Este texto tiene un carácter exploratorio a partir de la experiencia etnográfica del levantamiento indígena y popular que paralizó Ecuador en el mes de junio de 2022. Con epicentro en Quito, la capital del país, dicha movilización fue la más larga de todas las que ha protagonizado el movimiento indígena ecuatoriano desde la década de 1990. El artículo reflexiona sobre las características de esta última protesta; señala sus diferencias con respecto a las movilizaciones de los años noventa y de los primeros años de este siglo XXI; y plantea algunas hipótesis sobre la nueva generación de líderes que están al frente de la organización indígena más importante del país, la CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador). El argumento principal que se explora es que la adopción de discursos y repertorios de protesta más orientados hacia una dimensión clasista que hacia una puramente etnoidentitaria ha sido la clave en la mayor capacidad de convocatoria del movimiento. Esto se reflejó en el masivo respaldo al llamado de la CONAIE contra las medidas neoliberales adoptadas por el Gobierno nacional.

This article examines the social and political impacts of President Nayib Bukele’s 2023 opening of a megaprison in El Salvador by analyzing his government-funded international public relations campaign. We chronicle how the design of the prison, along with policies for arresting, detaining, and prosecuting Salvadorans for alleged gang-related crimes, offers a mirage of transparency that obstructs the visibility needed to protect the human rights of Salvadorans. Our analysis places empirical accounts of conditions in El Salvador in conversation with the largely Twitter/X-based public relations campaign announcing the new prison. We show how the campaign works to justify an alarming degradation of democratic principles and practices during the current régimen de excepción (state of exception). Bukele rationalizes an iron-fist-style approach to gang violence while simultaneously silencing political opposition and obfuscating the expanding scope of state human rights violations. We argue that the trade-offs being made in El Salvador between increased safety for some and human rights violations for others ultimately contribute to the corrosion of democracy. Moreover, we discuss how Bukele’s tough-on-crime populism simultaneously produces and exports an “authoritarian playbook” for wider regional democratic erosion in line with Bukele’s model.

Esta conversación surge de una frustración compartida por una antropóloga y un historiador a propósito de la reacción de muchos científicos sociales ante su interés por estudiar las clases medias en América Latina. En ella proponemos explorar cómo el estudio de las clases medias y el uso de esta categoría como constructo histórico proporciona una perspectiva enriquecedora para comprender las múltiples y diversas formas de poder y dominación en la región, desafiando ciertas interpretaciones hegemónicas. Se proponen, además, tres ejes temáticos de discusión: lo político y coyuntural, lo historiográfico-metodológico y lo histórico político. Estos ejes permiten anudar puntos cruciales de conexión entre el estudio histórico de las clases medias y un análisis crítico interdisciplinario e interseccional sobre procesos históricos más amplios.

This article analyzes historical claims about the Quyllurit’i pilgrimage (Cuzco, Peru). First, it discusses its relationship to Inka rituals and the Tupac Amaru rebellion. It shows that the way the rebellion affected the Ocongate church in 1782 was crucial for the later inscription of 1783 as the year of the pilgrimage’s miracle. It then analyzes how the conflicts between the Ocongate merchants and the hacienda Lauramarca over the commercialization of colono alpaca wool in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are related to the creation of the first written account of the pilgrimage’s origins. This account was written in 1932, using the local archive shaped by the Great Rebellion, but without any evidence of anything that happened in 1783 in what is now the Quyllurit’i shrine. As the pilgrimage expanded beyond Ocongate, scholars who studied the pilgrimage in the 1970s used this first account to hypothesize its relationship to the Great Rebellion within tropes of indigenous cultural authenticity, continuity, and resistance.

This article analyzes structures of feeling among the generation of trauma carriers who grew up under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Drawing on interviews with thirty-seven cultural producers (including filmmakers, novelists, visual artists, and memory activists), we shed light on the generational memory work involved in processing cultural trauma, emphasizing the emotional force behind memory transmission in postconflict societies dealing with legacies of terror. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s notion of structures of feeling, we explore how the generational memory of children during Pinochet’s dictatorship is shaped by melancholic intergenerational identification with past struggles. This intergenerational bond is characterized by melancholic affect in representing the previous generation, which is rooted in experiences of state violence and resistance and plays a key role in processing historical trauma and shaping contemporary social critique in postconflict Chile.

En el marco de la Comisión para el Acceso a la Verdad, el Esclarecimiento Histórico y el Impulso a la Justicia de las Violaciones Graves a los Derechos Humanos Cometidas de 1965 a 1990, creada en 2021 en México por decreto presidencial, entre los años 2022 y 2024 se organizaron foros regionales donde se presentaron diversos testimonios sobre la violencia política infringida durante dicho período histórico. Desde un enfoque que comprende a los mismos como prácticas narrativas de memoria y resistencia que son significadas desde el presente, este artículo aborda los testimonios narrados durante el Diálogo por la Verdad en el Estado de Chiapas. El análisis muestra formas de visibilización de la agencia política indígena en contexto contrainsurgente.

