Professor Joan Thirsk has recently argued that the history of the peasant is not one history, but several. The demise of the peasant, insisted Professor Thirsk cogently, should be seen against the background of particular farming systems and the stages in their evolution. However obvious this point might be to an historian of sixteenth-century England, it is often lost on sociologists of contemporary Latin America. All too often attempts are made to assess the revolutionary potential of the Latin American ‘peasant’ without distinguishing clearly enough between sections of the rural population, and placing them within the context of the land-tenure system. Failure to distinguish between different groups of peasant farmers has important implications not only for academic research but also for Government policy.

The documented history of Mexican sugar in the twentieth century begins with the introduction of vacuum-pan technology between 1880 and 1910, subsequently chronicling the progressive expansion and concentration of the industry, and the creeping State intervention which eventually resulted in the nationalisation of most private sugar mills during the 1960s and 1970s.1 Small-scale, labour-intensive rural trapiches producing panela (an unrefined form of semi-crystalline sugar) have largely been left out of this history, despite the fact that trapiches were often predecessors to modern sugar mills and in many areas survived displacement by them. Surveying Oaxaca's Isthmus of Tehuantepec region in 1940, for example, Ybarra recorded three industrialised mills and 37 small, motorised, panela- producing trapiches.2 In 1947, according to Aragón Calvo and Vargas Comargo, panela accounted for an estimated 25% of Mexican sugar production overall, and consumption of panela exceeded that of refined sugar in the states of Veracruz and Guerrero.3Panela continues to be produced and consumed in Mexico today — albeit in reduced quantities. In Panama, Colombia, India and other nations, panela (or the local equivalent) is an even more important sugar source than in Mexico.4

Nationally the labour-intensive panela industry pales into insignificance next to the modern sugar sector. However, in particular regions and communities, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, it has been an important source of employment and capital, providing rural dwellers with their first experience of disciplined factory work and numerous small entrepreneurs with profits that were invested back into the communities to expand control over local land and businesses.

The governments of the Orléans Monarchy pursued a very active policy in Spanish America. In 1838–9 France fought a brief war with Mexico. From 1838 to 1840 she was engaged in a dispute with Governor Rosas of Buenos Aires which escalated into an attempt to overthrow him. The French Navy played a distinctly un—neutral role during the Argentine siege of Montevideo in the early 1840s. In 1845 France and Britain cooperated in an attempt to impose a peace settlement upon the belligerents in the Río de la Plata. These two powers also seriously considered a plan to block American expansion in 1845 by offering certain guarantees to Texas and Mexico. The French were also involved in several minor disputes – involving New Granada, Chile, and Mexico again – which nearly led to blows. The armed forces of France were in more constant action only in North Africa. Yet French political and economic interests in Spanish America were hardly as important as these activities implied. In fact, French policy was based upon a misconception of the potential importance of their interests. The error was made worse by the nature of the French policy-making process. The aims of this paper are ito explain how these erroneous conceptions of French interests were formulated, why they were not rectified, and why it was the French rather than the British, despite their greater interest in Spanish America, who appeared to wave ‘the big stick’ there during this period.

In 2013, Argentina's then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sparked controversy for her decision to replace a monument of Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires with one of nineteenth-century mestiza revolutionary Juana Azurduy. This article examines the history and iconography of these monuments, exploring the intersections between public space, art, politics and memory. It argues that these monuments — one representing Argentina's previously maligned Italian immigrant heritage, the other its forgotten indigenous culture — demonstrate how fundamental struggles over national identity have been embedded and contested in the capital's urban landscape, in ways that remain influential. It highlights Argentina's 1910 centennial and 2010 bicentennial as key to these efforts, and examines the power/politics of place in the central plaza where various actors have fought for public commemorative representation.

During his five years as chief US policy-maker towards Puerto Rico, Ernest Gruening strove to create a model – based on the anti-imperialist principles he had outlined in the 1920s – for a reformist policy which the United States could pursue towards the rest of Latin America. The initial support of Franklin Roosevelt allowed Gruening to position his Puerto Rican programme as one of the three ideological alternatives present in the early stages of the Good Neighbour Policy. The collapse of Gruening's scheme provided US policymakers with an early illustration of the difficulty of imposing reform with insufficient local support.

