This article identifies four frames of corruption in the discourse of three leaders of Operation Lava Jato, also known in English as Operation Car Wash, a large-scale Brazilian anticorruption operation (2014–2021). These frames are inequality, hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease. The frames were identified by analyzing a wide set of press interviews, opinion articles, and books by two prosecutors and one judge whose work has revealed scandals involving the state oil company Petrobras. The operation had a major impact on politics and the economy and left a controversial legacy. We noticed a contradiction between one frame invoking judicial activism (inequality) and three frames focusing on specific techniques that appeal to a more conventional view on the judiciary’s role (hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease). Furthermore, even when scholars were still largely positive about the operation, the discourse showed signs of judicial activism. This analysis contributes to the debate on Lava Jato and judicial activism by focusing on discourse rather than action.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a literary revival in the Indigenous languages of the region known canonically as “Latin America.” Across this varied corpus, a major theme is the cultural significance of maize. This article compares the depiction of maize in four bilingual poems, each written in a different Indigenous language alongside Spanish: Nahuatl (Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez), Yucatec Maya (María Dolores Dzul Barboza), Central Quechua (César Vargas Arce), and Southern Quechua (Emilio Corrales). Through close textual analysis and by recourse to theoretical perspectives such as “literary cartography,” the “textual continuum,” “deep mapping,” and “trans-indigeneity,” the article argues that each poem communicates culturally specific ways of understanding geography that, when set in dialogue, challenge hegemonic definitions of the Western Hemisphere such as North, South, or Latin “America.” Rather, the poems in combination weave an interconnected yet multiperspectival cartographic tapestry with maize as the common thread.

Entre 1949 y 1952, funcionarios del Ministerio de Educación Pública del Perú, encabezados por el intelectual peruano José María Arguedas, grabaron alrededor de doscientas piezas musicales vernáculas con miras a formar el primer archivo peruano de música tradicional. Esta iniciativa no logró sobrevivir a las adversas condiciones materiales e institucionales del sector cultural público a pesar de los esfuerzos de sus gestores. Este artículo estudia el proceso a través del cual folkloristas adscritos al Ministerio de Educación Pública construyeron el primer archivo nacional sonoro en el contexto de la temprana gestión cultural pública en el Perú. Tales esfuerzos incluyeron intercambios transnacionales de alto nivel y cooperación entre diversas instituciones culturales peruanas. Nuestro análisis abarca el periodo de 1945 a 1952 y se basa en fuentes administrativas, epistolares y hemerográficas revisadas en archivos institucionales del Perú y Estados Unidos. Argumentamos que la constitución de este archivo musical folklórico estuvo marcada por la precariedad del sector cultural estatal y por el anhelo de los folkloristas/funcionarios del ministerio por construir un repositorio sonoro a pesar de las condiciones adversas. Esta investigación ofrece significativos hallazgos históricos sobre las tempranas iniciativas oficiales de registro de música tradicional y sobre la gestión pública del folklore en el Perú de mediados del siglo XX.

This article examines questions pertaining to Indigenous people’s citizenship status, the problematic definition of orphanhood, rule of law, and structural racism in Brazilian society. The definition of orphanhood was articulated in a way that allowed for the extralegal abuse and racialized exploitation of labor to continue long past the legal end of Indigenous slavery (1755). Indigenous persons’ legal status, the definition of orphanhood, and guardianship laws worked together to legitimate the permanence of child separation as a means for wealthier Brazilians to get free child labor. The article uncovers the ambiguities in defining Indigenous people’s legal status, making citizenship status a subjective determination contested on a case-by-case basis. With this foreground understanding, the article presents the practice of child separation and the created discourse to legitimize Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race children as unpaid criadas de casa (housemaids).