The women who have participated in memory-building projects in Colombia have shaped the formation of collective memory in important ways in official and informal projects. They have emphasized and highlighted their gendered experiences of the Colombian conflict and gained valuable experience working with and inside organizations. These experiences have provided women with a sense of feminist empowerment. The case of Medellín is particularly interesting because the city’s women have been engaged in constructing collective memory for decades, long before the ratification of the 2016 Peace Accord. As such, these women had a valuable skill set that they were able to employ in collaboration with the official transitional justice mechanisms supported by the state after 2016. The experience of having their voices recognized and acknowledged has raised the feminist consciousness of the women of Medellín involved with these projects. The Medellín case is somewhat distinct from other Latin American cases of women peace and human rights activists because Colombian women have had several decades to learn the importance of including and even centering their intersectional gendered perspectives. The women of Medellín are not unique among Latin American women, but they have had a significant head start.

Elections in many contemporary Latin American democracies unfold in a setting that complicates traditional political communication strategies. Indeed, many countries in the region are characterized by weak political parties, high levels of institutional distrust, and growing disdain for political elites. While a large body of literature has sought to explain which factors weaken parties and increase institutional distrust, less attention has been paid to the question of how these characteristics shape political communication. Drawing on the content of television advertisements created for Chile’s constitutional plebiscite campaigns, and original interviews with the creative and political teams that designed the ads, we explore how each side communicated with voters; the issues they focused on; and to what extent they relied on partisan, policy, generic, or emotional appeals. The analysis identifies important changes in messaging across the three electoral contests and probes an explanation for this variation. We find that in the absence of partisan messages, the constitutional campaigns relied first on policy-based appeals but then transitioned to generic appeals, ultimately opting for “antipolitics” messaging. These changes resulted from the expansion of the electorate and growing distrust in the constitutional convention. The analysis also underscores that pro–status quo plebiscite campaigns are more likely to deploy negative emotional language than campaigns centered on change.

In Indigenous Lenca communities of western Honduras, craft production is a central livelihood that has economically supported artisan households for generations. In some communities, crafts like pottery are regarded as cultural patrimony, with socioeconomic and spiritual value that reflects Lenca identity. However, perceptions of which crafts are “Lenca tradition” and what it means to be a Lenca person in Honduras today vary greatly among the general public. Narratives of indigeneity are heavily shaped by the state and national tourism industry. Promotion of Lenca crafts, considered most commercially appealing, dominates national tourism marketing but often misaligns with how Lenca artisans define themselves and their craft practices. Constructions of “national identity” distance artisans from directly interacting with tourists and disconnect them from controlling the promotion of their respective identities and livelihoods. Through a comparative analysis of craft practices in five Lenca communities that are variably defined as “traditional” either in the tourism industry or by artisans themselves, this work asks: How have state-constructed definitions of “tradition” shaped public understanding of Indigenous Lenca identity in Honduras, from the colonial period to the present? How do these misconceptions impact Lenca artisans participating in the national tourism industry? How do Lenca artisans themselves define their contemporary craft practices and react against inaccurate identity narratives affecting their livelihoods? Drawing on neoliberal multiculturalism, this project explores complex and changing definitions of “tradition” and reactive strategies artisans use to maintain craft livelihoods and reclaim ownership of what it means to be an Indigenous Lenca artisan in Honduras today.

In 2019 and 2022, Indigenous leaders mobilized rural comunas in general strikes that forced the national government of Ecuador to negotiate the terms of newly introduced fiscal and policy measures. These mobilizations came despite long-term demographic decline in these same rural comunas. Further, the ministries charged with granting this authority to comunas today exercise little oversight. Why, then, has the comuna persisted as the preferred form of local organization amid widespread shifts to postagrarian ways of life? We have approached this problem through field research in over a dozen rural comunas, a review of comuna registrations, interviews with comuna leadership, and intergenerational dialogues among comuna members. In practical terms, we find comuna leadership consolidating an agenda focused on infrastructure development in the place of activism for land or the pursuit of agricultural investments. At the same time, it is through rituals of registration and management that local authorities not only find legitimacy but also secure a measure of “cultural autonomy” insofar as comuna members associate the disciplined fulfillment of procedures with the historical expansion of social rights. As the younger generation pursues nonagrarian careers, older comuna members underscore the mutuality of comuna life and lay out a moral purpose and a pathway that in effect centers state procedure as essential for indigenous autonomy.

Political engagement in highland Peru has changed over the past half century along with the economic, policy, and institutional environment, as demonstrated through this case study. Allpachico, a legally recognized peasant community (comunidad campesina), participated in a national peasant association that actively defended shared livelihood interests based on small-scale farming in the 1970s. Political and economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s undermined both protests and organizations. In the current neoliberal era, the state has promoted large-scale mineral extraction and municipal government while sidelining peasant farming and the comunidad. With few local jobs and scant returns to agriculture, Allpachiqueños have migrated to Lima, but many maintain their houses in the community. Despite the increasing diversity among Allpachiqueños, they continue to unite for projects for the common good, now manifesting in lobbying the local municipal government for improvements to urban structure. A communal habitus persists even though the scope of what is possible to demand has shifted from livelihood to lifestyle concerns.

