In Bolivia, expectations for a decolonised society turned into a political crisis in the autumn of 2019. Discussing the limitations of progressive politics in cultivating democracy, this article identifies three narratives of authoritarianism – liberal democratic, developmentalist and colonial – which the opponents of Evo Morales use to frame their disillusionment with his rule. It argues that these multiple narratives lend meaning to contradictory experiences in a context in which hopes for a major decolonising state-transformation process have devolved into a deep polarisation of Bolivian society. The events in Bolivia are discussed in the context of rising authoritarianism throughout Latin America.

Cave carbonate mineral deposits (speleothems) contain trace elements that are intensively investigated for their significance as palaeoclimate and environmental proxies. However, chlorine, which is abundant in marine and meteoric waters, has been overlooked as a potential palaeo-proxy, while cosmogenic 36Cl could, in principle, provide a solar irradiance proxy. Here, total Cl concentrations analysed from various speleothems were low (3–14 mg/kg), with variations linked to crystal fabrics. High-resolution synchrotron radiation micro X-ray fluorescence (μ-XRF) trace element mapping showed Cl often associated with Na, Si, and Al. We propose that speleothems incorporate Cl in two fractions: (1) water soluble (e.g., fluid inclusions) and (2) water insoluble and strongly bound (e.g., associated with detrital particulates). However, disparities indicated that alternate unidentified mechanisms for Cl incorporation were present, raising important questions regarding incorporation of many trace elements into speleothems. Our first measurements of 36Cl/Cl ratios in speleothems required large samples due to low Cl concentrations, limiting the potential of 36Cl as a solar irradiance proxy. Critically, our findings highlight a knowledge gap into how Cl and other trace elements are incorporated into speleothems, how the incorporation mechanisms and final elemental concentrations are related to speleothem fabrics, and the significance this may have for how trace elements in speleothems are interpreted as palaeoclimate proxies.

Although black soil in northeast China undergoes severe erosion, the contribution of parent materials, mainly Quaternary loess and non-loess sediments, to soil erodibility remains unclear. Considering the inheritance of ferromagnetic materials by parent materials, changes in magnetic parameters can successfully determine soil erodibility on a regional scale with a close climatic background. Here, we analysed the magnetic indicators of 142 samples from the black soil horizon formed on loess and non-loess sediments, covering areas of severe and slight erosion in the region to determine the effects of parent materials on the erodibility of black soil in northeast China. Both low-frequency magnetic susceptibility and frequency magnetic susceptibility (χfd) were proportional to the decrease in erosion rate due to erosion-induced leaching of ferromagnetic materials, and the change in χfd was narrow for black soil with loess parent materials, corresponding to relatively low soil erodibility. Compared with loess, the addition of soil organic matter could stabilise soils against erosion, thereby inducing a decrease in the erodibility of black soil formed on loess. Additionally, sustainable soil management policies to protect black soil from further erosion are necessary and urgent under the pressure of maintaining high grain yields and preventing erosion in northeast China.

Carbon isotope analysis of pedogenic carbonate (δ13CCarb) and soil organic matter (δ13CTOC) is widely applied in reconstructions of terrestrial paleovegetation. The δ13C of different archives is considered well matched and equally reflects the proportion of C3/C4 plant biomass covering the soil profile. However, modern soil and paleosol sequences provide substantial evidence that δ13CCarb and δ13CTOC do not always match, raising doubts about the accuracy of quantitative C4 plant reconstructions. Here we report paired δ13C records of pedogenic carbonates and organic matter occluded within carbonate nodules from the Shaozhai section in the central Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP). The δ13CCarb record exhibits a positive anomaly and exceeds the theoretical fractionation range with the coexisting δ13CTOC record during the expansion of C4 plants. The possibility of contamination by detrital carbonates and atmospheric CO2 affecting δ13CCarb was ruled out based on the morphological features, mineral fractions, and geochemical composition of carbonate nodules. Our study suggests that the enhanced respiration of C4 plants during pedogenic carbonate precipitation may have caused positive shifts in δ13CCarb records, supporting the hypothesis that the discrepancy in carbon sources explains the δ13CCarb positive anomaly. Thus, the δ13CCarb could reflect the maximum relative abundance of C4 plants during their metabolic peaks.

This essay reviews the following works:

Dealing with Peace: The Guatemalan Campesino Movement and the Post-Conflict Neoliberal State. By Simon Granovsky-Larsen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 275. $70.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781487501433.

Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954. By Patricia Harms. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2020. Pp. xii + 409. $75.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826361455.

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala: Cultural Collapse and Christian Pentecostal Revitalization. Edited by John P. Hawkins. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research, 2021. Pp. xxv + 448. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826362254.

Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala. Edited by Stephen Henighan and Candace Johnson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. v + 263. $36.95 paper. ISBN: 9781487522971.

Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution: A History of Religious and Social Reform, 1920–1968. By Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 254. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780268104412.

Cuando el indio tomó las armas: La vida de Emeterio Toj Medrano. By Emeterio Toj Medrano and Rodrigo Véliz Estrada. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021. Pp. 504. $354.00 paper. ISBN: 9786073043175.

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.

A partir de las series fotográficas Padre Patria (2014–2019) y Vírgenes de la Puerta (2014–2016), de Juan José Barboza-Gubo y Andrew Mroczek, este ensayo reflexiona acerca de la identidad de las mujeres trans en el Perú desde la sexualidad, el mestizaje y la colonialidad del poder. Padre Patria ofrece una narrativa visual de los crímenes de odio hacia la comunidad LGBTI en diferentes lugares del país. En Vírgenes de la Puerta se propone un nuevo modelo de feminidad a través de la apropiación de íconos religiosos como la Virgen María. A partir de enfoques decoloniales, feministas, de diversidad sexual y biopoder, este trabajo indaga sobre la reformulación del retrato fotográfico de las mujeres trans a través de la estética mariana y la violencia patriarcal. La dimensión política de este proyecto fotográfico busca visibilizar las experiencias de las mujeres trans en la actualidad.

A pesar de su abarcadora influencia, La ciudad letrada de Ángel Rama (1984) ha sido sometida en los últimos años a una intensa crítica que ha cuestionado la relación demasiado unívoca que el argumento planteaba entre escritura y poder, así como su exclusión de las formas de alfabetización indígena, mestiza y afrodescendiente. El presente trabajo parte de estos debates para, revisando la obra crítica y los epistolarios de Rama, ofrecer una nueva genealogía intelectual del concepto que daba título al libro póstumo. En particular, se rescata el ensayo de 1980 donde Rama se refirió por primera vez a la ciudad letrada, titulado “La señal de Jonás sobre el pueblo mexicano”. La relectura del libro en diálogo con este trabajo previo nos permitirá ver que la idea de ciudad letrada no aspiraba a describir la totalidad de la realidad cultural de la América colonial, sino uno de los polos que la tensionan, uno de los lados de un conflicto cultural. “La señal de Jonás” ofrece una visión significativamente diferente de la ciudad colonial, donde la fuerza cultural de una plebe urbana y multirracial desafía los muros de la ciudad letrada y alcanza a penetrar la práctica intelectual de algunos de sus guardianes. Frente al pesimismo de La ciudad letrada, late en “La señal de Jonás” un utopismo similar al de Transculturación narrativa en América Latina respecto a las potencialidades políticas y estéticas de esa cultura urbana popular de raigambre colonial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.