Este artículo teoriza las relaciones entre la ciudadanía y el Estado ecuatoriano durante el primer año y medio de la pandemia COVID-19. Basado en una metodología cualitativa de entrevistas, las perspectivas de los participantes revelan relaciones contradictorias con el gobierno características de los estados de seguridad neoliberales, pero también de patrones (pos)coloniales persistentes de exclusión racista y clasista: por un lado, un sentido de abandono del Estado, particularmente en salud pública y educación; y por otro lado, la fuerza represiva del Estado en su uso de medidas militares y policiales y de estados de excepción. Proponemos el término estado disperso para referirnos a estas tendencias opuestas de simultánea ausencia y presencia estatal. Argumentamos que las respuestas ciudadanas a la ausencia estatal incluyen cierta aceptación del retorno de las funciones educativas y sanitarias a comunidades, hogares e individuos, provocando de todas maneras nuevas formas de adaptación y creatividad cultural. En cuanto a la presencia represiva del Estado, los participantes expresaron apoyo considerable hacia medidas estatales autoritarias, frecuentemente justificadas por discursos esencialistas sobre el carácter de la ciudadanía nacional.

Whether referendums, initiatives, and other mechanisms of direct democracy enhance representative systems is a matter of debate. Skeptics note—among other criticisms—that turnout tends to be low in referendums, often lower than in candidate elections in the same country. If citizens do not care enough to participate, how useful can these mechanisms be for improving the quality of democratic systems? We argue that low referendum turnout has as much to do with parties’ disincentives to mobilize voters as it does with voter disinterest. Prior research on political behavior in referendums has focused largely on Europe and assumes that voters view them as elections of lesser importance. By shifting focus to Latin America, we introduce more variation in the features of political parties that influence levels of turnout. We draw on cross-national evidence, qualitative research in Colombia, and quantitative analysis of municipal-level referendum voting behavior in Brazil. The key to understanding low voter turnout in these settings is the relatively weaker incentives that political parties have to turn out the vote when control over office is not at stake. We demonstrate that, in clientelistic systems, party operatives have particularly weak incentives to get their constituents out to the polls.

This article studies a theoretical term for diasporic cultural production proposed by the contemporary Black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. Evaristo’s first novel, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017)—semiautobiographical remembrances of a midcentury favela community during its eviction—exemplifies escrevivência as a theory of the transmission of a culture of resistance to imposed dispossession. The term has been cited in a proliferation of antiracist critiques and studies on marginal subjects in Brazil. My argument is that escrevivência is crucial for Brazilian decolonial thought, given the temporally recursive frame it enunciates, which opens the present and future to prior articulations of Black culture in Brazil. I make three approaches to Becos within escrevivência’s temporal frame, examining literary anteriority (the influence of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s works), narrated marginality (polyphony, embodiment, domestic labor, minor literature), and cultural heritage (the instantiation and circulation of Black language).

This article explores how the editors and contributors of Revista de Avance formulated an idiosyncratic version of visual modern art and how that discernment shaped their idea of a nationalist and regional culture. Their artistic disquisitions were influenced by complicated political agendas and funding. After the collapse of the Cuban economy in the early 1920s, the magazine’s editors, who held socialist and anti-American imperialist beliefs, looked to Spain as a cultural model. In its pages, the magazine privileged Spanish civilization and conflated it with both European modernist culture and Cuban art and literature. At the same time, Revista de Avance voiced the ideas of the Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura, led by Fernando Ortiz.

Clientelism is traditionally viewed as a mechanism through which patrons exert control over clients. Drawing on qualitative data from three municipalities in Santiago, Chile, and building on literature that emphasizes client agency, this article explores a variant of clientelism in which clients initiate and enforce clientelistic relationships. The findings suggest that these two forms of clientelism can differently impact a crucial aspect of democracy: horizontal accountability. Client-driven clientelism compels patrons to seek resources for distribution, rendering them susceptible to influence by those who can grant them access to these resources. When patrons are tasked with accountability roles and the resource providers are subject to their oversight (as in the relationship between municipal councilors and mayors), the providers can deter these accountability functions. In contrast, patrons with independent access to resources can better preserve their autonomy.