Chile has undergone two consecutive failed attempts at constitutional replacement (2021–2022 and 2023), positioning it as a globally interesting case. While existing literature identifies macropolitical and institutional factors underlying such failures, certain key causal mechanisms remain unexplored. This article addresses the central question of why majority-controlling political actors, aware of the need for broad national consensus, ultimately fail to achieve it. Framed as a two-level process—one at the elite negotiation level and the other at the electoral ratification level—this study elucidates the mechanisms operating at each stage that contributed to this dual failure. By analyzing these dynamics in detail, the article offers valuable lessons for future efforts to replace a constitution in a democratic setting.

The authors examine the 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 US censuses to identify demographic characteristics of children who resided in public and private institutions for minors, with special attention to patterns of racial segregation and exclusion. The article focuses on public and private institutions founded exclusively to serve children and youth and also on correctional institutions for children and adults. The authors found racial segregation in private institutions, underrepresentation of children of color in both private and public institutions, and overrepresentation of boys of color in correctional institutions for minors and adults. They also identified a historical pattern, with few exceptions, of excluding girls of color from all types of public and private institutions.

Populist presidents often mobilize popular support for their institutional reforms by claiming to promote a democracy that is genuinely responsive to the majority. However, most of the time, they are doing the exact opposite—undermining democracy. Voters, then, should decide whether to support the incumbent’s undemocratic behavior and reforms. In this article, I argue that voters will embrace the gradual subversion of democracy when they approve of the executive’s performance in office, particularly when the populist president is a prominent and influential figure. I test this argument using survey data collected in Mexico under Andrés Manuel López Obrador—an influential populist leader who enjoyed widespread approval and advanced autocratization in the name of democracy. The results indicate, indeed, that López Obrador’s presidential approval not only reinforced the belief that Mexico is a democracy but also increased voters’ support for the president if he decided to disregard the rule of law, curb the opposition’s rights, or cancel the separation of powers. These findings suggest that populist presidents might be able to persuade voters to embrace the subversion of democracy disguised as democratic improvement.

Indigenous peoples, rural and peasant populations, and Afro-descendants have increasingly disputed mining and other extractive ventures in the territories they inhabit in various regions of Latin America. This article introduces an open-access digital and bilingual curated repository of data that compiles legal and legal-like actions by various actors in the context of paradigmatic conflicts over mining in Central America and Mexico. It situates the relevance of this digital resource against the background of the increasing global recourse to law in socioenvironmental conflicts—a tendency that may be defined as the juridification of environmental politics. The article also places the database in relation to key debates in digital humanities and discusses potential uses as well as future developments and challenges to expanding and improving such a resource.

The present article focuses on a place-based repertoire of contention known as Punto de Encuentro, designed to defend a rural-urban territory against racialized processes of economic globalization and armed conflicts in Colombia. The article suggests that citizenship becomes meaningful when Afro-Colombians exercise their rights to their territories. To support this argument, the article delves into the 2017 civic strike mobilizations that reclaimed the city space of Buenaventura as a territory of life where Afro-Colombians can live with dignity and in peace. As the article describes, the civic strike activists created four crucial social participation processes: the crafting of a social movement, the production of a place-based knowledge from past struggles, the construction of a common ethical and political framework, and Puntos de Encuentro as places of social and cultural resistance.

In this article, we argue that Brazilian tan lines constitute a new site of race and class struggle on and over women’s bodies. Popular in Rio’s socially and geographically marginalized periphery, fita (electrical tape) bikinis leave sharp and shocking tan lines that call attention to the contrast between lighter and darker skin. Brazil’s funk music sensation Anitta brings this aesthetic practice to the global stage as part of her brand, disrupting hegemonic beauty norms and attracting attention for herself and her fans. Through the public display of their bronzed sensuality, Brazilian women accrue “visibility capital” as they create new forms of bodily value and self-esteem in what we call a look economy. While global beauty hierarchies continue to promote and glorify whiteness, Anitta and fita tanners simultaneously turn heads (in person), attract eyeballs (online), and lay claim to the right to represent Brazil.

A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfers (CCTs) can shift voters’ electoral choices. Yet there remains a mismatch between reliance on aggregated municipal data and individual-level theories focused on retrospective rewards or reduced vulnerability to clientelism. Since CCTs also produce plausible spillovers on nonbeneficiaries, verifying who reacts, and how, is crucial to understanding their electoral effects. To empirically unbundle individual and spillover effects, the analysis exploits plausibly exogenous variation between beneficiaries of Brazil’s Bolsa Família and those on the waiting list. The evidence suggests that CCTs strengthen beneficiaries’ attitudes against clientelism, but they vote no differently than nonbeneficiaries. However, spillovers are strong: As CCT coverage expands, both beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries turn against local incumbents. This pattern is inconsistent with existing theory, which relies on either polarization or positive spillovers. Instead, I propose a theory of collective confidence derived from strategic voting incentives in which CCT expansion fortifies all voters in resisting clientelism.