Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20, 2018.

Following a sharp increase in the number of border arrivals from the violence-torn countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in the spring and summer of 2014, the United States quickly implemented a strategy designed to prevent such surges by enhancing its detention and deportation efforts. In this article, we examine the emigration decision for citizens living in the high-crime contexts of northern Central America. First, through analysis of survey data across Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, we explore the role crime victimization plays in leading residents of these countries to consider emigration. Next, using survey data collected across twelve municipalities in Honduras, we evaluate the extent to which knowledge of heightened US immigration deterrence efforts influenced respondents’ emigration decision. Though a vast majority of these respondents were aware of the stricter US immigration policy regime, this awareness had no effect on their consideration of emigration as a viable strategy.

In 2011, Chilean students mobilized in the largest demonstrations since the country’s return to democracy. Students in some other Latin American countries have also carried out mass demonstrations in recent years. What explains students’ participation in mobilizations in Latin America? This article argues that financial grievances generated by neoliberal education policies and the massification of higher education are major causes of student protest participation. In addition, it shows how weak organizational linkages with ruling political parties increase the likelihood of mobilization. The theory is explored through a case study of higher education policy, student-party linkages, and student mobilization in Chile from 1990 to 2011. A statistical analysis of a survey of Chilean students demonstrates that a working-class background, using debt to finance education, and weak programmatic connections to parties in power are associated with higher levels of protest participation.

Research in advanced industrialized democracies on social attitudes toward same-sex marriage suggests that intergroup social contact and positive media coverage play an important role in promoting tolerance and support for same-sex marriage. Using AmericasBarometer survey data for eighteen countries in 2010, 2012, and 2014, this article examines the ways in which individual-level Internet use interacts with news exposure, country-level quality of democracy, Internet penetration, and their association with support for same-sex marriage. The results suggest that not only is Internet use associated with greater support for same-sex marriage, but that among those who both use the Internet and pay more attention to the news, the positive effects are amplified. In addition, national level of democracy, economic development, and Internet use are also associated with overall higher probabilities of supporting same-sex marriage. We find that Internet use has a strong positive association with the probability of supporting same-sex marriage as the percentage of the national population on the Internet increases. These findings extend our understanding of social and political tolerance of same-sex marriage in Latin America.

En abril del año 2015 se promulgó la ley que creó el acuerdo de unión civil en Chile. Este artículo investiga las principales ideas discutidas en el debate legislativo y del rol que cumplieron profesores de derecho de familia invitados como expertos al mismo. Proponemos que la participación de estos abogados fue marginal dentro y fuera del Congreso. Como consecuencia, la ley que creó el acuerdo de unión civil presentó serias falencias. En este artículo proponemos considerar las batallas intra-profesionales por el reconocimiento de un saber experto, como un factor clave en la formulación de políticas en materia de género y sexualidad. Y de paso, esperamos abrir un debate desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria que reimagine al derecho de familia desanclado de relaciones diádicas, centradas en la atracción sexual y orientadas a la procreación.

In this article I focus on the nexus of urbanization, the environment and public health that was exposed by the 1912 bubonic plague epidemic in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I utilize the concept of “urban health penalty,” developed by demographic historians of the industrial revolution in Europe, to account for the declining health of the working class in cities. While in Europe poor health among the urban poor was associated with industrialization, I argue that in San Juan chaotic, unplanned urbanization reflected the effects of colonialism. I further examine how the epidemic exacerbated the class and racial divisions that contributed to the disastrous living conditions, and speculate as to whether the environmental neglect of the neighborhood by authorities was due to the fact that it was home to many poor people of African descent. I also highlight the varying understandings of the causes and appropriate responses to plague.

There is a forceful new impetus toward mega-hydraulic projects in Latin America, which are booming but also highly controversial. They bring benefits to some social groups while many others are negatively affected. Technocratic discourses are dominant in the region; they strategically mobilize institutions, infrastructure, money, and knowledge to present particular hydrosocial territorial imaginaries—such as multipurpose dams—as natural, universal, and politically neutral. Meanwhile, affected local communities commonly envision and practice different discourses, values, and worldviews, based on contextualized notions of well-being and territoriality. Using a political ecology perspective, this article examines how the Daule-Peripa mega-hydraulic scheme—Ecuador’s “hydraulic heart”—has de- and repatterned the territory, producing new hierarchical relations and unequal distribution of socioenvironmental impacts. Though political discourses have changed throughout state-centralist and neoliberal époques, governmental policies and practices have continued and renewed their defense of mega-hydraulism. In turn, affected communities and families, through everyday territorial politics, respond and aim to rearrange the hydrosocial network in order to regain control over water, land, and territorial services.