Este artículo cuestiona la suposición común de que las organizaciones negras son inherentemente antirracistas, enfatizando la necesidad de explorar cómo esas organizaciones desarrollan perspectivas antirracistas que se integra en su trabajo y prácticas. A partir de una experiencia de trabajo con Sankofa Danzafro, este estudio analiza los resultados de seis laboratorios de danza realizados con niños, adolescentes y jóvenes afrocolombianos. Estos laboratorios culminaron en la creación de “Ancestros del Futuro”, una obra de danza inspirada en el afro-futurismo y el Black joy, interpretada por la compañía de danza afro contemporánea en Colombia. Esta investigación resalta cómo la perspectiva antirracista en la danza afro contemporánea se forma a través de una combinación única de estéticas que emergen de prácticas de danza rutinarias y una dimensión afectiva que evoluciona en momentos clave en las trayectorias de vida de los bailarines. Esta fusión desafía los discursos antirracistas dominantes que generalmente enmarcan el antirracismo como una agenda programática estática, presentándolo en cambio como una conciencia política-afectiva dinámica desarrollada mediante un compromiso reflexivo con el cuerpo a través de la danza.

El presente artículo aborda los alcances y limitaciones del reconocimiento obtenido por el Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente Chileno en el proceso constituyente iniciado en Chile luego de la revuelta social de 2019 y, particularmente, en las deliberaciones de la Convención Constitucional que sesionó entre 2021 y 2022. Además de analizar la presentación y votación de normas relacionadas con el Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente, el principal foco está puesto en los discursos de los/as convencionales constituyentes relacionados con dichas normas. Mediante un análisis crítico del discurso, se identifican tres ejes discursivos que enmarcaron el apoyo o rechazo de iniciativas en torno al reconocimiento afrodescendiente, vinculados al significado de la categoría jurídica de “pueblo tribal”, a la cuestión de la preexistencia y a la extranjerización. El artículo concluye con una discusión de las posturas adoptadas por diferentes sectores de la Convención, identificando algunos imaginarios que comportaron límites para la inclusión del pueblo afrochileno en la propuesta constitucional.

This article explores understandings of race, mestizaje, and criollismo among blind people in Chile and Venezuela. It demonstrates that visually perceived markers are not self-evidently constitutive of race as a social category. Participants show sound knowledge of racialized categories but also reveal significant differences in the identification of racial markers and in the way that race informs their understandings of mestizaje and criollismo in Chile and Venezuela. In Chile, where racial markers convey identity fixity and intersect overtly with social class categorizations, mestizaje and criollismo are conceptualized as separate elements of national identity. In Venezuela, where racial markers convey more identity porosity, mestizaje and criollismo are conceptualized as intertwined foundations of national identity. These social configurations counter naturalizing conceptualizations of race and enable a reconsideration of how different notions of admixture continue to permeate ideals of personhood and social relations in Latin American countries. They also erode academic conceptualizations of race that unwittingly contribute to legitimize the naturalization of race in public discourse—and potentially in governmental policy and practice.

Populists emerge when distrust of state institutions or dissatisfaction with democracy convince voters that claims about conspiring elites blocking the general will are valid. We propose that these dynamics change when populists are incumbents; once they command institutions, their sustained support becomes contingent upon trust in the new institutional order, and they are held accountable for making people think democracy is working well. Newly collected data on party populism and survey data from Latin America show that support for populist parties in the region is conditioned by satisfaction with democracy as well as the incumbency status of populists. Dissatisfied voters support populist opposition parties, but support for populist incumbents is higher among those satisfied with democracy and its institutions. While democratic deficits and poor governance provide openings for populists, populists are held accountable for institutional outcomes.

El proceso de retorno del exilio, iniciado después de la caída del poder de Juan Manuel de Rosas en la Confederación Argentina, llevó a una compleja trama de reinserción profesional. Este artículo examina la incorporación de los proscriptos en los cargos asociados a la formación de las instituciones políticas argentinas. Para ello, recurrimos a una base de datos de 891 casos que utilizamos para seguir los recorridos socioprofesionales antes, durante y después de la emigración. En los principales sitios de asilo en Bolivia, Chile y Uruguay, los emigrados integraron las ocupaciones asociadas a la construcción institucional: desde cargos públicos, en el ejército y hasta profesiones liberales como la abogacía y el periodismo. Postulamos el exilio como experiencia fundadora que permitió la adquisición del saber gubernamental necesario para el desarrollo de las instituciones políticas argentinas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Nuestro estudio es un ejemplo de cómo los fenómenos transnacionales jugaron un papel determinante en la formación de los Estados nación contemporáneos.

