This essay reviews the following works:

Learning from Bogotá: Pedagogical Urbanism and the Reshaping of Public Space. By Rachel Berney. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. 190. $40.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781477311042.

Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948–1958. By Lisa Blackmore. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 268. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822964384.

São Paulo: A Graphic Biography/Uma biografia gráfica. By Felipe Correa. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. 7 + 336. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781477316276.

Shaping Terrain: City Building in Latin America. Edited by René Davids. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. xii + 261. $79.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780813062679.

El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Malls in Latin America. By Arlene Dávila. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 215. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520286856.

Improvised Cities: Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru. By Helen Gyger. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 438. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822945369.

The present trend toward democratic regimes in Latin American countries raises the issue of their regime-determined capabilities. Democracy is generally defined in procedural terms and supported on moral rather than policy grounds (Schumpeter 1950, 242). Consequently, very little is known about the policy consequences, if any, of the adoption of democratic forms and procedures by Latin American political systems. One way to examine this question is to analyze the policy performance of the three democratic regimes in Latin America that are the most institutionalized: Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. These three nations, unlike Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, were able to withstand the authoritarian trends of the 1960s and early 1970s. They have been democratic long enough (well over two decades) during a period when development issues were salient to indicate the policy-performance capabilities of democratic regimes operating within the cultural, economic, and political context of Latin America.

How did the social sciences theoretically contribute to producing the movements of Chilean pobladores and Brazilian favelados during the twentieth century? Through a critical review of the main theories that seek to understand the political actions of the urban poor in Santiago de Chile and Rio de Janeiro, this article shows the close relationship between these movements and the production of social sciences, in which a double hermeneutic operates—a mutually influential reflexive process that eventually contributed to the constitution and recognition of the movements as such. This research analyzes how social sciences perform the same social struggles that they attempt to describe, in other words, how certain academic contexts interact positively or negatively with the political and social disputes generated from the movements in question. I review theories of marginality and dependent urbanization, urban social movements, utilitarian views, and new social movements, showing how these interpretations alternated between requiem, rediscovery, and denial of the favelados and pobladores as social movements.

The Brazilian government's plans to build the Transamazon Highway from the Atlantic coast to the Peruvian border and to settle thousands of landless peasants along it created intense debate before the project's precipitous beginning. Critics of the road “that went from nowhere to no place” denounced it as economic folly, while champions of “national integration” saw it as a crucial step toward the economic and geopolitical unification essential to Brazil's realization of its “great nation” potential and toward alleviating some of its land-tenure concentration (Tamer 1970, Pereira 1971).

On the basis of data collected by the RETTRANS survey (2011–2012) on Bolivian migrants living in Spain, this article aims to identify the influence of the 2008 economic crisis on the determinants marking the migrants’ return intention. In this regard, there is a need to incorporate the concept of double embeddedness based on migrants’ social networks (meso level), the way migration is imbricated in persons’ lives (micro level); and how, at a macro level, economic and social transformations of different contexts affect these decisions. The article highlights that unexpected changes in living conditions trigger a reconfiguration of these mixed factors that condition return intentions.

Gendering Legislative Behavior: Institutional Constraints and Collaboration. By Tiffany D. Barnes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 274. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316507650.

Women, Politics, and Democracy in Latin America. Edited by Tomáš Došek, Flavia Freidenberg, Mariana Caminotti, and Betilde Muñoz-Pogossian. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. v + 243. $87.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781349950089.

Inclusion without Representation in Latin America: Gender Quotas and Ethnic Reservations. By Mala Htun. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. x + 226. $26.68 paperback. ISBN: 9780521690836.

Women in Mexican Politics: A Study of Representation in a Renewed Federal and Democratic State. By Fernanda Vidal Correa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Pp. ix + 122. $75.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781498534390.

Gender, Institutions, and Change in Bachelet’s Chile. Edited by Georgina Waylen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. ix + 244. $101.64 hardcover. ISBN: 9781137501974.

This essay reviews the following works:

Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions. By Marc Becker. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Pp. viii + 256. $39.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781442265875.

Sandino: Patria y libertad. By Alejandro Bendaña. Managua: Anamá Ediciones, 2016. Pp. v + 472. $49.90 paperback. ISBN: 9789992475485.

Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat. By Victor Figueroa Clark. London: Pluto Press, 2013. Pp. x + 164. $22.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780745333076.

Insurgent Marcos: The Political-Philosophical Formation of the Zapatista Subcommander. By Nick Henck. Raleigh, NC: Editorial A Contra Corriente, 2016. Pp. 311. $19.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781945234033.

Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America: An Oral History. By Dirk Kruijt. London: Zed Books, 2017. Pp. xvi + 287. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781783608027.

Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940. By John Lear. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. xiii + 366. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477311509.

La esperanza and el delirio: Una historia de la izquierda en América Latina. By Ugo Pipitone. Mexico City: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas; Taurus, 2015. Pp. 551. ISBN: 9786071137678.

Desde su creación a la fecha la Comisión ha realizado tres simposios: Lima 1970, Roma 1972, y México 1974. En estas reuniones se ha presentado y discutido un total de 74 ponencias científicas (Lima 13, Roma 32, México 29), elaboradas por 50 especialistas de la región y por 24 latinoamericanistas norteamericanos y europeos. Estos 74 especialistas intercambiaron conocimientos y experiencias, y tuvieron contacto estrecho con otros 150 especialistas que participaron en estas reuniones como observadores y comentaristas. Dicho de otro modo, la Comisión ha sido vehículo de contacto y punto de reunión para el intercambio de conocimientos de más de 220 investigadores interesados en la historia económica de América Latina.

This essay reviews the following works:

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. By Jeremy Adelman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. xv + 740. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780691155678.

Kalman Silvert: Engaging Latin America, Building Democracy. Edited by Abraham F. Lowenthal and Martin Weinstein. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. Pp. vii + 195. $24.50 paper. ISBN: 9781626375550.

Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945. By Ricardo D. Salvatore. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 329. $94.95 cloth. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822360957.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Alzate family, of Medellín, Colombia, grasped the magnetism of the Natural Man (a malleable myth with porous edges that combines both the Edenic and the cannibalistic visions of indigenous peoples) and its economic potential and orchestrated a family craft business of fake pre-Columbian pottery. They created pieces that would engage in dialogue with collectors’, anthropologists’, museums’, and tourists’ desires and imaginaries, as well as authenticity criteria, about indigenous pre-Columbian peoples. This article shows the relationship between these forgeries’ production, circulation, and consumption and the ways Latin American indigenous peoples have been conceived of by others. Moreover, this research stresses how authentic fakes, together with official and popular discourses and images, certain exhibition and validation rhetorics, and other mises-en-scène construct what is sacralized as uncontaminated, original, and traditional. Such fakes operate politically by undermining social hierarchies linked to essentialized race and identity.