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.

Peru launched its history as an independent state with one of the world's briefest and most direct Declarations of Independence. In Lima, on 15 July 1821, an open town council meeting (cabildo abierto) called especially to consider the question, declared: ‘All the gentlemen present, for themselves and satisfied of the opinion of the inhabitants of the capital, said: That the general will is decided in favor of the Independence of Peru from Spanish domination, and that of whatever other foreign power…’1 People actually present in the chambers of the city council, in the corridors outside, and in the street below signed the Act there and then.

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.

In 1936, the indigenous Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi travelled to and exhibited his work in Chile. Using a transnational framework of historical analysis, this article explores the multiple meanings of his visit. In particular it underscores the involvement of the Chilean and Peruvian governments in this cultural encounter, and highlights some of the commonalities and connections, as well as differences, between the discourses of race that were circulating in Chile and Peru at the time. This is important because it undermines the dominant historical narratives, which have tended to present Chile as a country that – in contrast to Peru – failed to engage in discussions about the so-called ‘indigenous question’, and which have interpreted relations between Chile and Peru almost exclusively as antagonistic and hostile.

On 26 January 1981, one of the colonels in Brazil's National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), Colonel Zanoni Hausen, issued an instruction from his department, the DGPC (General Department of Community Development – now extinct), to three public servants hitherto undistinguished for any particular contribution to indigenous affairs in Brazil and with no particular qualifications for the task assigned to them. Their brief was to form a ‘Committee for the Identification of Criteria of Integration’ and they were to present their results within ten days. The criteria, the document states, need no justification or explanation; ‘it is sufficient to list them in their principal groups; ethnic, sociological, economic, linguistic and so on’.

Uruguay's late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economic modernisation and political institutionalisation were accompanied by the education reform led by José Pedro and Jacobo Varela, which was extended to the whole country during the administrations of José Batlle y Ordóñez. Schools were to insert future generations into the capitalist world market and a more liberal polity. This article explores how official manuals and related texts constructed the nation. They invented a foundation narrative that made José Artigas a protagonist of independence; converted Amerindians into extinct ancestors; represented European immigrants as dynamic elements who, rightly mixed, would form a new ethnic group and help the cosmopolitan lettered city to civilise the gaucho; and taught children that hard work and education held the key to prosperity.

The subject of this study is the controversial territorial claim concerning British Honduras or Belize,1 a coastal strip some 174 miles long and about 70 miles broad at its widest point, lying on the eastern seaboard of Central America between 15° 54' and 18° 29' north latitude, and 88° II' (or, including the offshore islands, 87° 28') and 89° 13½' west longitude. 2 Its area of 8,867 square miles is roughly equal to that of Wales or twice the size of Jamaica. It is the second smallest political division on the American continent, being slightly larger than El Salvador, the smallest Latin American State.3 It is bounded on the north and north-west by Mexico, the boundary following the Hondo river; on the south and west by Guatemala, the southern boundary being the Sarstoon river; and on the east by the Carribbean Sea.4

The article addresses the history of the ‘Estatuto del Peón’ (peons’ statute or rural workers’ code), one of the most emblematic measures of the so-called ‘first Peronism’. It tries to weigh the importance of this legendary Peronist act for the actors directly involved and in particular to calibrate the magnitude of the Statute's impact on the everyday life and working conditions of Argentina's rural workers. I analyse in detail how the decree was conceived and the novelties it brought in terms of rights and regulations for rural workers. It also uses trial records to explore the implementation of the Statute and its concrete effects, in terms of both working conditions and the juridical protections offered to rural peons.

Much of the agricultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America has been dominated by studies of export products and economies. Yet just as important for national development were domestic markets supplied by small-scale farmers. Using Guatemala as a case study for Latin America, this article examines the challenges faced by farmers producing for local, regional and national markets. Over the course of the national period, state authorities’ sporadic concern for domestic agriculture provided indigenous small-scale farmers with opportunities to advance their agendas, which ranged from resisting forced labour to maintaining their traditional agricultural practices. By the 1930s, domestic foodstuff production had increased markedly because in the early twentieth century state authorities had joined small-scale farmers to actively promote domestic-use agriculture.