This article explores the relationship between urban violence in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s economic capital, and two works of contemporary Ecuadorian literature. I introduce the term mangrove gothic to analyze how María Fernanda Ampuero’s short-story collection Pelea de gallos (2018) and Mónica Ojeda’s novel Mandíbula (2018) appropriate gothic tropes to depict the violent realities of twenty-first-century Guayaquil. The mangrove gothic encompasses the narrative strategies through which these authors inscribe fear into the experience of living in—or having lived in—Guayaquil, where oppressive humidity and heat, social hierarchies, and violence haunt the urban space. At the same time, the term offers geographic, social, and cultural specificity to the broader category of the “new Latin American female gothic.” In doing so, it counters the risk of homogenizing Latin American literature under a single transnational trend tailored for global consumption.

This study investigates the significant presence and function of nonhuman elements, specifically flora and fauna, in Aluísio Azevedo’s seminal Brazilian naturalist novel, O Cortiço (1890). Drawing on the increasing academic interest in plant and animal studies in literary criticism, this analysis catalogs and categorizes the numerous references to plants and animals, as well as instances of animalization, to illuminate Azevedo’s naturalistic portrayal of the urban environment of Rio de Janeiro. The research demonstrates how, in line with naturalist principles, Azevedo employs these nonhuman comparisons to characterize his human figures, often reducing them to their physical or instinctual traits under the deterministic influence of the milieu. The study investigates patterns in the use of flora and fauna where both are frequently used to evoke sensuality, purity, the physical states of characters—often reinforcing social hierarchies, reflecting racist and patriarchal views. Ultimately, this study argues that Azevedo’s extensive use of flora and fauna in O Cortiço is crucial to conveying to naturalist ideas, characterized by degeneration, decay, and the leveling of distinctions. The constant interplay of the characters and their environment, mediated through plant and animal allegories, underscores the deterministic forces at play, where individuals are subject to the relentless and often brutal influence of heredity and their surroundings. This analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of Brazilian naturalism and the sophisticated ways nonhuman elements can shape and influence narrative meaning.

This article tests claims from the comparative extractive literature by examining how state-company linkages shape civil society mobilization against extractive projects. We focus on convenios de cooperación (CCs)—contracts through which extractive companies finance branches of the Colombian armed forces or judiciary to provide security for company operations. We employ a mixed-methods design. First, we analyze a panel dataset of nearly six hundred contracts signed between 2002 and 2020, assessing their relationship to threats, assassinations of social leaders, arbitrary detentions, and other security indicators across municipalities. We then pair this statistical analysis with fieldwork in two case study sites: Jericó, Antioquia, and the Ariari region of Meta. Our analysis asks two central questions. How do CCs fit into extractive companies’ broader repertoires of community control? And what do they mean for civil society mobilization—how are they lived and felt on the ground? Findings reveal sectoral variation and differences in how CCs are activated and experienced over time. By introducing the first systematic dataset on CCs, we make visible a widespread but understudied mechanism through which firms embed repressive capacity in state security apparatuses, thereby advancing debates on corporate counterinsurgency, protest criminalization, and security governance in Latin America.

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.

In light of contemporary geoengineering proposals to mitigate the impact of mining and climate change on glaciers in Chile, this article analyzes how imaginaries of glaciers have changed in recent decades. It focuses on recent proposals by consultancies and mining companies to relocate glaciers, including the transportation of over thirty thousand tons of ice to a valley with low exposure to the sun in 2007 to “save a glacier,” carried out under the auspices of Andina, a branch of Codelco, a national mining company that has the largest impact on rock glaciers in the world. This effort resonates historically with a mitigation strategy that the mining company Barrick Gold proposed in 2001 for Pascua-Lama, which in 2006 triggered an international controversy that resulted in the world’s first draft glacier bill, still under debate in the Chilean Congress, and which subsequently informed a proposal for a new constitution in Chile, rejected in 2022. This article argues that the underlying assumption behind glacier relocation initiatives is that glaciers are detachable elements from the landscape, composed of homogeneous and inert ice, the transformations of which are reversible. This assumption contrasts with conceptions of glaciers arising from earth system science and contemporary biology, which conceive of them as heterogeneous ecosystems bound to their surroundings, the eventual destruction of which is ultimately irreversible. The differences between these conceptions resonate with contrasting narratives of the place humans occupy in Earth’s history, which we term anthropocentric and planetary, according to which humans are conceived of, respectively, as masters of or in precarious balance with Earth’s history.