Studies of fatherhood in Latin America demonstrate an uneven shift from traditional, patriarchal fatherhood to a more reflexive version that incorporates elements of active, relational fatherhood. This hybrid fatherhood emerged from the transition of Fordism to flexible accumulation, a transformation that coincided with massive migration from Central Mexico to the United States. Migration scholars have demonstrated the fluidity of masculine identities, men’s strategies to father across borders, and how US immigration enforcement shapes gendered subjectivities and power relations in transnational families. Building off these insights, we examine how return migrant men in rural central Mexico navigated changing meanings and practices of fatherhood. Their hybrid strategies reflect the inherent contradictions of a border regime that limited circular migration to the United States and their interest in maintaining close emotional attachments to children. Transnational fathers’ connections to reproduction reveal another way that affect articulates with capital accumulation and borders.

Fuel subsidies have been an enduring policy in Ecuador’s political and economic history. Given their lack of targeting and high opportunity cost, they have been amply criticized. As of 2017, the Ecuadorian government started a budget consolidation plan that so far has involved seven reforms to subsidies policy in less than seven years. In late 2019, in response to social unrest motivated by a temporal elimination of fuel subsidies, the government pledged to study new targeting mechanisms for this policy to mitigate the impact on the most vulnerable sectors. This work seeks to contribute to that effort by evaluating the macroeconomic effects of these subsidies and serving as a guideline for targeting. A computable general equilibrium model is used to assess counterfactual scenarios. The results suggest that by implementing progressiveness and productive linkage criteria, targeting household final consumption and intermediate consumption is a feasible way to reduce the reforms’ negative effects.

In this article, I argue that Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s sociohistorical analyses of the formation of Brazilian society in Raízes do Brasil are based on a non-sociohistorical assumption. Holanda prioritizes the influence of the Portuguese colonizer on that formation based on a determinist-organicist standpoint. Although he also attributes deleterious traits to the Portuguese, he describes them as endowed with a consistent character able to adjust to adverse natural conditions and other ethnicities. As for African and Indigenous peoples, conversely, besides deprecating their temperament, Holanda reduces their influence to a peripheral and reinforcing function to the Portuguese temperament. Furthermore, he attributes the leading role in shaping Brazilian identity to the Portuguese. As I demonstrate, Holanda’s overvaluation of the Portuguese and his oversimplification of African and Indigenous peoples’ contribution to the sociohistorical development of Brazil reflect his view of peoples’ identities as naturally given, as organic-like features, and not as socially constructed.

The preponderance and influence of the public sector in the financial system have long been a defining characteristic of Brazilian capitalism. While exerting control over the national credit system through targeted lending policies and other regulatory tools, the federal government also wields significant weight through its state-owned institutions. This article delves into the role of Banco do Brasil (BB), a prominent financial institution and policymaking instrument of the Brazilian government, during the zenith of the developmental state between 1964 and 1982. In contrast to the prevailing focus on financing public spending, this study investigates the international engagements of BB and unveils its participation in managing the country’s external imbalances. BB’s financing proved crucial in bypassing the IMF and reinforcing the government’s commitment to industrialization and developmentalism. The article offers new insights into the forces of Brazil’s state-led finance and the political economy shaping its current banking and regulatory landscape.

La conformación de uniones mixtas entre personas inmigrantes y nativas se ha considerado un elemento central en el proceso de integración social, sobre todo cuando intervienen atributos como la nacionalidad y la identidad étnica. Aunque este tema ha sido ampliamente investigado en otros contextos, ha recibido menos atención en México. Este artículo busca analizar las dimensiones relacionadas con el proyecto migratorio, los discursos sobre la diferencia en México y el efecto del mestizaje sobre la formación de uniones y dinámicas de socialización de las personas. A partir de un acercamiento cualitativo que comprende el análisis de treinta y dos relatos de vida de inmigrantes latinoamericanos residentes en México, se encontró que este tipo de arreglos sociales no se traducen de manera directa en el debilitamiento de fronteras sociales, sino que pueden constituirse, en algunos casos, en elementos de reforzamiento de las barreras que dificultan la integración en distintas esferas de reproducción social.