One of the most significant developments in Latin American politics and political economy in the last two decades has been the increasing decentralization of government. This development has generated a substantial literature on the pros and cons of decentralization and on subnational politics but few attempts to explain differences in the pattern of decentralization across countries. Fiscal decentralization must be understood as a political bargain involving presidents, legislators, and subnational politicians, each having somewhat conflicting preferences. How these bargains are struck will depend heavily on the lines of accountability within political parties. In systems with centralized political parties, the central government has exercised greater control over resources and uses than in countries with decentralized parties, in which subnational politicians exercise strong influence over legislators. The article explores this hypothesis through a comparative analysis of decentralization in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico.

For more than a century, the Dominican sugar industry has hosted seasonal immigrations of neighboring Caribbean islanders as harvest laborers (most recently, Haitians). This migrant labor system is fully comparable to systems of labor control after slavery in other parts of the Caribbean. But the regional historical trend toward more liberal labor relations in commercial agriculture seems largely to have been reversed in the case of Dominican sugar. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the recruitment and employment of harvest labor changed from something resembling free wage labor into a government-managed system of semicoerced exploitation. Processes of state formation in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are crucial in explaining this transformation. Fuller understanding of historical change in the case at hand is afforded by broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the direct confrontation between labor and estate owners and by recognizing that governments and their agents have not always acted in accordance with private agro-industrial interests.

Thearticle explores popular opposition to the nineteenth-century liberallaws thatmandated privatization ofthecommunal lands held byIndian communities in Mexico. It argues that peasants in Michoactin responded to the reparto withacomplex mixtureof resistance, negotiation, andaccommodation in attempts to retain local control over the definition and distribution of property rights and to defend local religious and political institutions. The first section provides a briefoverview of liberal thinkingand legislation on the privatization of communal lands, highlighting the legal and ideological ambiguities and contradictions that provided opportunities for resistance and negotiation. The second section explores howand why peasants sooften opposed the reparto in Michoacdn, stressing the complex natureof popular resistance and state responses to it. Thethirdsection offers a briefoverview of nineteenth-century agrarian development in Michoactin as background for thetwo case studies of the politics of privatization at thelocal level. Zacapu peasants managed to delay thereparto for thirty-five years but ended up losing muchof theirlandto statetax officials and neighboring landowners. SanJuan Parangaricutiro successfully retained its substantial woodlands as communal property, evenas local mestizo elites appropriatedthe best of cultivated landas private property. Thearticle concludes with a comparative analysis of the liberal reparto in the two communities, linking the different outcomes to peasant partisanship in theagrarian andpolitical struggles of theMexican Revolution.

This essay reconstructs the history of the Instituto Fisico-Ceogrdiico Nacional, its scientists, and their activities. After surveying the historical context and the first scientific activities in Costa Rica, it narrates the institutional history of the IFG. Also covered are the main activities of the Instituto-meteorology, botany, agriculture, andethnography, especially theefforts to mapCosta Rica in the 1890s. Theworkof this institute and the scientists associated untn it markthefitful beginnings of the institutionalization of modern science in Costa Rica. Thecase of theIFG clearly demonstrates theenormous obstacles facing scientists and scientific institutions in the agro-exporting economies of modern Latin America. As a small country on the "periphery of the periphery," Costa Rica offers an extreme example of the problems of cultivating modern science in developing nations.

This study analyzes the work of Juana Manuela Gorriti, one of the most prominent women writers in nineteenth-century Argentina. It unravels the notions that structure Gorriti's ideas of literature, history, and nation and illustrates how her work established close links between memory, continuity, and the role of women in the creation of national identities in Latin America. Her short stories and autobiographical pieces are situated within their historical context and literary milieu. The Rosas dictatorship and its aftermath are examined as played out in Gorriti's fiction, in stories where violence against women, the ghostly, and popular culture became central themes through which Gorriti created myths of personal history and national identity. The essay also explores the ways in which her female characters illustrate the strategies of ordinary women for turning their social constraints into public action.

The demographics of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) have long fascinated historicans and sociologists. If the oft-repeated tales of a 70 percent loss of life in Paraguay are accurate, then this war represents a singular case in modern history, one full of implications for students of militarism, gender, and culture. This study analyzes a newly discovered census from 1870 and reworks earlier censal materials. The authors conclude that the old stories of a steep loss of population during the war are basically correct.