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A literary criticism of the book "Los desterrados" by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles is presented. It outlines the characters and explores the symbolic significance of these characters. It examines failure of hegemony in Venezuelan democratic discourses and Embodiment in nationalist ideologies, this failure involves not only the Bolivarian nationalism of the period denominated the Fifth Republic.

This article explores how Argentine intellectuals incorporated the natural environment into their accounts of the racial, cultural and political features of the nation. In the late nineteenth century environmental determinism, based on the assumption of a cause–effect relationship between geographical and racial factors, entered Argentina through three main routes: Lamarckism, Darwinism and Spencerianism. By the mid twentieth century, however, anti‐positivist philosophies had been fully incorporated into a body of work that analysed Argentina's socio‐historical foundations. This article examines the shift that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century in how those seeking to define race incorporated the environment into their arguments. The raza was commonly taken to be synonymous with nation. Selected works by sociologist and legal scholar Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875‐1918) and by writer and ensayista Bernardo Canal Feijóo (1897‐1982) will be analysed as influential yet overlooked examples of how 'the problem of Argentine culture' could not be separated from the question of nature understood in terms of both physical and human geography. The goal will be to reveal, firstly, the extent to which the notion of the interior as geographical and anthropological desert deeply informed the political vision of the early national period in relation to race and nation and, secondly, how later interpretations of the nation recast American nature as a foundational element of cultural authenticity based on a sentiment of geographical belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the development of Mexican football from its inception to the successful hosting of two World Cup finals. We place our analysis within a post‐revolutionary context that exalted the virtues of self‐discipline that sport could contribute towards the patriotic endeavour of 'improving the race'. We argue that the character of the post‐revolutionary state, in which a symbiotic relationship between public and private endeavours was encouraged, was reflected in the distinct way in which football developed in Mexico. Furthermore, it also influenced the way in which sporting culture contributed to the Mexican migrant experience in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of football, this work explores how stereotypes such as tropicalism and Europeanism are used to construct narratives of national identity in Argentina and Brazil. These stereotypes, which are the consequence of colonial perspectives that seek to reduce heterogeneity in order to gain symbolic power, appear to be effective when we consider their prominence in a range of media. This study argues that these stereotypes need to be deconstructed using methodologies based in the social sciences, while also considering the role of humour in their production and dissemination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guatemalan newspapers are dappled with the spectre of women's violence and the bodily evidence of the military response that is typical for a woman's transgression of gender roles. Gendered representations of violence – so often repeated in the media – engender particular forms of political agency. This article explores how political violence is imagined with women's bodies and suggests that such violence is always built on pre‐existing cultural practices. It argues that gender categorization is paramount to constructing a modern Guatemalan nation that all too often works to exclude women as knowing participants in Lo Político. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the racial thinking in Brazilian governance exposed during the creation of a Circuit of African Heritage in the port area of Rio de Janeiro from 2011 on. The Circuit and the policy discourses that have surrounded its establishment are visibly framed within a philosophy of ethno-racial recognition and multiculturalism, which apparently suggests a rupture from the long-established discourse of mixture and racial democracy in Brazil. Nonetheless, a careful analysis of the creation of the Circuit of African Heritage indicates that policy discourse is not conclusively unsettling the country's traditional faith in a shared, colour-blind national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews historical forms of localised government on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and contrasts them with the contemporary struggle to attain a communal form of autonomy undertaken by the region's indigenous population. It suggests that the contemporary autonomy process shares few features with the historical precedents of localised government which are commonly invoked to legitimise it. Instead, its roots can be located in the emergence of a Moskitian nationalism amongst the Miskitu which occurred to counter the assimilating impulse of an increasingly developmentally determined national state during the 1960s under the Somoza dictatorship, and then more thoroughly during the Sandinista revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Velasco's brand of military nationalism marked a real break from the orientation of the majority of Peruvian military regimes, which were pro-United States and espoused limited government. Many attempts have been made to explain this outcome, but the release of documents from British and United States archives clarify certain issues. Above all, Velasco's use of the nationalist card enabled him to win over decisive support from both the military and political society. This support gave him sufficient leverage to consolidate his personal position, which he did before launching a major programme of domestic property expropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims of this article are to explore the diversity of Catholic reactions facing state terror in Córdoba, Argentina, during the 1970s and to analyse how different Catholic groups redefined their relations with the State in the public sphere. To do that, I will use case study methodology applied to the kidnapping of an American priest and five seminarians. I will show how religious beliefs shape to some extent how Catholic social actors respond to political events. Different understandings of Catholicism produced different responses to state terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the failure of France to win its bid for the city of Lyon to host the 1968 Summer Olympic Games, held instead in Mexico City. The French political and social context for the 1968 host city competition is discussed, including the relationship of the government of the Fifth Republic to sports and French nationalism, the rivalry between the cities of Lyon and Paris, and the infrastructure development issues of the Rhône-Alpes region around Lyon, and economic modernization in France generally.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) has come to be regarded as an iconic work in the canon of nineteenth-century Cuban fiction, celebrated as much for its literary pedigree as for its radical combination of anti-slavery and feminist ideas. Yet it has been the subject of very divergent critical appraisals. This essay sets out to breathe new life into Avellaneda’s novel by interpreting it through a postcolonial optic. Drawing on ideas from the scholarship of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, as well as the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, these pages explore the implications of its nationalist, racial, sexual and feminist politics for Sab’s anti-slavery meaning. This postcolonial reading provides a possible solution for the conflicts between its various interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers published within this issue including one by Joann Crow on Salvador Allende and the Mapuche Indians in Chile and another by Michael Goebel on Argentine nationalism.