This article analyses the short-run periods that can be derived from the GDP per capita series for Argentina between 1875 and 1990, after extracting its segmented long-run trend using time series techniques and unit root tests. It also studies the economic forces which, from the aggregate demand side, might provide an explanation for this behaviour. This mode of operation makes it possible to identify successive cycles more accurately than in previous studies. A high level of agreement is observed between the results of this study and arguments in the literature regarding the causes shaping these short-run periods: the analysis demonstrates that exports were the key factor until 1932 while after this year consumption and investment came to predominate.

An examination of the evolution of Rómulo Betancourt's views in the 1930s and 1940s shows how he came to look for a close relationship with the United States just as the State Department, and later the Central Intelligence Agency, were coming to view reformist movements such as Betancourt's Acción Democrática as the best possible bulwark against communism in Latin America. The resulting international relationship during the three years of democratic government in Venezuela known as the trienio was cordial and potentially durable. Its failure is indicative of both the importance of local political leadership in the maintenance of democratic openings and the strength of nationalist notions of political legitimacy in US policy.

Since the Alliance for Progress was first established over fifteen years ago, a number of interpretations have been offered for United States agrarian development policy in Latin America. This paper examines two of these interpretations in the light of a detailed study of peasant organization and agrarian reform in Ecuador, a country which received considerable attention from AID from the early 1960s. It has been suggested that AID staff in Latin America are often confused about the role the Agency should play. Indeed, the former Peruvian President, Belaunde, is said to have remarked that ‘AID is very feminine: it never says “no”, but it always says “maybe”‘. It might be added that such prevarication does not seem to have prevented AID from curtailing its more ambitious proposals so as to make them ‘…acceptable to prevailing elites’ However, neither the undoubted conservatism of the Agency, nor its lack of decisiveness are its only notable features. A more penetrating analysis of AID's role in Latin America must begin with the context in which AID operated in specific cases, and consider the legacy of its involvement in particular countries. In this paper it is suggested that AID was instrumental in establishing the outlines of the agrarian development strategy currently being pursued by the Ecuadorian State. As such, its role cannot be considered in inflated conspiratorial terms, nor can AID's activities be interpreted as of only marginal significance in the continent as a whole.

A series of military dictators came to power in the four nothern republics of Central America during the Great Depression of the 1930s and perpetuated themselves in office through continuismo tactics until roughly the conclusion of the Second World War: General Jorge Ubico, the first and strongest of these caudillos, ruled Guatemala from 1931 to 1944; General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez governed El Salvador from December 1931 to 1944; General Tiburcio Carías Andino dominated Honduras from 1933 to 1946; and General Anastasio Somoza García controlled Nicaragua from 1936 to 1956.

The study of United States foreign policy has recently been invigorated by the introduction of Graham Allison's bureaucratic politics model (BPM). The basic unit of analysis of the BPM is governmental action viewed as political resultant. In Allison's words, the actions of governments are ‘resultants in the sense that what happens is not chosen as a solution to a problem but rather results from compromise, conflict, and confusion of officials with diverse interests and unequal influence…’. The BPM assumes that different players will have different perspectives toward similar problems, that is, they will each see different ‘faces’ of the same issue. The basic assumption of the BPM as it is applied to United States foreign policy toward Latin America by scholars such as Abraham Lowenthal is that United States decision-makes, who share power in both the formulation and implementation of policy, have differing points of view because of their differing organizational and personal perspectives.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted among parents living in the affluent neighbourhoods of Ipanema, Brazil, and El Condado, Puerto Rico, I examine how urban Latin American elites deployed their parenting practices as moral justification for their racial and class privilege (what I call ‘sovereign parenting’). One way in which they do this is by producing particular forms of affective relationships with their nannies. The women these upper-class parents hired were largely dark-skinned immigrants: from the Dominican Republic, to work in El Condado, and from the Brazilian Northeast, to work in Ipanema. I demonstrate how elites cultivated a form of ‘informality’ and expressions of care in relation to childcare workers in ways that not only produced whiteness as a pillar of Latin American liberalism, but also associated whiteness with the world of interiority and personal growth.

