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The recent passing of the renowned anthropologist and anti-racist activist Leith Mullings is a tremendous loss. The three of us became close to Leith through our shared participation in the Antirac...

This article chronicles the long-standing conflict between the Mapuche people and the Chilean state since militarized colonization of Mapuche territory in the 1880s. The analysis focuses especially...

This afterword summarizes the principal contributions of the articles in this collection, noting both common themes and points of difference. All six articles highlight serious problems and uninten...

Soon after the landslide election of Evo Morales in Bolivia’s 2005 presidential election, the racist backlash began. Political and economic elites and their followers in the eastern media luna (hal...

El mapeo participativo lo han usado comunidades indígenas y afrodescendientes en luchas de derecho a tierras y recursos. Sin embargo, nuevas presiones relacionadas con las políticas de cambio climático y prácticas extractivas han surgido en la reconceptualización del mapeo participativo. Este artículo presenta su historia en el contexto de las reformas territoriales y las leyes internacionales del siglo XX. Se discuten los avances del mapeo participativo, incluyendo usos innovadores de mapeo para representaciones espaciales, conservación cultural y manejo endógeno de recursos y gobernación comunitaria. Estas reflexiones surgen del Foro Internacional Cartografía Participativa y Derechos al Territorio y los Recursos, que tuvo lugar en la Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) en el 2011.

Neoliberalization of the construction industry, in combination with Texas’ anti-labor climate, has resulted in “precarious employment regimes” in Austin’s construction industry. Austin is currently the second fastest-growing urban area in the United States and depends heavily on a Latino immigrant workforce to meet its construction demands. In 2009 a community-based worker center in Austin, Workers Defense Project (WDP), in collaboration with the University of Texas students and faculty, undertook one of the most extensive studies to date on the U.S. construction industry in order to better understand working conditions and to promote fair labor practices and legislation. The study took a participatory activist approach to research and included a survey of 312 construction workers, as well as 37 qualitative interviews with workers and construction industry leaders. Findings revealed an industry characterized by poor and dangerous working conditions, low and stolen wages, limited benefits and racialized divisions of labor, resulting in weakened social citizenship and exclusion. The study exposes the often unaccounted for social, economic and bodily costs of these precarious labor regimes on workers, families, employers and taxpayers. We conclude that the emergent spaces of activism and collective response carved out by immigrant civil society, in particular the worker center movement, are resulting in new forms of social citizenship that are empowering for immigrant workers.

In the early 1990s, an influential group of northern scholars, foundation representatives and observers of academic trends came to the conclusion that ‘Area Studies’ were in crisis. Although the critiques and calls for reformulation applied across the board to a heterogeneous array of Area Studies fields, they had particular resonance within Latin American Studies (LAS). Rooted in disciplinary and institutional developments dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, LAS came into its own in the 1950s, in the context of the Cold War. It rapidly became the largest, most well-funded and most prestigious of the Area Studies fields. For this reason, among others, LAS assumed a central role in the broader debate: should Area Studies persist in their current form? If not, what successor intellectual and institutional configurations should emerge in their place? Nearly twenty years later, this high-stakes debate has virtually disappeared. By various important measures, LAS is thriving. This essay provides ...

This paper explores black and indigenous land rights struggles in Central America, focusing especially on the contradictions produced and deepened by strategies of neoliberal governance. Paradoxically, among the most daunting obstacles is not repression or denial of rights, but, rather, partial recognition and the bureaucratic-political entanglements that follow. Another major challenge is the declining viability of agrarian development in the globalized Central American political economy. The second part of the paper reflects critically on recent attempts to understand these problems, through the practice of politically engaged anthropological scholarship. Activist research, I argue, draws the anthropologist into some of the same contradictions and predicaments that the actors themselves confront. While this makes for difficulties at various levels, it can also be a privileged source of insight and analytical enrichment.

