This article explores the childhood of a Mexican Indigenous activist, Raúl Javier Gatica Bautista, who was born in 1963 in the Oaxacan market town of Tlaxiaco. Growing up in poor circumstances, Gatica would become a leader in the social movements that between the 1980s and early 2000s pushed Mexico toward gradual democratic reform. The article seeks to describe what it was like to grow up poor and Indigenous at a time (later dubbed the Mexican Miracle) of impressive social and economic advances. Paying special attention to the experience of racial abuse, the article also asks how Gatica's childhood came to inform his political militancy. While other historians have linked the phenomenon of political radicalism in twentieth-century Latin America to particular social conditions, or to the influence and adaptation of global ideologies, this article seeks the origins of Gatica's radicalism in the experience of a racialised childhood.

The European conquest and colonization of the Caribbean precipitated massive changes in indigenous cultures and societies of the region. One of the earliest changes was the introduction of new plant and animal foods and culinary traditions. This study presents the first archaeological reconstruction of indigenous diets and foodways in the Caribbean spanning the historical divide of 1492. We use multiple isotope datasets to reconstruct these diets and investigate the potential relationships between dietary and mobility patterns at multiple scales. Dietary patterns are assessed by isotope analyses of different skeletal elements from the archaeological skeletal population of El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba. This approach integrates carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of bone and dentine collagen with carbon and oxygen isotope analyses of bone and enamel apatite. The isotope results document extreme intrapopulation dietary heterogeneity but few systematic differences in diet between demographic/social groups. Comparisons with published isotope data from other precolonial and colonial period populations in the Caribbean indicate distinct dietary and subsistence practices at El Chorro de Maíta. The majority of the local population consumed more animal protein resources than other indigenous populations in the Caribbean, and their overall dietary patterns are more similar to colonial period enslaved populations than to indigenous ones.

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.

The shift towards legally plural multicultural and pluri-national citizenship regimes in the Andes formally recognised indigenous peoples’ community-based governance systems. These tend to emphasise participation, deliberation and service to the collective, but are often criticised for discriminating against women. We argue that recent constitutional reforms and legislation combining recognition of collective rights claims with institutional guarantees for gender equality have in fact amplified indigenous women's different strategies of ‘negotiating with patriarchy’, allowing them to further the transformation of their organisations and ‘custom’. Such strategies are necessary because of the intersections of race, class and gendered exclusions that indigenous women experience, and possible because of the diverse and dynamic nature of community governance systems. Despite systemic and structural constraints on the guarantee of indigenous peoples’ rights, the actions of organised indigenous women over the last two decades point to new ways of imagining more plural, less patriarchal forms of citizenship.

This article discusses the colonial encounter of the Welsh and Tehuelche/Mapuche in the Welsh colony (Y Wladfa Gymreig), founded 1865. The Welsh sought to create a Welsh-speaking utopia in the ‘empty’ lands of Patagonia, paradoxically using this colonisation as a way to resist disparagement of the Welsh language and culture by an English-dominated state. The article deploys a ‘coloniality of power’ perspective and explores archive materials that reveal how both the Welsh and the indigenous communities whose land they colonised were caught up in coloniality and expanding capitalist modernity. I conclude that exploring the ambiguous relationship which results from this encounter complicates and deepens our understanding of how the coloniality of power works. Particularly, I argue that stripping away the ‘myth of friendship’ between the Welsh and indigenous is vital, not to diminish moments of genuine mutual affinity but rather to show how these are caught up in processes of colonialisation.

In Chile and Argentina, indigenous Mapuche intellectuals contend that there is a single Mapuche nation that spans the Chile–Argentina border. When Mapuche people talk about the Mapuche nation and create symbols to represent it, however, they can mean both the Mapuche nation within the Chilean and Argentine state borders and the cross-border Mapuche nation. The dual nature of this project raises important theoretical questions about the nation-building process. In this article, I argue that Mapuche activists are engaging in a multi-scalar geopolitical imagination. They are imagining the geographic, political and cultural elements of the Mapuche nation at two scales simultaneously: within nation-state borders and across them. The overlapping and contested nature of this process means that the nation-building project is full of new tensions and constraints. However, it is also an example of ‘thinking otherwise’ and imagining an alternative sense of national belonging.

Introduction. Pescabivona is the name of an autochthonous peach [Prunus persica (L.) Batch] population of the central west of Sicily. In a previous work, this fruit was submitted to chemical analysis, while in this paper, sensory evaluation is considered. Materials and methods. Samples of four Pescabivona landraces were harvested throughout the harvest season. A trained panel outlined the sensory profiles and the data were processed by ANOVA and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). A correlation between sensory analysis and instrumental data was finally carried out. Results and discussion. The results demonstrated a high standard of quality for the four landraces studied, with some differences in aroma intensity and in some other parameters, with sweetness and aroma being highly correlated with overall liking. PCA did not clearly separate the different landraces as they have the same origin. Some correlations between sensory analysis and instrumental data were verified. The sensory liking was correlated with the main ripeness parameters, as well as with the pulp firmness. Conclusion. The data obtained contribute to outlining a complete fruit profile for product comparison and shelf-life monitoring. As previously verified for chemical parameters, the sensory evaluation indicates a substantial similarity among the landraces. The good agreement between sensory evaluation and composition makes sensory analysis a precious tool to assess quality of Pescabivona landraces.

The Mayan Indians of Guatemala share the burdens of local government by taking on a set of public duties, thereby maintaining community cohesion as well as political autonomy. This article analyses recent changes in this cargo system in a context defined by development, new representations of ‘Mayanness’, and multicultural politics. It shows how sovereignty – grounded in a distinct philosophy of leadership that generates meaningful self-rule – is crucial in facilitating political transformation towards more democratic arrangements at the cost of rule by the elders.