Through the life story of a sailor, merchant, former prisoner, and soldier, this article explores the Brazilian postcolonial empire’s experiments in settlement and domestic colonization during the Age of Revolutions. Johann Heinrich Lembke’s journey—from incarceration in the German territory of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, to his conscription into the Brazilian armed forces, to his eventual desertion—offers a unique entry point into the sociopolitical mechanisms of empire-building in the New World. Drawing on records from German, British, Portuguese, and Brazilian archives, this article traces Lembke’s trajectory within broader processes of territorial expansion, settler-military strategies, and normative pluralities that shaped imperial governance in Latin America. It illuminates the porous continuum between penal, military, and settler colonization projects, illustrating how such systems functioned as overlapping mechanisms of governance and control. Methodologically, a microhistorical analysis links the European and South American contexts, as this research uncovers the experimental nature of Brazil’s border policies and challenges binary representations of settlers in the South America. Lembke’s case thus becomes a window onto Brazil’s imperial formation, revealing how ordinary actors navigated the ambiguities of empire-building.

During the 1990s, the Conurbano, the vast urban area surrounding Buenos Aires, became the site of an innovative popular politics, as poor people responded to a deepening crisis provoked by neoliberalism with a new repertoire of collective action. At the same time, the Conurbano was also the site of a hugely popular music and dance scene, the so-called Movida Tropical. Breaking with interpretations that depict tropical music as explicitly apolitical, consumerist, even frivolous, this article argues that the Movida Tropical helped create the conditions that made possible a political culture of resistance to neoliberalism. The Movida constituted its participants as a counterpublic, a visible, audible collective whose joyful social interactions expressed opposition to dominant aesthetic hierarchies. Operating within the spaces afforded by neoliberalism’s contradictions, it embodied a working-class aesthetic that resisted appropriation, marginalization, and dismissal while revalorizing provincial roots and sparking new Latin American affiliations.

At the start of the seventeenth century the eastern Cuban town of Bayamo became a regional entrepôt. Merchants from France, England, Genoa, and the fledgling Dutch Republic arrived at the shores of the port of Manzanillo to trade linens, silks, and enslaved Africans for hides from the Cuban interior. The governor of Cuba, Pedro de Valdés, sought to stop this unlicensed trade and sent his lieutenant governor to Bayamo to investigate. His investigation found that Bayamo was a microcosm of the Caribbean itself, with people from all nations congregating on the shores of the Cauto River, where they formed both mercantile and social bonds in defiance of Spain’s trade monopoly. The lieutenant governor’s efforts to end contraband trade provoked a rebellion in Bayamo and a raid in the nearby city of Santiago de Cuba, where English raiders attempted to capture the investigator. The townsfolk appealed to the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo and reaffirmed their loyalty to the Spanish empire, while simultaneously playing overlapping jurisdictions against each other. This article demonstrates the complex relationships between local Spanish colonists, foreign merchants, and the regional colonial institutions that impacted the way local actors navigated commercial and legal channels.

In 1938 and 1940 the governments of Mexico and Colombia exchanged statues of Benito Juárez and Francisco de Paula Santander. Through this exchange and the diplomatic ceremonies and cultural events that surrounded it, the two governments selectively interpreted their past to fortify their diplomatic relations in the present. Cultural diplomacy played an important role in inter-American relations, and this article demonstrates that rather than serving as empty gestures of goodwill, such exchanges were examples of governments’ political use of the past, pursued with the aim of advancing foreign policy goals. By constructing a narrative of the past based on anti-imperialism and evidenced by their dedication to nineteenth-century liberal heroes, they countered the conservative opposition they faced at home and abroad. Based on analysis of Mexican government documents and periodical sources from both countries, this article shows that the past was present in inter-American cultural diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century.