This article explores how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas of the Spanish American consumer took shape. It argues that Atlantic debates on consumption, on the one hand, and on racial difference, on the other, provided a common ground on which foreign visitors, diplomats and commentators, as well as Colombian elite intellectuals, could jointly create a positive idea of the Spanish American consumer. The article demonstrates that, in the eyes of those who had either political or economic interest in the region, it was possible for Spanish American Indians, Blacks and ‘mixed races’ to gradually overcome their ‘backwardness’ by adopting new practices of consumption. The consumption of new necessities by the Spanish American popular sectors became, for many of these commentators, an irrefutably civilising force.

Nineteenth-century republicans across the political spectrum agreed: the Spanish monarchy produced ‘miserable Indians’. Abolishing tribute and privatising communal lands, known as resguardos in New Granada (roughly today's Panama and Colombia), would transform that wretched class into equal citizens. Drawing on late eighteenth-century privatisation efforts by the Spanish Crown, early republican leaders in Gran Colombia inaugurated an era seeking equal access to wealth from communal land for all indigenous community members. After Gran Colombia (the first Colombian Republic, 1819–30) dissolved into New Granada, Ecuador and Venezuela in 1830, New Granada's experiments with indigenous resguardo policies went further. By then, legislative efforts considered the needs of all resguardo members, including unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children. Complex laws, diverse ecological terrain and nuanced social realities required well-trained surveyors to ensure each eligible indigenous family received a fair share of land. Whereas indigenous communities in Pasto, Santa Marta and the Cauca river valley resorted to armed insurrection against liberal policies through the War of the Supremes (1839–42), those in the highlands near Bogotá did not. Instead, these republican indígenas – with their greater access to the levers of power housed in the national capital – chose to engage in the reforms of a decentralising state. This article reveals how contentious experiments seeking republican equality within indigenous resguardos as a path towards abolishing the institution were consistently stymied by efforts to ensure that indigenous community governance and communal landholding remained intact.

This article challenges the widely held view that, during the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatista villages governed themselves with complete autonomy from the state and according to the pueblos’ customary justice. It shows how Zapatistas in the multi-state region of south-central Mexico dealt with quarrels over small and medium-sized properties, the restitution of usurped pueblo lands and water resources, as well as village boundary disputes. They did so by blending nineteenth-century judicial procedures and civil law, limited but radical reforms to the existing judicial system and new forms of land and water management – all of which strengthened state authority.

If Latin America's public universities are considered part of the state, then it seems plausible to characterise them as similar to the state, i.e. as clientelistic. However, this plausible hypothesis has never been examined by the literature on twentieth-century Mexican social sciences. Just like clientelism, science patrons such as US philanthropic foundations have similarly been neglected. In this article I argue that, as an alternative to what the Rockefeller Foundation perceived as clientelism and amateurism at Latin American universities, it claimed to patronise liberal scholarship, practised according to formal rational criteria. While foundations have been frequently considered part of a US imperialistic drive towards cultural hegemony in Latin America, they were not unitary actors and frequently failed to predict the actual impact of their grants. In Mexico in the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation boosted the humanities, but missed the opportunity to support a local take on social science teaching and research.

This article examines the central role of sports media in the discussions about national sports programmes at the peak of Latin American populism, particularly during the governments of Juan Perón in Argentina (1946–55) and Carlos Ibáñez in Chile (1952–8). By exploring sports publications such as the Argentine magazines Mundo Deportivo and El Gráfico and the Chilean weekly Estadio, I argue that sports media staged stories and images that were both inspired by, and critical of, the larger populist projects in Argentina and Chile. Photographers and cartoonists, often in collaboration with sportswriters, produced and crafted populist ideas about class collaboration, the inclusion of children in the state project and women's participation in politics.

This article draws on an international assemblage of sources to recover the history of the involvement of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN) in the Cuban missile crisis. It argues that, through the mechanisms of the OAS and the UN, Latin American citizens and officials helped shape the peaceful outcome of the crisis. This article challenges dismissive portrayals of both Latin American countries and multilateral organisations and, in so doing, joins the growing literature on how supposedly weak Latin American countries have used international organisations to influence world affairs.

This paper analyses a government-facilitated truce, begun in 2012, between El Salvador's three principal street gangs. Using field theory and securitisation theory, it maps the evolution of the truce, distinguishing between the three related processes of making the deal, keeping the truce, and resisting it. It analyses the complex and intriguing political processes in which various actors, such as gang leaders, government officials and international organisations, interacted with each other and made deals about the use and visibility of violence and ways of diminishing, preventing or hiding it.