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.

…the record would seem to suggest that Latin American political studies have more often than not been unimaginative in concept and pedestrian in approach. A certain healthy eclecticism has been diluted by a Pavlovian tendency to respond to passing fads within the discipline. Political scientists committed to Latin American studies have in recent years rushed to follow the the comparative pack. They have distinctly been trend-followers rather than trend-setters.

The political life of Argentina between 1946 and 1955 cannot be defined exclusively by the emergence and consolidation of Peronism, but was also shaped by the actions, ideas and conflicts of opposition to it. The evolution of the Radical and Socialist parties during those years was marked both by their respective internal discrepancies and by the dynamics of confrontation with the government. In the face of Perón's emergence as a political figure, Radicals and Socialists revitalised inter-party agreements that had been tried and tested in previous years. The Radicals, their internal disagreements notwithstanding, were to become the main representatives of anti-Peronism their oppositional roles changing as the institutional spaces for conflict and engagement with Peronism developed. Meanwhile, the Socialists lost political and representational weight, despite their desperate attempts to maintain themselves as an option within the political arena. When the rules of political competition changed in Peronism's favour, Radicals and Socialists became convinced of the legitimacy of challenging the constitutional order in an attempt to increase the political representation of anti-Peronism.

The metal-mining boom Latin America experienced in recent decades precipitated highly contentious anti-mining social movements in Central America. In this context, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban all metal mining by law. In contrast, policy in nearby Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua remained pro-mining. These cases are compared using a most similar systems design. Comparison reveals the importance of three variables: how national economic-elite networks and interests relate to multinational corporations; national movement coordination and goals, specifically in relation to prohibition; and how parties and leaders relied on popular bases or capital. These factors shaped the contention between elites and movements that influenced state actions around mining and led to this ‘least likely case’ of extractive policy change in El Salvador.

If David Bell in his book Men on Horseback (2020) focuses on what is political charisma, how it functions, and what it means ‘to write its history’, this article examines how Brazil's ex-President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (‘Lula’) acquired charisma during the dramatic 1978–80 metalworkers’ strikes in the industrial ABC region of São Paulo, Brazil. While generating a vast literature, scholars of the ABC strikes have evaded the question of how Lula, the gifted organiser, emerged as a recognisably charismatic figure. This article explains where, when and why this happened and how a charismatic bond was forged as 100,000 stigmatised, fearful, self-doubting ‘peons’ came to constitute themselves as a locally articulated social actor, a group in fusion, whose boldness and creativity led to extraordinary feats of organisation and mobilisation. Arguing against conflating charisma and populism, it also establishes the utility of the theorisation of group-making advanced in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Marked differences in mid-twentieth-century reformers' approaches to politically active working women in Belize and Puerto Rico help to explain the emergence of colonial hegemony in the latter, and the rise of mass nationalism in the former. Reformers in both colonies were concerned with working women, but whereas British and Belizean reformers treated them as sexually and politically disordered, and aimed to transform them from militant wage-earners to clients of state social services, US and Puerto Rican reformers treated them as voting citizens with legitimate roles in the economy and labour movement. Although racialised moralism was not absent in Puerto Rico, the populism of colonial reform there helped cement a renegotiated colonial compact, while the non-populist character of reform in Belize – and the wider British Caribbean – alienated working women from the colonial state.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the often-remarked historiographical bias in favour of social/economic studies for the colonial period and political/ institutional studies for the national period more jarring than in treatments of the activities of the Mexican church before and after independence.1 The position of the church in the colonial economy has been the subject of several specialised works and is widely regarded in broader histories as most significant.2 But students of independent Mexico have usually focused on the church's role in the political arena, characterising the politics of the period from 1821 to 1856 as, in essence, a battle for supremacy betweenthe church and the state, or in a slightly different formulation, as a struggle between liberalism and conservatism.3