“El futuro del libro es el álbum, así como la ruina es el futuro del monumento”, propone Barthes en La preparación de la novela (Barthes 2005, 257). Según él, el álbum en tanto forma daría cuenta de un universo sin jerarquías, disperso y fragmentario, “puro tejido de contingencias”. Pero el álbum también tiene una relación, compleja, con la memoria. En parque das ruínas de Marília Garcia y El sistema del tacto de Alejandra Costamagna, el collage de restos diversos y heterogéneos—fotografías, cartas, noticias del periódico— activa una supervivencia a menudo fantasmal y paradójica. En la grieta abierta entre esos restos se cuela una visión del tiempo contemporáneo sombría y atravesada por violencias de diverso origen. Expandiendo la noción trabajada por Roland Barthes de libro álbum quisiera pensar los textos de Garcia y Costamagna, no tanto, o no solo, a partir de la noción de forma-álbum apropiada para secundar el mundo, sino sobre todo como una forma que en sus relieves cársticos deja aparecer la imagen de un tiempo presente dañado, atravesado por la violencia. Se trataría, por lo tanto, de formas contemporáneas construidas con esquirlas más que memorias, apropiadas para la escritura de un tiempo sombrío.

Clara Nunes (1942–1983) was one of the most renowned and successful female samba singers in Brazilian history. This article offers new interpretations of the term transposition in the analysis of how Nunes racially transformed her image and sound to fit the discourse of Brazilian mestiçagem, or race mixture, during the military dictatorship (1964–1985). Through the folklorization of Afro-Brazilian religions and traditions placed onto and voiced from her body, transposition offers a useful analytic to further understand her performance of mestiçagem as racial and gendered excess, lending itself to a queer reading. The queer potential of transposition is compounded by the legacy of black drag queens performing impersonations of Nunes following her early death to enact a sense of belonging to the Brazilian nation.

The Economic Society of Guatemala was a late colonial organization that sought to introduce “enlightened” reforms to colonial Guatemala. At first approved by the Spanish Crown, the society presented papers that were at odds with Spain’s colonial system, especially one on why Indians should be allowed to wear European clothing. In response, the Crown ordered the society closed. This article explores the threat that the society posed to established interests in both Spain and the Americas, and it utilizes previously undisclosed primary documents in which the Crown charged the society with violating numerous laws as spelled out in the Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, first published in 1680. While the society was closed in 1800, its work influenced future liberal regimes throughout Latin America.

This article, which relies on underutilized archival collections as well as oral histories, is one of the first comprehensive examinations of the feminist struggle to decriminalize abortion during Brazil’s transition to democracy during the 1980s. We discuss how the consolidation of the antiabortion Christian right and its proximity to several political parties, including ones on the left, coupled with the politically moderate tone of the transition from dictatorship to democracy, constrained the space in which Brazilian feminists could make radical demands of the state. Moreover, we contend that although the creation of the state-funded feminist organ Conselho Nacional dos Direitos da Mulher in 1985 brought important visibility to feminist issues and inserted the movement’s agenda squarely within the government apparatus, it also fragmented feminists, threatened co-optation by the state, and ultimately compelled abortion rights activists to prioritize the more palatable strategy of expanding access to therapeutic abortions, which were already permitted by law. In addition to divergences in political strategy, feminists struggled to create multiracial and multiclass coalitions during this period, when many Black feminists and working-class women were organizing around other concerns. As a result, feminists were not able to fundamentally alter public opinion about the political importance of abortion, and their efforts to enshrine the termination of pregnancy as a human right in the 1988 Constitution were unsuccessful.

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.

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.

