Bulletin of Latin American Research最新文献

This article examines the complex relationships between Spaniards and Guaraní peoples in the Río de la Plata province during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It challenges prevailing historiographical narratives regarding a purportedly “harmonious miscegenation” and questions the characterisation of Spanish colonisation in Paraguay as founded upon kinship relations between Spaniards and Guaraní. Through rigorous archival analysis, the study demonstrates that colonial documentation reveals profoundly asymmetric power relations regulated through slavery, servitude, and sexual violence. The research critically evaluates the deployment of the Spanish term “brother-in-law” (cuñado) in translating Guaraní concepts, determining that this terminology indicated colonial domination rather than genuine kinship bonds. The analysis recovers Indigenous voices expressing resistance to Spanish control whilst genealogical reconstruction of a Guaraní family illuminates the devastating effects of colonisation. This article proposes new methodological approaches for understanding the contributions of Indigenous history and colonial practices affecting Indigenous peoples.

Studies about oil palm production in Latin America have highlighted its negative impacts on peasant communities and the resistance these communities have offered. This article suggests that peasant identities also make part of the moral economies of extractivism. I analyze the conflict derived from peasant producers' side-selling engagement in an oil palm contract scheme in Colombia, where peasants' resistance and the company's efforts to encourage compliance with the contract terms deploy competing interpretations of historically formed black peasant identities and obligations. This demonstrates that peasant identities configure a contested field that both sustains extractivist economies and enables communities to oppose them.

At the beginning of the 21st century Nicaragua was a weak liberal democratic regime that held free and competitive elections. Since Daniel Ortega came to power in 2006, a process of de-democratisation has been taking place in which the regime increasingly resembles a traditional caudillismo, where the head of state controls the state administration, the election machinery, the courts and oversees and arbitrates business. However, from 2018 onwards the political system has been sealed off and transformed into an authoritarian one that combines elements of a hereditary and family-based nature, rooted in personal loyalty and caudillismo, with others of a more repressive nature where dissent is persecuted and punished with imprisonment and exile.

In the early 1980s, thousands of Guatemalans crossed the southern border of Mexico in search of refuge fleeing the massacres perpetrated by the army of their country. As they reached the border municipalities of Chiapas, they created more than a hundred refugee camps there. This article analyses the case of the camps that were built on properties purchased by the Catholic Church in the municipality of La Trinitaria, relying on archival sources and interviews, it reconstructs the tensions that occurred between the refugees and the local population as these two sectors shared land, water and firewood.

In this article, I will argue that the perspective of ritual and festive violence related to events such as carnivals, masquerades, or fiestas, needs to be considered alongside economic, structural, and demographic explanations to understand better the phenomenon of social revolts and riots in general, and the Chilean estallido social (social outburst) of 2019 in particular. I propose that only by doing so can we explain the ambiguity of these situations and their varied, often surprising, and complex political outcomes.