By the time the English translation of Juan Bosch’s story “The Indelible Spot” was published in the Saturday Evening Post on November 16, 1963, his eight-month presidency was over. Bosch’s brief tenure was punctuated by growing unrest among Dominicans on the Left and mounting suspicion from those on the Right. Central to this tension was the question of his loyalties to US-style democracy, Soviet communism, and/or Castro’s Cuba. Against this backdrop, the tale of how his short story came to be translated and published is emblematic of the complex, contradictory, and confusing cultural and political discourses surrounding the future of the Dominican Republic within the sphere of US Cold War policies. Central to this analysis is the unique affiliation between two authors: Juan Bosch and John Bartlow Martin, the first US ambassador to the Dominican Republic after Trujillo’s assassination. Ultimately, the communiques and notes about the translation and two distinct versions of the final published story found in Martin’s papers at the Library of Congress reveal the ideological impasse between Cold War and Caribbean discourses of culture and power.

This article proposes an affective turn in scholarship on colonial Latin American literature, focusing on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios as a case study. Through an engagement with embodied, intersubjective, and circulatory affects in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, it sketches out a critical framework that investigates what I call the exteriority of feeling in the colonial Americas. My reading focuses on three main areas: the theory of the humoral body as the cultural referent that shapes the externalization of embodied affect in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, the description of forms of affective transmission precariously established between European and indigenous communities, and the emergence of affective minefields and emotional untranslatables in colonial contexts. In this way, this article works toward a broad investigation of the meanings, functions, and circulation of affect and emotion in the colonial Americas.

El boxeo mexicano ha generado una larga tradición literaria y gráfica que ha sido poco estudiada. Este ensayo analiza las crónicas “La última gigantomaquia,” de José Juan Tablada, “Las glorias del gran Púas,” de Ricardo Garibay, y “La hora del consumo de los orgullos,” de Carlos Monsiváis. En ellas el boxeo sirve como espacio donde se representan y resuelven simbólicamente tensiones políticas y sociales, nacionales y transnacionales. Además, como industria deportiva el boxeo es el espacio en donde se experimentaron las prácticas y condiciones a las que se enfrentará el deportista profesional dentro del capitalismo global. Por otra parte, debido a la violencia que conlleva, el boxeo ha sido el espacio donde se representa la masculinidad moderna. Las tres crónicas que conforman este ensayo crean un arco temporal que recorre el siglo XX mexicano y muestran la relación del deporte con el periodismo, la política y el mercado global.

This essay outlines the three articles in this dossier, “Latin American Studies and the Humanities: Past, Present, Future.” The authors, working in different disciplines, contribute to debates about how to reconceptualize area studies. Each article considers how area studies might be enriched by considering different spatial scales and incorporating methodologies drawn from ethnic studies disciplines. Our introduction explains how each essay contributes to our understanding of five key issues in Latin American studies: (1) the relationship between the field’s regionally bound framework and emerging conceptual paradigms like the global South; (2) the potential for interdisciplinary, rather than multidisciplinary, research; (3) how to place Latin American studies in dialogue with ethnic studies; (4) how to rethink the origins of Latin American studies by tracing the long history of Latin America–generated knowledge about the region; and (5) how recent indigenous studies approaches might decolonize the field of Latin American studies.

This essay contributes to a fuller understanding of the history and future of area studies by tracing Latin American studies back to the early twentieth century, when it took form within academic disciplines that sought to contribute to state policy-making. The essay focuses on a set of intellectual exchanges between the United States and Mexico around Native American affairs. In an era in which new inter-American scientific venues and the Good Neighbor policy attenuated the inevitable and ever present intellectual hierarchies that divided the United States from Mexico and the rest of Latin America, some scholars found resemblances and parallels between North and South America. These scholars envisioned a cosmopolitan Americanist intellectual sphere based on horizontal forms of sharing, and they looked for novel ways of reconciling the avowed need for generalization with the particulars that they confronted at home and abroad. They found themselves unable to fully escape epistemological binds that positioned the North as a model of modern nationhood and a locus of universal knowledge, and that relegated non-Western nations like Mexico to the category of the particular. They could not overcome the difficulties spawned by hierarchies among nations and, concomitantly, among their own scholarly communities.

1970s Latin America was a hotbed of theoretical and methodological innovation in the social sciences and the arts, developing novel approaches to studying social reality to support social movements. This article uses Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda’s field notes and his four-volume work Historia doble de la Costa to analyze how he and his colleagues, working in collaboration with the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos on the Caribbean coast, developed the methodology of participatory action research, which attempted to erase the distinction between researchers and researched, and to rewrite the history of the peasantry from below using novel formats.

