriato that “Mueran los caciques!” took its place alongside “Tierra y libertad!” and “México para los mexicanos!” as the central rallying cries of the 1910 Revolution. Moreover, it is difficult to refute John Womack's proposition that to capture the intent of Madero's slogan “Sufragio efectivo y no reelección,” still the first commandment of the Institutionalized Revolution, it should properly be rendered: “A real vote and no boss rule.” Now, though only recently, a steadily increasing number of studies at the regional level by historians and social scientists is beginning to document that the epic Revolution found its energies in the small towns and villages and that the millions who fought, although primarily moved by the promise of land reform, were more immediately preoccupied with the related problem of breaking the political and economic stranglehold of the local power-brokers.

The creation of the Andean Pact in 1968 was accompanied by a chorus of enthusiastic official pronouncements and renewed scholarly interest in Latin American integration. In ensuing years, each new accomplishment and each new crisis in the Andean Pact has brought waves of official commentary and academic analyses.

Chile has a long tradition of collecting, publishing, and improving its historical statistics. The objectives here are to provide an introduction to the economic historical statistics of Chile since 1830 and guide the reader to their most significant primary and secondary sources. Mention is also made of attractive historical statistics research projects.

Los manuales de conducta surgieron durante el siglo XIX cubano como un instrumento de la élite criolla en ascenso, para imponerse como modelo de un sujeto nacional imaginado en construcción. Estos textos, también llamados de “urbanidad y buenas maneras” fueron importantes símbolos de las aspiraciones de la élite criolla, en tanto tecnologías para la conformación de un tipo de cuerpo —burgués, blanco, heterosexual, cubano— moldeado para habitar las nuevas configuraciones espaciales urbanas que trajeron consigo las tendencias modernizadoras de inicios de siglo. El presente artículo examina las formas sinérgicas en que los manuales de conducta, y su ideología motora, la urbanidad, se desarrollaron en estrecha relación con otra importante tecnología de gobierno y diferenciación de cuerpos en el espacio: el ornato. Bajo la premisa de adecentar, las políticas de ornato tenían como objetivo transformar La Habana en una elegante capital, colonial y moderna a la vez, concebida como una imagen limpia de referencias sensoriales a cuerpos negros y femeninos marginales. Al examinar las conexiones discursivas entre el ornato y la urbanidad se evidencian las formas en que la respetabilidad moderna burguesa se negociaba, no sólo en un plano simbólico sino también a través de la regulación de las sensaciones y emociones.

The Brazilian government's plans to build the Transamazon Highway from the Atlantic coast to the Peruvian border and to settle thousands of landless peasants along it created intense debate before the project's precipitous beginning. Critics of the road “that went from nowhere to no place” denounced it as economic folly, while champions of “national integration” saw it as a crucial step toward the economic and geopolitical unification essential to Brazil's realization of its “great nation” potential and toward alleviating some of its land-tenure concentration (Tamer 1970, Pereira 1971).

Este trabajo analiza de qué manera la guerra de Malvinas (Falklands) afectó los planes de la Internacional Socialista (IS) para consolidar un esquema de alianzas flexibles entre partidos políticos de distinta procedencia geográfica e ideológica como sostén de su expansión extra europea, en el marco de un entorno internacional cambiante. Se avanza en la caracterización de las posiciones adoptadas por los partidos políticos latinoamericanos y europeos miembros de la IS, profundizando en sus diferentes visiones del conflicto y evaluando qué impacto tuvo en las relaciones interpartidarias y en las estrategias regionales de la IS.

The Publication in 1960 of I. R. Lavretskii's “A Survey of the Hispanic American Historical Review, 1956-1958,” provided U.S. specialists in Latin American history with an abrasive introduction to recent Soviet historical scholarship in the Latin American area. Subsequent reviews by American and European scholars, together with further translations of pertinent Soviet writings, have helped to provide those lacking a knowledge of the Russian language with additional insight into the nature and scope of Latin American studies in the USSR. At the same time, however, the frequently opposing views of history held by Soviet historians and their western critics have greatly complicated the task of scholarly evaluation. On the one hand, Soviet historical scholarship has often been dismissed as “a branch of politics;” on the other, U.S. historians are said to “falsify and distort the historical truth in order to benefit imperialism.” In content and presentation, the Lavretskii article evinces both extremes.