The aim of this work is to analyze the situation of disabled people in the labor market in Mexico, taking into account socioeconomic variables and the spatial dimension. The results of our analysis provide guidelines for actions geared at improving the inclusion of disabled people in the labor market, and, as a consequence, in society. We apply cluster analysis to thirty-two Mexican federal states using data of the XII Censo de Población y Vivienda 2000; this allows us to identify spatial correlation processes and therefore spatial clusters. A dual structure emerges in the distribution of disabled people in the Mexican labor market, showing that effective economic policies to encourage the inclusion of disabled people into the labor market must take into account the socioeconomic diversity of different geographical areas.

As a consequence of US border policies that funnel migrants through the harsh Sonoran Desert, migrants since the 1990s have been crossing and dying in large numbers on Tohono O'odham lands. This article examines the spiritual and political journey of Mike Wilson, a tribal member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, who puts water out for migrants against the wishes of his tribal council. Wilson's road to human rights activism was a winding one. In the 1980s, he was a member of the US Army Special Forces stationed in El Salvador; politically, he was, in his words, “to the right of Attila the Hun.” How did a Green Beret become an outspoken human rights activist? This article argues that religion provided the material and cultural conditions of possibility for Wilson's conversions and was an important source of “friction” that both enabled and constrained his prophetic style of activism.

Robert J. Sampson and W. Byron Groves (1989) analyzed data from 238 British neighborhoods to test the mediating effect of indicators of social disorganization. Basing their work on that of Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay (1942), these researchers created indicators such as friendship networks, organizational participation, and the control of street-corner teenaged peer groups, and developed a theory of community level. In this article, we apply the formal logic of Sampson and Groves using data from the first Belo Horizonte victimization survey. In addition, we use data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and the Military Police. The results support the social disorganization theory and demonstrate that crime-rate differences are an effect of community level.

In rediscovering the interpenetration of popular culture and politics in Latin America, and thus the ways these realms mutually constitute one another, scholars have also witnessed the analytic irruption of one particular cultural field: religion. Close attention to grassroots political culture allows us to probe how people's spiritual subjectivity and political subjectivity overlap and cross-fertilize one another. In the process, religion shapes political outcomes in ways often unintended. Two further analytic insights are discussed: First, analysis of lived religion must partially decenter religious institutions from the focus of analysis but also pay attention to how institutions shape spiritual and political subjectivities. Second, our theoretical frameworks—while rightly rejecting dominant Western forms of anti-body dualism—must preserve analytic place for a realm of human experience termed here “embodied dualism” or “experiential dualism.”