From the coloniality of power to the decolonial swerve, US-centered decolonial academics concur with the foundational points introduced by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Nevertheless, they seldom cite Latin American Indigenous or Native American intellectuals’ decolonial perspectives, or examine specific bodies of critical thinking emerging in hemispheric Indigenous communities. In turn, a diversity of Indigenous paradigms and methods are appearing in the Americas, either as literary texts or critical works. Indigenous or Native American writers and theorists are often political actors, working within their respective grassroots movements, or writing to advance specific goals of their own communities. This article will emphasize Native American and Indigenous decolonial issues framed from a critique of contemporary Indigenous narratives. Their views both enrich and complicate Western decolonial theorists’ assumptions. Examining their production provides continuity to the political and epistemological searches of both, while also contributing to breaking down those invisible walls separating them.

This essay reviews the following works:

Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito. By Sherwin K. Bryant. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 240. $35.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781469607726.

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima. By Michelle A. McKinley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. x + 282. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107168985.

The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. By Joanne Rappaport. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 352. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822356363.

Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies. By Ann Twinam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 534. $32.71 paperback. ISBN: 9780804750936.

Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. By Nancy E. van Deusen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 336. $25.60 paperback. ISBN: 9780822358589.

This essay reviews the following works:

Sons of the Mexican Revolution: Miguel Alemán and His Generation. By Ryan M. Alexander. Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 239. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826357397.

A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900–1910. By Robert M. Buffington. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 287. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822358824.

Radio in Revolution: Wireless Technology and State Power in Mexico, 1897–1938. By J. Justin Castro. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 270. $30.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780803286788.

Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution: The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz. By Heather Fowler-Salamini. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Pp. vi + 403. $45.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780803243712.

Industry and Revolution: Social and Economic Change in the Orizaba Valley, Mexico. By Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 351. $49.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780674072725.

For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca. By Mark Saad Saka. Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 177. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826353382.

Pesos and Politics: Business, Elites, Foreigners, and Government in Mexico, 1854–1940. By Mark Wasserman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 249. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780804791540.

This essay reviews the following works:

Awükan ka kuxankan zugu Wajmapu mew: Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu. Edited by Enrique Antileo Baeza and others. Temuco: Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2015. Pp. 331. $20.00 paperback. ISBN: 9789569761003.

Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia. By Ana Mariella Bacigalupo. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 275. $ 26.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477308981.

The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History. By Joanna Crow. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. Pp. ix + 281. $74.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780813044286.

Ta iñ fijke xipa rakizuameluwun: Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche. Edited by Héctor Nahuelpan Moreno and others. Temuco: Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2013. Pp. 378. $14.60 paperback. ISBN: 9789563533330.

This essay reviews the following works:

Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia. By Nancy P. Appelbaum. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 304. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469627441.

The Colombia Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Edited by Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Marco Palacios, and Ana María Gómez López. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 619. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822362289.

Colombia, 6-volume history, edited by Eduardo Posada Carbó.

Tomo 1, Crisis imperial e independencia, 1808–1830. Edited by Adolfo Meisel Roca. Madrid: Editorial Taurus and Fundación MAPFRE, 2010. Pp. 311. ISBN: 9788430607976.

Tomo 2, La construcción nacional, 1830–1880. Edited by Beatriz Castro Carvajal. Madrid: Editorial Taurus and Fundación MAPFRE, 2012. Pp. 311. ISBN: 9788430608423.

Tomo 3, La apertura al mundo, 1880–1930. Edited by Eduardo Posada Carbó. Madrid: Editorial Taurus and Fundación MAPFRE, 2013. Pp. 360. €15.00 paperback. ISBN: 9788430617357.

Tomo 4, Mirando hacia dentro, 1930–1960. Edited by Malcolm Deas. Madrid: Editorial Taurus and Fundación MAPFRE, 2014. Pp. 351. €15.00 paperback. ISBN: 9788430617364.

Tomo 5, La búsqueda de la democracia, 1960–2010. Edited by Jorge Orlando Melo. Madrid: Editorial Taurus and Fundación MAPFRE, 2015. Pp. 311. €15.00 paperback. ISBN: 9788430617623.

Tomo 6, Colombia a través de la fotografía, 1847–2010. Madrid: Editorial Taurus and Fundación MAPFRE, 2015. (Not reviewed here.)

Territorial Rule in Colombia and the Transformation of the Llanos Orientales. By Jane M. Rausch. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. Pp. x + 186. $69.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780813044668.

Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles. By Cindy García. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. xxv + 181. $23.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822354970.

Salsa World: A Global Dance in Local Contexts. Edited by Sydney Hutchinson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 229. $30.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781439910078.

Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce. By Juliet McMains. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 409. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780199324644.