Henry George Ward's Mexico in 1827 (published in 1828) is one of the most exhaustive accounts of Mexico and its mining activities in the years following its independence from Spain. Written with a meticulous attention to detail, it provided a unique first-hand interpretation both of Mexico's early governments’ achievements and of the not insignificant problems they had as yet to overcome. It highlighted the risks and opportunities Mexico presented to potential British investors and emphasised the benefits of free trade, the need for patience, and how important it was to become meaningfully acquainted with the country before investing in one or several ventures there. This study provides for the first time an analysis of Ward's two-volume survey-cum-travelogue. It shows how Ward's cautiously optimistic appraisal faithfully reflected the short-lived hopes of Guadalupe Victoria's 1824–9 government and provides a sympathetic account of the young republic that would prove anything but common in subsequent British representations of Mexico, as the country's inability to service the London debt and its ensuing instability went on to hinder British–Mexican relations for the greater part of the nineteenth century.

From the last years of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twentieth, the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro witnessed a new social phenomenon: the proliferation, in every neighbourhood, of small dance clubs formed by workers. Noteworthy among them was the Flor do Abacate, a recreational society founded in 1906 by a group of men and women of African descent. Far from making any claim to ‘being African’, this association promoted balls and parades in which African cultural heritage was shown in conjunction with other cultural logics valued as modern and cosmopolitan. As a consequence, it constituted a model of recreational society, black and modern at the same time, which its members tried to associate to a national profile. The objective of this article is to analyse both the logic that explains the organisation of this dance society and the challenges that its members faced in consolidating it.

Controversy and intrigue greeted Charlie Chaplin's new film, The Great Dictator, when it arrived in Latin American theatres in early 1941. With tear gas, Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic insults, pro-Axis factions from Mexico to Argentina protested against the Hollywood star's ridicule of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. At an important Good Neighbour moment, the film's tumultuous Latin American circulation and exhibition exposed fault lines in hemispheric solidarity by subverting US efforts to recruit allies in the region and threatened President Roosevelt's support for European intervention at home. Down south, heated public debates over the film trained a harsh light on Latin American leaders’ own anti-democratic impulses and raised questions about constitutionality within unequal societies. This article moves beyond film as text to examine the Chaplin picture as a cultural object and agent that exposed the limits of US imperialism and Latin American resistance strategies more broadly.

In the 1990s, Colombia decentralised politics and passed multicultural reforms as part of wider strategies to strengthen the state. Multiculturalism produced a complex institutional environment marked by jurisdictional overlap and legal plurality. The literature on Colombia's multiculturalism confirms that violence, indigenous rights abuses and the lack of enabling legislation on indigenous territorial entities limited ethno-political autonomy and instead enhanced the capacity of the state to transform indigenous identity and bureaucratise local decision-making practices. However, some indigenous authorities used the new institutions to take control of communal matters, changing local governments along the way. The better-known case of indigenous self-government is that of the Nasa people in Cauca, characterised by the capture of local institutions to advance ethnic rights. In my study of the Embera Chamí of Karmata Rúa (Antioquia) I argue that they represent an alternative approach centred on institutional embeddedness, or the repetition of ethnic autonomy rules by multiple layers of government.

This article studies the intersections between race and regional identity in the 1940s and 1950s in Salvador, Bahia, a critical site for the African diaspora. It examines how tourist guides produced for domestic consumption, first by Jorge Amado and later by intellectuals Odorico Tavares and José Valladares, sought to frame the city in new ways around blackness. Grounding the production of such guides in national trends for mobility and travel, the article proposes that they provided a foundational site for the crafting of a regional identity. Critically, these texts established early links between a commodified black culture and tourism in ways that would prove exceptionally long-lasting.

The most significant weakness of the Marxist Left in early Cold War Mexico was that it subordinated itself to post-revolutionary nationalism. Both the Mexican Communist Party and followers of Vicente Lombardo Toledano supported the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), avoiding significant criticism before late 1947. Some dissident currents of Marxism did exist, but they were sparsely followed. Mexico provides an extreme case of Left subordination to popular-nationalist ideology, yet is indicative of trends visible elsewhere, e.g. among Marxist groups in post-war Cuba and the United States. Rather than promoting notions of communist political practice, the Mexican Marxist Left consistently advocated the elimination of class conflict and support for the ‘national bourgeoisie’. The Marxist Left held the Mexican government to different standards from those to which they held the governments of other countries. A near-consensus on the Mexican Left equated patriotism with progressive politics. The argument is illustrated with an important case study: the 1947 Marxist Round Table.

