In contrast to the rich scholarship documenting the traumatic post-contact destruction of indigenous populations in the Latin American tropics, little is known about their contemporary population dynamics. What accounts for the “demographic turnaround” reported for some groups? How widespread is population recovery, and what are its implications for indigenous political resurgence? We address these questions by compiling recent (post-1980) demographic indicators for over one hundred lowland indigenous populations. Despite remarkable socioeconomic and cultural diversity among these groups, we find compelling evidence that they nevertheless share a common trajectory of very rapid growth over the past two decades, especially in contrast to non-indigenous populations. We briefly review the implications of their dramatic physical resurgence and show how closer attention to this phenomenon is overdue. We discuss the relevance of indigenous societies' recovery to scholarship and praxis in the areas of health and education, cultural and political gains, and demographic theory.

In an era when development processes seem best characterized by a continuing cycle of macroeconomic crisis and recovery, a critical question for students of the political economy of development concerns identifying the factors that facilitate recovery from economic shock. Recent work on this question has moved beyond a focus on specific macroeconomic policy adjustments toward analysis of the role political institutions play in shaping recovery processes. Applying this research to the experiences of Mexico's thirty-one states following the country's 1995 economic crisis, I identify significant variations in states' abilities to recover from crisis and link those variations in part to the country's uneven electoral transition to a multiparty democracy that coincided with the crisis. With more and more governmental activities increasingly being decentralized to lower levels of government, these findings provide an indication of the important role subnational variations in political environments can play in shaping the broader political and economic outcomes of Latin America's “dual transition.”

While there is much disagreement concerning the political effects of Chile's two-member district binominal election system, most agree that it provides strong incentives for the formation and maintenance of coalitions. This article takes on these assumptions, contending that the electoral system's coalition-inducing tendencies are actually quite context dependent. Focusing primarily on the governing Concertación coalition and relying on analyses of relative levels of electoral support among parties, a “reward” insurance policy for electoral losers, and the timing and sequencing of elections, this article outlines the conditions under which the coalition-enhancing tendencies of the electoral system are at their strongest and their weakest. It finds that these variables align to provide a less than propitious environment for the maintenance of the Concertación coalition in the lead up to the 2005 elections. In theoretical terms, the article challenges direct and mechanistic connections between electoral formulae and party outcomes, arguing that we should not be surprised when subtle contextual variations cause theorized outcomes not to occur. These findings contribute to an emerging consensus that many of the theorized rules on the connection between electoral and party systems are more complex and context dependent than is usually supposed and should be applied with greater caution.

Researchers studying migration and development have argued over the potential that migration and associated remittances have to improve the economic and social conditions in origin communities. Past research on migration from indigenous communities in Oaxaca has similarly questioned the compatibility of traditional governance systems with high migration rates. We argue, using evidence from four Zapotec communities in rural Oaxaca, that communities can use the organizational capacity of traditional governance systems to access remittances from migrants for the benefit of the community as a whole. Communities can require payment from migrants in lieu of communal labor requirements (tequio) and may directly solicit remittances from migrants for community projects. The extent to which they enforce these requests depends on the existing organizational strength in the community. These findings imply that strong forms of community organization can make the difference between migration contributing to underdevelopment and migration contributing to development.

This article uses an interdisciplinary approach to present and analyze information on the smallest manifestations of popular culture in Latin American countries: postage stamps. The disciplines involved are semiotics (the linguistic study of signs), history, politics (internal and international), and popular culture. The project studies how these postage stamps carry significant messages, including expressions of nationalism, politics (national and international), propaganda, and cultural identity. The article begins with an overview of Latin American postage stamps, with an emphasis on internal and international politics. The latter category focuses on several cases of inter-country tension in which postage stamps have played a role.

The relative success of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) is a puzzle for most theories of regional integration. This is due to its having achieved remarkable progress in spite of lacking features such as significant levels of previous interdependence (demand factor) or major regional institutions (supply factor). To account for this puzzle, it has been claimed that the operation of MERCOSUR rests on presidential diplomacy. Such a mechanism is understood as the resort to direct negotiations between the national presidents whenever a crucial decision has to be made or a critical conflict solved. This article argues that presidential diplomacy—understood as political, summit diplomacy as opposed to institutionalized, professional diplomacy—is insufficient to account for the performance of MERCOSUR. Through the empirical analysis of three critical episodes, the article shows how institutional structures, shaped by the system of government of the member countries, have sustained presidential intervention and, hence, the process of regional integration.

N. M. Rothschild & Sons (NMR), the banking house which the Frankfurt-born Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836) began operating from New Court in London in 1809 and which is continued to this day by his descendants, has a long history of involvement in Brazil. Extensive documentation of this history is preserved in The Rothschild Archive in London, where material up to 1930 is available for consultation. The firm's initial business with Brazil was in merchant banking activities and bullion dealing, but in 1855 it became the Brazilian government's financial agent in London and went on to handle the government's borrowing in the London capital markets and to be closely concerned with the country's fiscal, commercial, and exchange rate policy. With the bank at the heart of the development of Brazilian public finance, The Rothschild Archive is an important resource for an understanding of this aspect of Brazilian economic and political history, as well as the history of British informal imperialism and emerging patterns of globalization.

In vol. 39, no. 3, John T. Morris was incorrectly cited as co-author of John Tuman's Reshaping the North American Automobile Industry (Continuum, 2003). Morris was co-editor, with John Tuman, of Transforming the Latin American Automobile Industry (ME Sharpe, 1998).