This article explains why—contrary to predications of influential scholars and foundation representatives in the 1990s—Latin American studies (LAS) entered the new century vibrant and growing rapidly. We posit five realms of critique and innovation from within which, in interaction with traditional strengths of area studies, account for this vibrancy. Because these critiques challenge many inherited premises of LAS, they have faced considerable resistance; the resulting dialogue has made our field more inclusive and stronger. Anthropologists contributed amply to this transformation, which has a parallel within the discipline itself.

This paper explores the relationship between �post-revolutionary politics� in Central America and the broader theoretical claims made in the name of the �new cultural politics of difference.� At issue are the critiques of political visions that downplay cultural difference in the name of unity, and correspondingly, the widespread politicization of identities that previously would have been subsumed under broader political categories. Two settings are examined: the Miskitu Indians in post-Sandinista Nicaragua where �hybridity� is presently associated with powerlessness and fragmentation, as well as with the potential for creative renewal. And Guatemala, where discourses of hybridity and mestizaje are used by relatively owerful ladinos to advance their own agendas and delegitimate Maya activism. The varying material consequences of the �new politics� and the �new theory,� are raised in the conclusion of this paper

(2004). Rethinking Indigenous Politics in the Era of the “Indio Permitido”. NACLA Report on the Americas: Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 16-21.

This article challenges the assumption that the underlying principles of state-endorsed ‘multiculturalism’ stand in tension with neoliberal political-economic policies. Based on ethnographic research in Guatemala, it is argued that neoliberalism's cultural project entails pro-active recognition of a minimal package of cultural rights, and an equally vigorous rejection of the rest. The result is a dichotomy between recognised and recalcitrant indigenous subjects, which confronts the indigenous rights movement as a ‘menace’ even greater than the assimilationist policies of the previous era. It is suggested that the most effective response to this menace is probably not to engage in frontal opposition to neoliberal regimes, but rather to refuse the dichotomy altogether.

This article analyzes the complexities that arise when certain keywords in culture theory "travel" from one sociopolitical setting to another. The specific context is ethnic and racial relations in the highlands of Guatemala, where members of the dominant (ladino) group have come to use the term hybridity (among others) to challenge and delegitimate Maya Indians’ demands for cultural rights. I conclude with a call for theory-making efforts without pretensions of universal resonance, grounded instead in an active engagement with the politics of a particular place, time, and people.

La fin des conflits violents (guerre, guerilla) suscite chez les populations directement confontees et affectees le besoin collectif d'un passe historique afin de faire face au futur. Le Guatemala, depuis l'accord de paix de decembre 1996 - etabli entre l'organisation de guerilla et le gouvernement, se retourne actuellement vers le passe et vers la memoire collective populaire. Les historiens et les anthropologues travaillant sur la periode revolutionnaire transmettent des informations inevitablement partielles et subjectives ; en revanche nier cette violence recente ne peut que servir les interets du pouvoir en place et collaborer a l'amnesie officielle. L'A. analyse comment les contributions des historiens et des analystes de la memoire sociale peuvent contribuer au processus de memorisation et de construction historique a travers la presentation de trois ouvrages recents : « Massacres in the jungle, Ixcan, Guatemala, 1975-1982 » de Ricardo Falla (1994), « Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940 » de David McCreery (1994) et « Between two armies in the Ixil towans of Guatemala » de David Stoll (1993). Bien qu'elabores selon des methodes differentes, apportant des theses et des conclusions diverses, ces ouvrages etudient une question commune sur la comprehension et la reponse de la paysannerie (principalement Maya mais pas uniquement) face a la violence a diverses periodes de l'histoire.

Alors qu'une campagne contre le cinquieme centenaire de la decouverte de l'Amerique se manifeste, une opposition chez les Amerindiens entre les « indigenas » et les « populares » s'affirme sur les questions de l'imperialisme et du colonialisme, sur la culture nationale et les heros, sur l'Etat et la spiritualite

(1991). Miskitu: Revolution In The Revolution. Report on the Americas: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 24-46.

To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912-1979. Jeffrey L. Gould. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. 377 pp. $47.50 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8078-1904-2, ISBN 0-8078-4275-3.