We analyze how new technologies can be used to foster individual engagement that limits deliberation and reduces people’s capacity for political action within parties. We present the results of an analysis of the case of the Argentinean Propuesta Republicana (PRO). Using data from in-depth interviews with key actors—party elites and political consultants—we show that new technologies helped to mobilize almost 1 million volunteers in presidential elections, without transforming them into party stakeholders. This incorporation, though successful for organization and mobilization, reinforced the existing distribution of power within the party, by activating new adherents without engaging them in a collective organizational structure.

The relationship between Zapatismo and women’s liberation has sparked heated debates between academics and activists alike. Although the Zapatistas’ official communiqués have promoted gender parity, criticism has been aimed at Zapatista fiction for accentuating gender stereotypes and for contradictions regarding women’s rights. This article discusses the children’s books Habrá una vez (2016) and Hablar colores (2018), encountered during archival and ethnographic research in Zapatista territory, and examines how “Zapafiction” embraces contradiction as constructive revolutionary politics. The children’s books analyzed here depict ecofeminist characters, including Defensa Zapatista (an approximately eight-year-old schoolgirl), Gato-Perro (a cat-dog symbolizing nonbinary identities), a disabled horse, and Loa Otroa (embodying queer identities). Instead of solving contradictions, I argue that these characters reject the romanticization of progressive political movements while viewing Zapatismo as the venue for advancing dignity as a way of life (jch’uleltik). Through the concept of imperfect politics, Zapafiction leverages the principle of caminando y preguntando, “walking, we ask questions,” to reimagine the governing structures of the organization through fiction, moving beyond theoretical doctrines on how politics should be.

Marking the bicentennial of US-Brazil relations, this article assesses the fraught inception of the bilateral relationship and where it stands today. The United States, fueled by the ideals of its revolution, viewed itself in the nineteenth century as a beacon of democratic principles beset by powerful European discontents. Brazil’s position as an independent nation with deep ties to Portugal bred suspicion. The promulgation of Brazil’s 1824 Constitution offered a modicum of common ground, creating space for a political rapprochement culminating in formal recognition. The relationship thereafter was proper but distant. Brazil today is not a rival of the United States, but some worry that it has not done enough to distance itself from Washington’s antagonists. Indeed, while friendship and commonality have been common bywords of leaders in both nations, suspicion and ambivalence have been ever-present. If anything, the surprise is that both countries remain as close as they are today.

This essay reviews the following works:

Del antiperonismo al individualismo autoritario: Ensayos e intervenciones (2015–2023). By Ezequiel Adamovsky. Buenos Aires: Unsam, 2023. $18.00 ebook. ISBN: 9789878938494.

¿Por qué ganó Milei? Disputas por la hegemonía y la ideología en Argentina. By Javier Balsa. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica Argentina, 2024. $10.99 ebook. ISBN: 9789877194739.

El sueño intacto de la centroderecha. By Mariana Gené and Gabriel Vommaro. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2023. Pp. 320. $22.24 paperback. ISBN: 9789878012193.

El peronismo de Cristina: El Frente de Todos, entre la dolorosa unidad, la escasez y la guerra interminable con el establishment. By Diego Genoud. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2021, Pp. 336. $8.84 paperback. ISBN: 9789878010755.

El loco: La vida desconocida de Javier Milei y su irrupción en la política argentina. By Juan Luis González. Buenos Aires: Planeta Argentina, 2023. $4.99 ebook. ISBN: 9789504982890.

El kirchnerismo desarmado: La larga agonía del cuarto peronismo. By Alejandro Horowicz. Buenos Aires: Ariel, 2023. $10.99 ebook. ISBN: 9789878318608.

La hegemonía imposible: Veinte años de disputas políticas en el país del empate. Del 2001 a Alberto Fernández. By Fernando Rosso. Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2022. $7.99 ebook. ISBN: 9789876146531.

Está entre nosotros: ¿De dónde sale y hasta dónde puede llegar la extrema derecha que no vimos venir? Edited by Pablo Semán. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2023. $6.95 ebook. ISBN: 9789878012957.

¿La rebeldía se volvió de derecha? Cómo el antiprogresismo y la anticorrección política están construyendo un nuevo sentido común. By Pablo Stefanoni. Siglo XXI Editores, 2021. $9.99 ebook. ISBN: 9789878010533.

Puerto Rico’s seven hundred miles of coastline are the most dynamic, biodiverse, heavily populated, and hotly contested part of the archipelago. Hurricanes beat the island from the ocean side while luxury tourist developments encroach from the land. These forces converge in the zona marítimo terrestre (ZMT), which includes littoral areas and navigable portions of waterways in which, according to Puerto Rican law, tides and the biggest waves from storms can be felt. This clunky legal term, notable for its shifting and affective dimension, has become part of everyday conversations and creative practices in contemporary Puerto Rico, but no academic study has considered its cultural significance. This article brings together insights from the fields of environmental justice and environmental humanities to propose that works of art and literature in the ZMT are autogestiones acuáticas, or independently imagined and managed shoreline activities that contest coastal displacement and articulate a decolonial sense of place within nonsovereign dynamics.

This article examines a rare sixteenth-century manuscript lectionary (Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Manoscritti, AH._X.9) containing Nahuatl translations of Biblical texts, long associated with Bernardino de Sahagún and the Franciscan evangelization project in New Spain. Through interdisciplinary analysis combining ethnohistory, art history, and conservation, the authors illuminate Indigenous roles in colonial knowledge production. The lectionary, in effect, offers a core sample of the intellectual labor of Indigenous peoples involved in its creation: They served as scribes and Biblical translators, as papermakers, and possibly as bookbinders. Unique among the corpus of Nahuatl lectionaries, this manuscript was created from two types of native paper, one for the main text and another for binding reinforcement. Considering the paper as the outcome of pre-Hispanic technologies allows us to expand the field of Indigenous knowledge manifested in the Christian book to include material knowledge, as well as theological and linguistic knowledge. This trinity of knowledge allows us to link the lectionary to Sahagún’s Nahuatl sermonary (Newberry Library Ayer MS 1485) produced at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. The lectionary’s preservation of neophytes’ alphabet practice offers singular evidence of the pedagogical practices at the Colegio.

This essay is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave at the annual reception of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) at the American Historical Association meetings in New York City in January 2025. It was written as a keynote address connected with my acceptance of CLAH’s Distinguished Service Award for 2024. I focus here on what have been the two most critical and intertwined commitments of my roughly five-decade career as a historian of Mexico and Latin America: broad intellectual collaboration across disciplines, academic generations, and national boundaries, and a two-way notion of mentoring. Apart from my own monographic research, these commitments have played out in an array of editorial arenas—academic journals, multi-authored collections, a massive country-level compendium of documents, and a long-running book series—that have remained integral to my intellectual growth and figured importantly in the mentoring of my doctoral students and their mentoring of me. My career trajectory in this regard may well have been a road less travelled and one certainly not for everyone; still, there is a case to be made for giving greater emphasis to broader collaborative strategies of research and dissemination in our work as scholars and teachers of Latin America’s past.