This article analyses efforts by the state of Oaxaca to mark its border from 1856 to 1912. State officials hoped to demarcate a permanent border along the frontier as a way to delineate a peaceful ending to on-going boundary disputes, some of which allegedly dated to pre-Columbian times. The activity of marking Oaxaca's boundary effectively represented a literal process of Mexican state formation. Oaxaca officials attempted to negotiate the state's jurisdictional limits in cooperation with other federations as well as with their own citizens as they located the parameters of the state and the limits of its authority during the era.

This article presents an entangled history of Argentina and Egypt in the years surrounding the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. It combines diplomatic, migration and anti-imperial activism histories to delineate the intellectual and institutional links between these nations from the late 1940s to the 1950s – from the rise of Peronism through to Nasser's management of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Diverse Argentine social and political sectors saw parallels between the anti-imperial struggles in the Arab world and in Latin America. Though with differing and sometimes competing agendas, these groups learned and deployed the language of non-alignment and South–South solidarity in the escalating Cold War.

A tradition in Latin America of reliance on strong leaders becomes problematic when political parties look outside their ranks for candidates who have popular appeal but do not embody their ideologies. This contradiction emerged in Ecuador in the mid-twentieth century when the Left looked to General Alberto Enríquez Gallo as its champion. His early trajectory in the military made him a most unlikely hero for the Left, but when he promulgated progressive labour legislation he gained its strong support. It was, however, a marriage of convenience, as leftists and populists inherently follow different political logics.

Within the neocolonial context of ‘Plan Colombia’ in the early 2000s, agents of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took up position in the heart of the Colombian penitentiary administration to lead a reform based on the United States’ ultra-punitive penal regime. This paper analyses how the reform was set up on the ground, shedding light on the partially divergent expectations of the two governments. Drawing on recent literature on the mobility of policies and built forms, the paper argues that the introduction of US-inspired prisons in Colombia is a striking case where a mobile policy and a travelling architectural type coincided and complemented each other.

This article analyses the administrative structure and development of Chile's indigenous policies under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–90), taking as its focus a pilot project for indigenous Mapuche integration known as Plan Perquenco. Officials formulated Plan Perquenco in accordance with the Chilean state's new administrative structure known as regionalisation. I focus on the unintended consequences of regionalisation that permitted the Mapuche youth group, Los Guitarreros Caminantes, to work through Plan Perquenco's music programmes to challenge the cultural politics of and justification for the pilot project.

This article explores the settlement of Russian Mennonites on the Paraguayan Chaco frontier during the Chaco War years. These colonists engaged in a range of seemingly contradictory place-making practices – from the agro-environmental and the political to the spiritual and the cultural – that served to solidify their tenuous claim to an unfamiliar and highly contested landscape. Ideas of food security – seen in terms of both production and consumption – linked these diverse exercises. In the Paraguayan Chaco, these former Russian wheat farmers experimented with new crops and foodways. Although pacifists, they supplied the Paraguayan military efforts even as they also sent their crops to Nazi Germany. Finally, as an ethnic group practising endogamy and seeking isolation from their neighbours, they unexpectedly initiated a campaign to evangelise the Chaco's indigenous population centred, in part, on reforming the latter's ‘deficient’ diet.

This paper explores the meanings that youth crime and policing acquire in the context of their mediated representation on the televised news in Nicaragua. In particular, it explores this question by juxtaposing the televised imagery of the apprehended juvenile delinquent with the discursive treatment of his person by both police and reporters on Nicaragua's most watched news shows, Acción 10 and Crónica TN8. The police are presented as heroic protagonists who serve and protect the barrio through ‘communitarian policing’ whilst the juvenile delinquent – the ‘pinta’ – is excluded and stigmatised. This turns such youths into socially expendable and ‘tainted, discounted’ outsiders who can be treated as such. In this way, through the news, pintas are targeted for ‘removal’ from the barrio, and their mediated arrests become ‘spectacular performances’ of community. A discrepancy appears, then, between the police's communitarian discourse and its reactionary practice.

