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In this article, we argue that the speeches and policy documents from the later period of Hugo Chávez's presidency exemplify 'transnational populism', a form of populist discourse that defies the close association between populism and nationalism that frames the scholarly literatures on both populism and Chávez. We explain why Chávez's populism took this distinctive form by reference to the history of international political thought in Latin America and the political context surrounding the creation of the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, ALBA). We suggest that while transnational populism may actually amplify the threat that other scholars have argued populist leaders pose to democratic institutions, it also offers an important corrective to how scholars think about the relationship between populism, democracy and international politics, suggesting that international institutions capable of restraining powerful states are essential to stabilising democracies in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1954, the story broke internationally of Marta Olmos, recipient of the first widely known, male-to-female sex reassignment conducted in Mexico. Her doctor, Rafael Sandoval Camacho, claimed that homosexuality could be cured and that, through transitions, queer Mexicans could be made into 'socially useful' citizens. While initially celebrated as a scientific triumph placing Mexico among elite nations, and receiving support from individuals close to the Ruiz Cortines administration, opinions soured as critics – physicians, politicians, cartoonists and clerics – condemned Marta for renouncing manhood through a fraudulent cure that threatened the binary sex/gender order underpinning Mexican nationalism. Sex reassignment, understood through foreigners including Christine Jorgensen and associated with 'anti-social' queer Mexicans, thus exemplified misplaced priorities during a period in which the state sought to 'modernise patriarchy'. While self-affirming for Marta and permitted unofficially through state indifference, sex reassignment became seen as anti-Mexican. Thus, Marta's case illuminated how the state reconciled development with policing its patriarchal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the political economy of Henri Lefebvre's concept of ‘state space’ with specific attention directed towards the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, completed in 1938. The conditions of modernity can be generally related to the spatial ordering of urban landscapes within capital cities conjoining the specifics of national identity with imitative processes. Antonio Gramsci captured such sentiments through his understanding of the condition of ‘passive revolution’. The key contribution of this article is to draw attention to forms of everyday passive revolution, recognising both cosmopolitan and vernacular aspects of modern architecture in relation to the Monument to the Revolution. A focus on the Monument to the Revolution thus reveals specific spatial practices of everyday passive revolution relevant to the codification of architecture and the political economy of modern state formation in Mexico. These issues are revealed, literally, as vital expressions in the architecture of everyday passive revolution in modern Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most significant weakness of the Marxist Left in early Cold War Mexico was that it subordinated itself to post-revolutionary nationalism. Both the Mexican Communist Party and followers of Vicente Lombardo Toledano supported the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), avoiding significant criticism before late 1947. Some dissident currents of Marxism did exist, but they were sparsely followed. Mexico provides an extreme case of Left subordination to popular-nationalist ideology, yet is indicative of trends visible elsewhere, e.g. among Marxist groups in post-war Cuba and the United States. Rather than promoting notions of communist political practice, the Mexican Marxist Left consistently advocated the elimination of class conflict and support for the ‘national bourgeoisie’. The Marxist Left held the Mexican government to different standards from those to which they held the governments of other countries. A near-consensus on the Mexican Left equated patriotism with progressive politics. The argument is illustrated with an important case study: the 1947 Marxist Round Table. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the last years of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twentieth, the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro witnessed a new social phenomenon: the proliferation, in every neighbourhood, of small dance clubs formed by workers. Noteworthy among them was the Flor do Abacate, a recreational society founded in 1906 by a group of men and women of African descent. Far from making any claim to ‘being African’, this association promoted balls and parades in which African cultural heritage was shown in conjunction with other cultural logics valued as modern and cosmopolitan. As a consequence, it constituted a model of recreational society, black and modern at the same time, which its members tried to associate to a national profile. The objective of this article is to analyse both the logic that explains the organisation of this dance society and the challenges that its members faced in consolidating it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chávez government introduced a ‘Bolivarian’ national curriculum to promote radically different understandings of Venezuelan history and identity. We place the fate of this reform initiative within the broader study of state formation and nationalism. Scholars have long identified mass schooling as the key institution for socialising citizens and cultivating national loyalties, and many states have attempted to alter the nationalist content of schooling with these ends in mind. Venezuela constitutes an ideal case for identifying the specific conditions under which transformations of official national ideologies do and do not gain broader resonance. Using evidence derived from textbook analysis and semi-structured interviews with educational officials and teachers in Caracas, we highlight a new argument, showing that intrastate tensions between the central government and teachers, heightened by a well-established cultural machinery and by teachers’ increasing exclusion from the Chavista political coalition, explain the limited success in government efforts to implement Bolivarian nationalism through the school curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the intricate and developing nature of official politics and grassroots activism in post-revolutionary Mexico. It does so by tracing the trajectory of the Pentathlón Deportivo Militar Universitario, a right-wing youth movement that emerged in Mexico in 1938. By locating the group within both the international and domestic emergence of youth movements in the early twentieth century, the article shows how the study of Pentathlón's formation, objectives and later evolution can significantly enrich our understanding of an important phase in Mexico's post-revolutionary history. Within the context of right wing oppositional politics, analysis of the movement provides a fascinating insight into both the emerging Mexican state's ability to appropriate the radical impulses of the younger generation and the Pentathlón's willingness to accommodate such strategies in order to ensure its own survival. