Recent studies on the figuration of the nation in nineteenth-century Hispanic America have used sophisticated analyses of different media to suggest that Indigenous references were progressively excluded from urban public space as national symbols. In these spaces, the creole authorities placed themselves and their ancestors centre stage. However, these studies have neglected a highly representative medium: street names. This article demonstrates that street nomenclature was key in figuring the nation in a capital city and shows a different trend from that established using other media. Specifically, after the 1861 municipal reform of street names in Lima, Peru, the majority of official names were Indigenous and did not celebrate creole or military elites. This article examines this reform and the conflicts it provoked.

Based on his record as president, Carlos Ibáñez is usually considered a populist caudillo in Chilean historiography. However, there are few studies of whether his electoral base permits this classification or of the type of populism he represented. In his four presidential bids between 1927 and 1952, Ibáñez ran with the support of both left- and right-wing parties. Using municipal-level data, we assess his electoral support in the 1942 and 1952 presidential campaigns and support for Ibañista parties in the 1953 legislative elections. In 1942, Ibáñez's electoral base was similar to that of right-wing candidates while, in 1952, his support increased in areas where the Left was historically strong. While he received consistent support in agricultural areas, it fluctuated in mining and industrial areas.

This article examines the activities of Comunidades Cristianas Populares (Popular Christian Communities, CCPs) in marginalised neighbourhoods of Chile's capital, Santiago, during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. It traces how the CCPs emerged, thrived and then stopped, to showcase the uneasy co-existence between liberationist practices espoused by popular sectors and traditional ecclesiastical paradigms until their breaking point in 1990. In doing so, I argue that religious ritual is an important form of social protest against authoritarianism. Public processions exposed tensions between the Church and state, within the Church's diverse constituents, as well as between Christian community members and left-wing party militants. In the late 1980s, as the Church increasingly retreated from liberation theology, the dictatorship successfully co-opted social organisations and rendered religious rituals largely ineffective as a form of social protest.

This article proposes the concept of ‘memory script’ to analyse how, in the aftermath of political violence, memory activists narrate their lives in a way that is practised, repetitive and performative. Through a self-reflective life history of Aluízio Palmar, a Brazilian human rights activist and former political prisoner who suffered intense torture under military rule, this approach seeks to elucidates the personal and political contours of somebody's decision to transform their experiences into a public narrative. A close reading of Palmar's various platforms of memory-sharing reveals the complex moral reckoning of an activist's own trauma.

In 2019, thousands of women took to the streets in Mexico City to protest gender-based violence. The demonstrations were characterised by the defacement of iconic monuments, which was widely condemned. But the protests also ignited widespread political mobilisation, including by a group of women restorers who, despite being designated to clean the monuments, refused to perform their work and publicly defended the protesters. By withholding their labour and their ostensible duty to the state and to the nation, the restorers’ actions helped to transform narratives around feminism, protest and the meaning of national heritage. Based on a case study of this previously depoliticised group of art restorers who went on to become one of the most important faces of Mexico's feminist movement, this article argues that political mobilisation can be rooted in and directly linked to people's labour and professional expertise.

In this commentary, I consider Mariátegui's globality. I begin by discussing his status as the pre-eminent Latin American Marxist. I then consider the fact that he continues to be ignored or marginalised by scholarship in English on Marxism and the global history of the Left. I note, however, that in recent years, ‘global’ interest in Mariátegui (i.e. beyond Latin America) has increased. This leads me to a consideration of two types of Mariátegui's globality. First, a globality produced by his growing purchase as an ‘epistemologist of the South’ which is extending the applicability of his thought beyond Latin America. And second, a globality expressive of his role as a global actor; as someone who (i) sought to experience life globally, (ii) drew on global ideas, or ideas with globalising (or universalising) ambitions, to make sense of his own (local) context, and (iii) operated as an original interpreter of the global.