This article explores the legal writings of Brazilian sociologist and jurist Francisco José de Oliveira Vianna to reveal the global context that shaped Brazil's corporatist experiment in the 1930s. From the Labour Ministry, Oliveira Vianna was at the forefront of legal and political debates over how to create corporatist laws and institutions. He was often cast as an authoritarian and retrograde thinker, yet this article looks beyond those categories to examine how his engagement with the US New Deal inserted corporatism into global debates over the role of the state in economic recovery and social welfare.

This article focuses on census policy-making by analysing the decision-making processes behind the apparent stability of Brazilian racial categories within a context of multiple changes in racial politics and policies over the last four decades (1970–2010). Empirically, we rely on archival material, survey and census data, as well as key informant interviews with senior technocrats from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, IBGE). Our findings show the central role of technocratic actors in shaping and giving meaning to these categories in a context of uncertainty about the most valid approach to measurement. Their role is particularly evident in IBGE's early application of the negro category to the non-white population and repeated rejection of the moreno category. Beyond technical expertise, these census officials navigated various professional, political and ideological motivations. We develop the concept of technocratic compromise to capture census officials’ decision-making process and underscore its importance to explaining census policy outcomes.

This paper uses corruption in Mexico City's markets as a lens to examine state–society relations and the construction of the PRI's hegemony in post-1946 Mexico. It presents three case studies that show how some ostensibly corrupt practices supported state functioning, while others contributed to the process of party building. It demonstrates that these practices were driven by shifting social dynamics and conflicts among vendors, which operated through networks of formal and informal power. Historicising corruption illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the Mexican state as well as the balance between co-optation and popular demands that lay behind it in this period.

Why do new parties split? Scholars of new party schisms shy away from leadership-centred explanations for fear of excessive voluntarism and thus fail to conceptualise differences between leaders systematically. This article challenges that trend, arguing that externally appealing, internally dominant leaders generate cohesion in new parties. It analyses why some externally appealing leaders are internally dominant, while others are not, and argues that this variation can make the difference between schism and survival. The article supports its argument through a representative case study: the fatal (and consequential) schism of Peru's United Left coalition in the late 1980s.

This article chronicles the fifteen-month border conflict between the military regimes of Brazil and Paraguay that occurred between March of 1965 and June of 1966 – a stand-off that paved the way for the Itaipu project that would become the largest dam in the world. In the context of the 1960s Cold War, both governments saw a large-scale dam on the Paraná River as a means to catalyse industrialisation and strengthen the political legitimacy of their respective authoritarian regimes. Yet the border crisis was not a stand-off between equal powers. Brazil was the much stronger force, and, with the backing of the United States, the Brazilian dictatorship brought Paraguay firmly under its sphere of influence while also marginalising neighbouring Argentina. The border question at Guaíra served as a springboard for Brazil's rising power, and subsequently transformed the geopolitical landscape of the Southern Cone.

This article analyses the political economy of Henri Lefebvre's concept of ‘state space’ with specific attention directed towards the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, completed in 1938. The conditions of modernity can be generally related to the spatial ordering of urban landscapes within capital cities conjoining the specifics of national identity with imitative processes. Antonio Gramsci captured such sentiments through his understanding of the condition of ‘passive revolution’. The key contribution of this article is to draw attention to forms of everyday passive revolution, recognising both cosmopolitan and vernacular aspects of modern architecture in relation to the Monument to the Revolution. A focus on the Monument to the Revolution thus reveals specific spatial practices of everyday passive revolution relevant to the codification of architecture and the political economy of modern state formation in Mexico. These issues are revealed, literally, as vital expressions in the architecture of everyday passive revolution in modern Mexico.

This article examines the dynamics of women's participation in the Communist Party of Uruguay (PCU) from the 1920s to the 1960s. Despite its commitment to women's emancipation and to equality between men and women, the PCU's attitudes towards gender equality were often contradictory and its messages were ambiguous. Though it promoted women's participation, the Party oscillated between seeking to overcome social prejudices, upholding principled and dogmatic positions, and accommodating the conservative habits prevalent among the working class. Women were encouraged to take part in activities but not to assume leadership positions. The 1960s, ironically a period characterised by openness and political success, was a decade of regression in gender equality that stood in contrast to the Uruguayan Communists' long trajectory concerning women's rights.