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how Syrian immigrants in Argentina responded to the intersection of transnational politics and nascent nationalisms between 1900 and 1922. In particular, it studies the role of Syrian intellectuals in Argentina in advocating a variety of political allegiances that changed over time as their homelands suffered a series of intense political transformations during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The emergence of Syrian and Lebanese ethnic identities as well as an Arab racialised identity was the product of distinct political programmes circulating in the Levant and among the Syrian émigré communities in the Americas, threatening to undermine the immigrant colony's sense of community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Starting from an understanding that maps of an entire nation-state territory reflect and regulate state projects and expressions of national identity, rather than providing detailed technical information for decision making, this paper examines the national maps of race/ethnicity produced under Ecuador's state-led multiculturalism. Using national-scale cartography as a means to examine contested processes of rearticulating state, citizen and nation, the paper analyses recent transformations in cartography, nation building and geographical knowledge in Ecuador. Directing a critical analysis towards the ways maps of indigenous populations are produced, circulated, authorised and read provides a distinctive lens by which to explore postcolonial questions of belonging, rights and presence. The paper discusses how, despite the emergence of innovative maps, the plurinational project envisaged by indigenous cartographers remains stymied by a series of material, cultural and postcolonial limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the promotion of Mexico's national image in the Americas during the Cárdenas period, using as a starting point a scandal arising from a 1940 performance of Mexican dancers at a cabaret in Panama. Mexican diplomats found the show objectionable because it clashed with the image of women that they used in their efforts to raise the country's reputation abroad. By investigating these efforts, as well as the career of Eva Pérez Caro, the dance troupe's leader, the article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between gender, cultural performance and nationalism, and the role that they played in Mexico's foreign relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the example of nineteenth-century Bolivia, this article argues that economic motivations need to be taken into account in understanding the role of peasants in constructing Latin American nation-states, especially in the Andes. Based on local archives, it considers the case of the altiplano region of Oruro-Poopó. From this perspective, during the half-century that followed independence, Andean communities were mostly in favour of a free-trade regime. They were integrated into the nation-state, but in a subordinate position. By the 1850s there was such prosperity in trading activities that community members refused to participate as authorities in their communities due to the time it would consume. However, the assault on community lands that began in the 1860s impoverished the Indians and marginalised them as peasants, turning them into a threat to the new, racist nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cuban scholars and women's advocates have criticised the widespread emergence of sex tourism in post-Soviet Cuba and attributed prostitution to a crisis in socialist values. In response, feminist scholars in the United States and Europe have argued that Cuban analysts promote government agendas and demonise sex workers. Drawing on nineteen months of field research in Havana, I challenge this conclusion to demonstrate how queer Cubans condemn sex tourism while denouncing an unconditional allegiance to Cuban nationalism. By introducing gay Cuban critiques into the debate, I highlight the interventionist undertones of feminist scholarship on the Cuban sex trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the cultural adjustment of immigrants to Brazil through an analysis of the role that association football (soccer) played in identity formation in twentieth-century São Paulo. It focuses on the city's large Italian population, in particular the experiences of a leading club, the Società Sportiva Palestra Itália, and of the first generation of Brazilian footballers who migrated abroad in order to play football professionally, many of whom were Paulistas of Italian descent. It demonstrates that through football Italians obtained agency in negotiating the process by which they became Brazilian and found a means by which to preserve a sense of discrete ethnicity within São Paulo's multiethnic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexico's i 910 Centenario reflected a popular trend in Western Europe and its former colonies to use centenaries of important historical events to promote political programmes and philosophies through the construction of historical memory. Centennial organisers in Mexico linked Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José Maria Morelos to President Porfırio Díaz in words and symbols, and associated state formation and civic culture with Liberal leaders and policies, such as public education, material progress and secularism. The planners also promoted Morelos as a mestizo icon and symbol for national identity and integration, while they simultaneously celebrated Mexico's pre-Columbian cultures and criticised contemporary natives as impediments to progress. The Centennial's audience included hundreds of thousands of Mexicans as well as foreigners from around the globe, who came away with different impressions based on their cultural perspectives, political philosophies and material interests. Following the overthrow of Díaz in 191 I, Mexico's revolutionary governments continued to use Independence Day celebrations to promote their programmes, including some whose origins lay in the Porfıraito. As we approach the bicentenary of Latin American independence, competing visions of patrias will likely surface and provide insights into the construction of historical memory and contemporary political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the Algerian episode of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Viajes en Europa, Africa y Asia. Cornerstone around which the principles of Argentinean national identity were elaborated; Achievement of an understanding of the paradox in the movement away from the canon of travel writing toward the morality tale; Reintroduction of an academic and political debate linked to theoretical reconsiderations about imperialism, the history of science, and the construction of otherness.