En la segunda década del siglo XXI, varios países latinoamericanos vivieron un ciclo de movilizaciones que antecedió a campañas presidenciales marcadas por la disputa entre candidaturas de izquierdas y derechas. En algunos casos, los actores que participaron de los estallidos respaldaron a candidatos de izquierda; en otros, no. Con base en esta variación este artículo analiza los factores que incidieron en ese apoyo en Ecuador, Perú, Chile y Colombia (2021–2022). Se plantea que dicho respaldo depende de la inclusión programática de sus reivindicaciones y de las estrategias de cooperación o conflicto con las candidaturas. El análisis se desarrolla a través de un rastreo de procesos, utilizando una revisión documental de prensa, programas de gobierno y comunicados. Se concluye que los conflictos endógenos y exógenos entre actores movilizados y candidaturas presidenciales son el factor más relevante para explicar el apoyo o rechazo hacia coaliciones de izquierda.

According to its 2022 national glacier inventory, Chile is home to 26,169 glaciers and roughly 80 percent of the glaciers in South America. Yet much of this ice is not legally protected. Diverse local communities whose lifeworlds depend on the spiritual and material integrity of Andean glaciers and their meltwaters are placing growing demands on Chilean glaciologists to accompany grassroots campaigns to defend these ecosystems from the direct impacts of anthropogenic interventions amid the climate crisis and years of megadrought. This article builds off a feminist glaciology framework to examine if, how, and to what extent an emerging generation of Andean glacier scientists is learning to question the masculinist and Western modes of knowledge, thinking, and action embedded in their disciplinary training. Through ethnographic fieldwork with glacier scientists, arrieros (herders), and grassroots organizations in the municipality of Putaendo in Central Chile, and the author’s participation in codesigning a knowledge exchange between Mapuche communities and glacier scientists in the province of Araucanía, this article analyzes the possibility for dialogues between ancestral, local, and technoscientific knowledges to transform the dominant discourses and practices of glaciology. It demonstrates the ontological openings that occur when knowledges that have been systematically marginalized from the technoscientific domain of glacier science are taken seriously in conversations over the present and future of the cryosphere. And it argues that these ontological exchanges not only impact the possibility of climate justice for those communities most directly affected by glacier loss but also can contribute to building more feminist, plural, and decolonial praxis within contemporary glaciology.

What happens when scientists, dedicated to basic scientific research, are called forth to participate in politically fraught scenarios? We explore this question through a qualitative study of the intimate experiences of scientists who developed the first Argentine National Glacier Inventory (2010–2018). This inventory was entrusted to IANIGLA, a state-funded scientific institute. It arose from the world’s first glacier protection law, drafted to protect all glacier and periglacial environments as hydrological reserves as mining megaprojects encroached on them. This article examines the failed attempts to turn periglacial environments into “governable objects” (Hellgren 2022). Interviews and an auto-ethnography among scientists involved reveal that these failures can be attributed to unresolved tensions in upscaling and downscaling practices that are needed to simultaneously produce world-class climate science and locally relevant policy science. The failure to anticipate or resolve those tensions, in the context of grassroots opposition to mining, undermined trust in science and government, pointing to the local limits of global climate science.

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.

El Consejo Comunitario Eladio Ariza, en los Montes de María, concibe su territorio como un espacio de vida que preserva sus costumbres afrodescendientes y prácticas colectivas. Como autoridad étnica, organiza y regula el uso del territorio, priorizando lo comunitario. Sin embargo, su territorialidad ha sido impactada por políticas estatales de ordenamiento que, lejos de conciliar con las visiones locales, han generado tensiones entre las lógicas comunitarias y estatales. A ello se suman las consecuencias del conflicto armado interno y las presiones territoriales derivadas de planes de desarrollo que no corresponden a su visión propia. El Programa de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial (PDET), surgido del Acuerdo de Paz, representó una esperanza de transformación, pero no se ha implementado en su totalidad. Así, el territorio de Eladio Ariza se ha visto reconfigurado por estas dinámicas externas, consolidando “territorios de diferencia” donde confluyen intereses y visiones contrastantes.

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.