Anthropological analysis elucidates how discourses about agriculture in one North-east Brazilian community reflect relational roles of citizens and the state, the position of farmers in society, and the relationship of individuals to their work. In these discourses, farmers are positioned as moral, hard-working, autonomous citizens, justifying their participation in low-paying activities. The declining numbers of agricultural workers is explained as a result of individual laziness or government irresponsibility. In using these discourses to take stances publicly on agricultural issues, speakers assign responsibilities and moral status to agents. In constructing rural identities, such moral discourses emphasise the symbolic value of subsistence agriculture as its economic value declines.

The article analyses social and political conflict in Chile during the agrarian reform period of the 1960s and 1970s through a case study of the province of Cautín, in the indigenous heartlands of the south. Using a combination of written and oral sources, it analyses the responses and strategies of landowners descended from nineteenth-century settlers to the emancipatory projects carried out during the presidencies of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende. In the context of an increasingly radicalised agrarian reform programme and a growing number of territorial conflicts with the Mapuche communities, this little-studied political actor developed a collective identity, an ideological discourse and a readiness to use violence which provides important insights into the causes of the military coup carried out in 1973.

At the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), the clandestine lottery called the jogo do bicho or ‘animal game’, which still exists today, gained enormous popularity in Rio de Janeiro, the city of its origin, and soon in the whole of Brazil. Reconstructing the spread and persecution of the jogo do bicho during its first decades reveals the social process of urbanisation evident in the daily, often informal and quasi-legal, interactions between the state and popular commerce in Latin America. The ambivalent official stance and public sentiment that developed toward this lottery suggest that ‘law and order’ concerns in themselves do not explain the criminalisation of vernacular practices.

Although in recent years there has been an increasing quantity of suggestive and important investigations of Peronism, little attention has been paid to the continuity between the pre-1943 and the Peronist labor movement.1 This continuity has been neglected despite general recognition that there were important labor leaders from the earlier labor movement who provided key initial support to Peonism and that the pre-1943 labor movement was one of Latin America's strongest.

By the end of the nineteenth century, railway expansion had led to the formation of a technocratic bureaucracy in Chile and other countries in Latin America. Central to this formation were the engineers who oversaw and regulated both public and private railways. Recently, historians have begun to re-examine engineers’ roles in this period. By employing methods and theoretical framings from the history of technology, this article argues that engineering was an important framework through which state–capital relations evolved, making engineers pivotal actors in the evolution of political economy at the time.

This article seeks to expand our understanding of the dynamics of the Gómez regime and of its treatment of foreign investment by examining its relationship with a large British enterprise engaged in ranching and frozen meat exports. The company and the regime established mutually beneficial relationships during the First World War, but when the tighter market conditions of the post-war period obliged the company to restrict its purchases of cattle from Gómez, he forced the company to end its exports. The regime's treatment of the Vestey enterprise thus offers a vivid contrast to its treatment of foreign oil companies.

Indigenous beauty pageants can be seen as a way of re-appropriating indigenous identity. This article approaches beauty pageants as being situated in multiple systems of power at four levels of contestation: (1) reproducing gender relations and creating new professional and political opportunities; (2) constituting a site for cultural and political agency and delimiting the ways to ‘be a Maya woman’; (3) reproducing class relations in terms of access to the event and contributing to social awareness of beauty queens; (4) as a social event consolidating (gender) relations within the family. The findings are based on longitudinal (2002–14) ethnographic fieldwork in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

In late eighteenth-century Mexico City, Spanish colonials, particularly members of the urban middle and popular classes, performed a number of weddings and baptisms on puppies (which were wearing clothes or bejewelled collars) in the context of fandangos or dance parties. These ceremonies were not radical challenges to orthodoxy or conservative reactions in the face of significant economic, political, religious and cultural Bourbon reforms emanating from Spain. Employing Inquisitorial investigations of these ceremonies, this article explores the rise of pet keeping, the meanings of early modern laughter and the implications of the cultural and religious components of the Enlightenment-inspired Bourbon reforms in late colonial Mexico.

Revisionist historians have convincingly argued that Spanish American independence was not the result of simmering grievances that galvanised a national or Creole identity against Spain. Instead, this scholarship insists that Spanish American national identities did not exist at the time and that independence was an unforeseen process that must be understood in the context of the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia. But, if independence was undesirable before 1808 and if national identities arose at a latter period, how do we explain the early independence projects of ‘precursors’ like Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán? By contextually reconstructing the logic behind Viscardo's projects, this article offers a new perspective on the intellectual conditions of possibility for Spanish American independence. It argues that though he certainly identified as a Creole from Peru, Viscardo actually deployed an Enlightenment global science of commerce, not Creole patriotism or nationalism, to legitimate Spanish American independence.

The electoral democracy created by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 opened up dramatic new possibilities for working-class political identity. In the important port city of Rosario, the Radical politician Ricardo Caballero crafted a political discourse that combined an explicit defence of working-class interests with a nostalgic depiction of the country's rural past. By linking class consciousness with images drawn from the popular culture of the ‘gauchesque,’ Caballerismo constructed a distinctively working-class version of Argentine nationalism and citizenship.

The social and economic history of North-Eastern Brazil has largely been written as the story of slave-holding plantations. In contrast, this article focuses on the peasant agriculture of tobacco in the state of Bahia. It shows how the small-scale cultivation of tobacco for the European (mainly German) export market had already started well before the end of slavery. Tobacco cultivation gradually expanded to become the most important export product in the first decade of the twentieth century. Apart from its economic significance, the history of Bahian tobacco agriculture throws an interesting light on the social and political relations in the region. Land ownership among the tobacco farmers expanded, but most of them remained locked into ties of dependency to commercial intermediaries and large landowners. On the other hand, the latter's dominant position did not lead to a strong position for tobacco interests in the regional political arena. Finally, the tobacco producers originated in the black (ex-)slave community. This article argues that this specific ethnic make-up played an important role in the organisation of the tobacco sector and its relative neglect by regional and national politicians.

In the nineteenth century, members of the Rio de Janeiro-based Sociedade Auxiliadora da Industria Nacional promoted the development of new agro-industrial commodities from Brazil's native forests as substitutes for expensive foreign imports. Influenced by late colonial scientists and reformers who followed the political economy of Carl Linnaeus, the society turned a Portuguese imperial project of economic revitalisation into a vision for developing the nation's post-independence economy. For society members, Brazil's ‘industrial forests’ were essential for economic independence and defined the new nation's place in an emerging global capitalist system.

This interdisciplinary study approximates the Columbian interpretation of the Taí nos – filtered and re-interpreted by the Dominican people, through their museums. Cultural phenomena such as vomitic spatulas, ‘talking’ idols, hallucinogens, infant cranial deformation, dances, nudity, sexual customs, punishments, and live burial produced Columbus's tendency to denounce the Taínos in his writings. These texts are displayed in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano side-by-side with anthropological exhibitions. Together, these texts and artifacts become purveyors of an ideology, one which Dominicans use to challenge the Eurocentric, romanticising, Noble Savage approach propagated during the Quincentennial.