In Bolivia's 2002 national elections indigenous-movement-based political parties combined to capture 27 percent of the vote, far surpassing their previous performance and constituting a major improvement in the representation of the country's excluded indigenous majority. Using a social movement theory framework, I attribute this result to five interacting factors: institutional changes that opened the system; the collapse of two competitive parties; the consolidation of indigenous peoples' social movement organisations; the unpopularity of the Banzer- Quiroga government and the intense anti-government mobilisations it provoked in 2000; and the ability of the indigenous parties to capitalise on growing nationalist, anti-US public sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marked differences in mid-twentieth-century reformers' approaches to politically active working women in Belize and Puerto Rico help to explain the emergence of colonial hegemony in the latter, and the rise of mass nationalism in the former. Reformers in both colonies were concerned with working women, but whereas British and Belizean reformers treated them as sexually and politically disordered, and aimed to transform them from militant wage-earners to clients of state social services, US and Puerto Rican reformers treated them as voting citizens with legitimate roles in the economy and labour movement. Although racialised moralism was not absent in Puerto Rico, the populism of colonial reform there helped cement a renegotiated colonial compact, while the non-populist character of reform in Belize — and the wider British Caribbean — alienated working women from the colonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the cultural nationalism of residents during the twentieth century in Argentina. Analysis of the political implications of ethnic nationalism; Accounts on the ideas of positivist on social organicism; Characteristics of cultural nationalists.

Examines the voices of Movimiento Nacional Socialista de Chile and Partido Nacional Fascista during 1938-1942 in Chile. Assumptions on the role of nacismo; Arguments on fascism versus nationalism; Weakness of the Chilean fascists during the late 1930s.

Reconsiders the dimensions of Mexican nationalism with the challenges from the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional and the presence of economic and political crisis. Components of Mexican nationalism; Nationalist debates over the Indian, the American and the state; Link between nationalist sentiments, ideas and policies.

Examines the political ideology, cultural nationalism and the establishment of identity in Chile during the twentieth century. Reference to the origin of the huaso cowboy; Perceptions of nation and culture in the context of socio-political, economic and demographic transformation; Information on the emergence of the huaso cowboy; Significance of the term huaso in Chile; Details on the existence of the huaso legend and nationalist representations of pastoral life.

Discusses the historical background in the formation of Creole nationalism in Peru. Significance of the Peru Bolivian Confederation in inspiring Peruvian Creole nationalism; Disparity between glorifying the nation's Inca background and contemporary images of Indians; Observations of historical crisis associated with the trend.