En este artículo, estudiamos qué factores individuales y contextuales explican la confianza en los sindicatos latinoamericanos. Utilizando datos de Latinobarómetro (2018–2020), mostramos que la confianza en los sindicatos es mayor entre personas de clase trabajadora y clase media asalariada, así como entre quienes se identifican con la izquierda y confían más en las instituciones políticas. A nivel contextual, la confianza es mayor en países neo-desarrollistas (por ejemplo, Brasil y Uruguay) y menor en países capitalistas tercerizados (por ejemplo, México y países centroamericanos). Contrario a nuestra hipótesis, también encontramos que la confianza en los sindicatos es alta en Chile (un país liberal-rentista con sindicatos débiles) y baja en algunos países redistributivo-rentistas (Venezuela) y neo-desarrollistas (Argentina). Para explicar estos resultados, analizamos cómo la confianza en los sindicatos depende de aspectos contextuales como la informalidad laboral, el desempleo, la inflación, el poder de los partidos de izquierda y el nivel de movilización social.

Datos históricos, lingüísticos y etnográficos muestran que, cuando se utilizan para apoyar la existencia de mercados durante la época prehispánica en el área maya, demandan una interpretación más cautelosa y crítica. En este trabajo se argumenta que fue hasta finales del período posclásico cuando las plazas funcionaron exclusivamente como lugares de mercado de forma cotidiana, ya que antes de ese período las plazas fueron los espacios donde se celebraron numerosos eventos sociales donde también ocurrió un intercambio de mercado, aunque de manera periódica. Además, ciertos términos económicos del lenguaje maya sugieren que transacciones de compra y venta, así como el intercambio por trueque, canje o permuta, pudieron haberse utilizado desde el período preclásico en esos acuerdos económicos. Ambos tipos de transacción forman parte de los intercambios de mercado y, en este artículo, se profundiza en la explicación de cómo pudo haber operado el trueque o canje, tomando en cuenta que, hasta hoy día, la permuta de bienes y/o servicios continúa jugando un papel importantísimo en las transacciones económicas que se realizan en diferentes mercados de México. Un tercer tema analizado en el presente artículo se enfoca en mercaderes quienes concurrían o reunían con otros mercaderes en “puertos francos” o centros de comercio o trasbordo para el intercambio de mercancías, ya sea por trueque o por compra y venta. Estos mercaderes parecen haber sido proveedores de productos que pudieron haber vendido al por mayor a otros mercaderes, o bien, los vendieron a otros comerciantes quienes a su vez realizaron ventas al por menor.

La Milpa, situated in northern Belize, stands out as one of the region's largest archaeological sites, having served as the capital of an ancient Maya city-state. Its significance is indicated by extensive monumental architecture, with the epicenter covering approximately 8.8 ha. The site's corpus of monuments, comprising 23 stelae and several altars, underscores its prominence in northern Belize, rivaling the corpora of sites such as Nim li Punit and Caracol. Despite its remote location, La Milpa has garnered the attention of researchers, particularly since the first modern survey of the site in 1988. Subsequent studies—in particular, that by Nikolai Grube in the 1990s—has provided detailed analyses of the site's corpus of carved monuments. Recent efforts, including epigraphic documentation in 2019, serve to enhance our understanding of La Milpa's dynastic history through traditional epigraphic and computational photographic methods. Utilizing field observations, raking light photography, and 3D photogrammetric models, we have refined previous analyses and provide new insights into the iconography and textual segments of the monuments. Here, we present the results of these recent efforts as well as our new analyses of a selection of monuments.

Dominant historiography in Singapore celebrates Sinnathamby Rajaratnam as one of the city-state’s founding national fathers, and the intellectual superintendent of state-sponsored multiculturalism in what has been characterized as an ‘illiberal democracy’. Little attention, however, has been paid to the extensive periods of Rajaratnam’s life in which he was not in governance with the People’s Action Party, and thus had considerable intellectual autonomy. This article examines the first of these periods—his sojourn in London from 1935 to 1947—marked by connections with overlapping communities of anti-colonial intellectuals drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, and East and South Asia. Close reading of Rajaratnam’s London lifeworld, his published fiction and journalism, and the many annotations he made in the books he read reveals a very different intellectual history than the one that we think we know, and allows us to better understand his lifelong uneasiness with capitalism and racial governmentality. Re-reading Rajaratnam as an autonomous intellectual disembeds his early intellectual life from the story of the developmental state, enabling a focus on the role of affect and form in his writing. The process also offers new insights into Singapore today, where the legacies of state-sponsored multiculturalism are increasingly challenged, and where citizens, residents, and migrants seek new forms of solidarity in and across difference.

Asking the simple question of why writers in one language commented on works composed in another opens up a set of questions and problems for thinking through the relationships between languages and literary cultures and their development over time. The archive of Hindi literature—a set of literary vernaculars that came into use at the end of the fourteenth century and were assimilated into the modern standard language of Hindi during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—contains a wealth of commentarial literature, including commentaries in which Hindi writers commented on texts in Sanskrit—the privileged ‘cosmopolitan’ language of literature, science, and scripture. Despite the ubiquity of such commentaries, they have received almost no attention from modern scholars—the result of certain nationalist modes of literary historiography that counterpose Hindi and Sanskrit. This article attempts a preliminary history of commentarial writing in Hindi, outlining the motivations, strategies, and techniques behind different types of commentaries that were composed during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Even this brief survey of commentarial writings reveals not only how writers thought about the relationship between Hindi and Sanskrit—which they understood to be two distinct species or modes of language—but also the techniques and operations through which they created new lexicons and metalanguages in the vernacular of Hindi. These commentaries reflect a type of renaissance that occurred during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in northern India, characterised by new types of interpretive and analytical engagements with ‘classical’ works.