In 1964, Salvador Allende signed the ‘Cautín Pact’ with leftist Mapuche organisations in Temuco in which they pledged to support Allende’s presidential campaign and he vowed to introduce important socio-economic reforms to benefit Mapuche communities and to respect their culture and religion. As has been argued in previous studies, there were limitations to the implementation of these reforms in practice. This article suggests, however, that even so, an important space was opened up for – and by – Mapuche people within the government’s left-wing nationalist project. This shift was also reflected in the works of intellectuals closely linked to the Unidad Popular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism has been a key, but generally overlooked, component of twentieth-century Paraguayan politics and an important explanatory factor in the country’s political outcomes. Indeed, it has been central to the struggle for political power, most significantly to the continuing hegemony of the Colorado Party. This article traces the development of the Paraguayan Left, highlighting its structural and functional weaknesses, and analyses its relationship with nationalism, in particular with the dominant Colorado nationalist discourse. It argues that an important failure of the Left – and indeed other political parties and movements – has been its inability to produce a successful challenge to this hegemonic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to debates about fascist influences among Argentina’s guerrilla groups of the 1970s. From the overall perspective of developments in Argentine nationalism, it traces back the history of the far-right Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista and Tacuara and assesses their significance as the nuclei from which later guerrillas came. Based on police reports and periodical publications from the period in question (c.1937–c.1973), it makes some generalisations about the collective biographies of militants. While not contradicting the widely held view that originally fascist groupings played a role in the emergence of Argentine guerrillas, the article introduces some nuances into this argument. Particular emphasis is given to the role of Peronism and the Cuban Revolution as facilitators of changes in Argentine nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines nationalist historiography in revolutionary Cuba, focusing in particular on the relationship between pre-revolutionary ‘revisionist’ histories and the revolutionary historiography produced after 1959. Despite agreement among the revolutionaries on the need for new histories to respond to the needs of the revolutionary age, the dominant nationalist historiography of the Revolution repeated many of the myths of the ‘bourgeois’ histories of the past. In the 1960s, however, several historians working at the margins of academia emerged to challenge the nationalist myths perpetuated by both their republican counterparts and by their Marxist adversaries in the University School of History. Yet despite many significant historical re-interpretations undertaken during the Revolution, many of the sacred cows of Cuban nationalism remained firmly on their plinth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how currents of Bolivia's indigenous movement are gravitating to the city and to the centre of national political life, capitalising on popular sentiment against the political status quo, economic privatisation and violations of national sovereignty. The Movement Toward Socialism led by Evo Morales does not promote a separatist ethno-national project; instead, it uses regional, national and international coalition building to equate indigenous with non-indigenous issues through resonant political analogies that frame Bolivia's national crisis of political legitimacy in terms of indigenous rights, while making common cause with diverse urban popular sectors who, if not indigenous, recognise their indigenous cultural heritage as a crucial background to their own struggles against disenfranchisement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how three Mexican novels, published between 1971 and 1999, respond to the effects of political violence on national identity. It focuses particularly on fictional representations of state-sponsored, politically motivated murder and on how survivors negotiate a social space forever changed by unsolved crimes. The article concludes that an important consequence of political violence is that it undermines the validity of systems of representation that once seemed capable of portraying the national community. Each of the three novels interpreted here adopts a different stance regarding literary language's relationship to its ever-changing sociopolitical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If categories of‘race’ and nationality are social and historical constructions laden with irrefutable meaning and consequences, then ethnic identities, like any other forms of identity, are means to other ends that may or may not be particular. Twentieth-century indigenist histry in Brazil reveals how the cultural politics of indigenism and nationalism can coalesce in a tautological politics of identity that undermines individual liberty and democratic heterogeneity. The concepts‘post-indigenism,’‘post-nationalism‘ and‘post-identity’ point to the strategic suspension of the infinite heterogeneity of the political subject as a means to widen the ground of shared experience and common interests beyond the realm of hollow and oppressive essentialisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which the immigration of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica