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.

Why do some voters believe that there is electoral fraud when this belief contradicts the best available evidence? While the literature on public opinion has explored misperceptions’ pervasiveness and the factors that contribute to them in advanced industrial democracies, the present study analyzes motivated reasoning among voters in a young democracy, Mexico. This study highlights the important role that partisanship plays in voters’ likelihood to believe the allegations of electoral fraud in the 2006 presidential election in Mexico, which continues polarizing both political elites and the electorate even today. To understand the mechanisms at work, this research finds that it is not voters lacking information but rather voters with high levels of affective polarization and conspiratorial thinking who are more likely to believe that there was electoral fraud. The study also includes a survey experiment that fact-checked the belief in the alleged electoral fraud. Consistent with motivated reasoning theory, MORENA partisans resisted efforts to reduce their misperception. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the conditions that make some voters hold misperceptions in young democracies.

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 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.

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.

Although a few historians have discussed the influence of Peronism in Chile, research has been guided mostly by diplomatic studies and political history, which, though important, are less convincing for historians interested in logics of media representation, particularly from the satirical press. This article explores visual representations of Argentina’s president Juan Perón (1946–1955) in the Chilean magazine Topaze. By discussing and contextualizing a series of images produced by Chilean cartoonists, this study provides new insights into the important role played by the press in shaping anti-Peronist sensibilities and discrediting Perón within Chilean domestic politics. Studying the impact of Peronism in the region—particularly in neighboring countries such as Chile—is useful for thinking about Peronism as a transnational phenomenon with multiple meanings outside Argentina.

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.

En este texto se analiza la relevancia del parentesco y la cultura familiar en la reproducción cultural de los Calós (Gitanos) que forman la comunidad de Ciudad de México. La metodología ha sido de orientación cualitativa empleando técnicas de inmersión antropológica. El objetivo es analizar cómo el sistema de parentesco se construye desde la genealogía como un constructo que permite la comparación cultural y corroborar el funcionamiento de una sociedad bilateral con un colorido patrilineal. Asimismo, se subraya la importancia de la preservación de la diferencia etnocultural, no solo a través de la organización social y familiar, sino a través de la endogamia sociobiológica. El hecho es que los Calós se sienten “un poco parientes entre sí”, aunque genealógicamente no lo sean. Esta lógica imprecisa de funcionamiento del sistema de parentesco plantea interesantes cuestiones al campo de los Romani Studies.

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.

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 artículo analiza la propuesta teórica del posjudaísmo articulada por el proyecto YOK en respuesta a la crisis del judaísmo institucionalizado en Buenos Aires, Argentina. Contrario a cualquier forma de pensar lo judío en términos tradicionales y normativos, el proyecto posjudío se planteó como una deconstrucción capaz de derribar los muros del judaísmo tradicional y, con el mismo movimiento, dar voz a aquellos judíos que no encuentran acomodo en las infraestructuras institucionales de la comunidad. Nuestra hipótesis es que su arquitectura conceptual, cuyo objetivo es conseguir la total liberación de las formas identitarias judías, termina legitimando una nueva servidumbre, esta es: la adaptación de lo identitario a la fluidez del mercado. Para demostrarlo, me detendré en reflexionar sobre cómo el posjudaísmo repiensa, desde el andamiaje de las filosofías posmodernas, la comunidad tradicional con el fin de proponer un judaísmo en las antípodas de este, un judaísmo basado en un trabajo de autocreación incesante que apele a lo plural, a lo abierto y a lo emancipado de toda norma y de todo dogma. Esto me permitirá demostrar cómo la autocreación es fruto de las dinámicas posmodernas de transformación de la subjetividad cimentadas sobre la emoción y la individualidad creadora.

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.

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.

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.

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 article examines three novels that use fiction to revise the figure of the Argentine author Leopoldo Lugones: Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial (1980), C. E. Feiling’s Un poeta nacional (1993), and César Aira’s Lugones (2020). These three novels present different portrayals of Lugones, which also mirror their opposing views of the Argentine literary tradition. Piglia, Feiling, and Aira look back at the so-called national poet when self-fashioning themselves as writers and outlining a literary project in a (post)dictatorial scenario. In a cultural field marked by the effects of state terror and neoliberal reform policies, these fictional renderings of Lugones become a means of reflecting on the political past and the future of literature. Ultimately, I argue that Respiración artificial, Un poeta nacional, and Lugones devise a figure of the Argentine author decoupled from the mission of consolidating a national identity that Lugones epitomized for nearly half a century.

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.