is represented by Costa Rican institutions and individuals through public discourses and everyday life. Three discourses are considered. First, intellectual claims that immigration poses a threat to Costa Rican national identity, whereby intellectuals portray‘Costa Rica in crisis’ due to immigration. Second, fictional works seek to represent issues regarding the Nicaraguan community in innovative ways, being open-ended and including diverse voices. Third, stories written by Nicaraguan children are discussed in view of exploring how hostility towards immigration interpellates them, who face the challenge of negotiating their identities with their peers in everyday life. The article ends by asking for a politics able to defend public institutions and public investment, able to forge networks of solidarity with immigrant communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the ideas of in discussing the role played by the National Literacy Crusade of 1980 in imagining the Nicaraguan nation. As the article demonstrates, the National Literacy Crusade had the potential to create a sense of communion with a mass of anonymous others that is, according to Anderson, the hallmark of modern nations. At the same time, it was also a project that sought to foster a particular national identity centred around the anti–imperialist and socialist nationalism of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the 1934 Southern Railway Strike, a largely neglected yet important episode in Peruvian labour history. The strike, which pitted the British-owned Peruvian Corporation against its workforce, resulted in victory for the company. Drawing on a variety of original primary sources, I examine the factors that shaped the development and outcome of the strike. I pay particular attention to the strategies developed by the company managers to defeat the workers. The success of these strategies, I suggest, owed in no small measure to the volatile political situation created by the insurgency tactics of APRA and the Communist Party, which made victory for the workers politically impossible, and to the capacity of the Peruvian Corporation managers to draw on ‘imperial connections’ in their dealings with the Peruvian government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structural economic reforms justified by neoliberal ideas that transformed Mexico's statist political economy in the 1980s posed a direct challenge to the nationalism inherited from the revolutionary era that had long served to legitimise the interventions of the social state. This article examines the strategy adopted by the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) to reconcile the rival ambitions of neoliberalism and nationalism and its reasons for doing so. It does so by examining ideas concerning the state, society and the individual found in writing and speeches published in political organs and the press during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the Chaco War (1932–1935) a strong left nationalist political current emerged in Bolivia which defined the three large mining companies of Patiño, Hochschild and Aramayo as a superstate, controlling both the economy and the politics of the nation to their own advantage. This article challenges that characterisation by examining the way in which the state exercised control over the two largest producers. Unfortunately, the state lacked the technical capacity to use its powers responsibly, preventing the development of a coherent mining policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the 1930s moved towards their close, a new generation of young men began to dominate the political wing of a generally more radical and assertive Argentine Nacionalismo, replacing the old guard that had found its inspiration in General José F. Uriburu and the regime he had led between September 1930 and February 1932. The Alianza de la Juventud Nacionalista, set up in September 1937, was the most important nacionalista faction of the period. It shared with other nacionalista factions the rejection of liberalism, parliamentary democracy and communism, but in contrast to the elitist and anti-popular orientation of earlier organisations, it aggressively tried to enlist popular support by portraying itself as a group genuinely concerned about the needs of the masses. The Alianza also distanced itself from the glorification of nineteenth-century Argentina, another hallmark of previous groups. Although it failed in its efforts to build up a significant following, the analysis nevertheless demonstrates that the organisation can be described as a genuinely fascist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that examined the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late 19th-century western Guatemala. Factors that influenced the procedural culture in the country; Discussion on ethnic struggles in Huehuetenango for the control of the local government; Details of jurisdictional disputes between the Maya and ladinos.

Focuses on the different effects the formation of national identity had on the development of political democracy in Uruguay and Argentina. Information on the different models of collective identity that developed after independence; Roles of the two hegemonic parties in each nation; Discussion on the authoritarian periods both countries experienced in the 1930s.

Traces the development of the concept of nationhood in Mexico. Casa Mata rebellion in February 1823 as the event that brought the onset of the federalist revolution; Nationhood as alien to Mexican masses during the Casa Mata rebellion; Drafting of the Acta Constitutiva in November 1823.