Subject: History / Latin America / South America

Subject: History / Latin America / South America

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Building Power to Shape Labor Policy

|9780822947691|Unions, Employer Associations, and Reform in Neoliberal Chile|During Chile’s shift to neoliberalism, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet passed a swath of probusiness labor legislation. Subsequent labor reforms by democratically elected progressive administrations have sought to shift power back to workers, but this task has proven difficult. In Building Power to Shape Labor Policy, Pablo Pérez Ahumada explains why. Focusing on reforms to collective labor law, Pérez Ahumada argues that analyzing how both workers and employers mobilize power to influence government policies is crucial for understanding labor reform outcomes. He examines the relational character of power to explain how different types…

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Now We Are in Power

|9780822947783|The Politics of Passive Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Bolivia|During the first decade of the century, Evo Morales and other leftists took control of governments across Latin America. In the case of Bolivia, Morales was that country’s first Indigenous president and was elected following five years of popular insurrection after decades of neoliberal governance. Now We Are in Power makes the argument that the so-called Pink Tide should be understood as a passive revolution, a process that has two phases: a period of subaltern struggle from average citizens strong enough to culminate in a political crisis, which is followed by a time…

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Modernity at the Movies

|9780822947677|Cinema-going in Buenos Aires and Santiago, 1915-1945|Cinema can both reflect the world as it is and offer escape from it. In Modernity at the Movies, Camila Gatica Mizala explores the ideas of reflection versus escapism and examines how modes of understanding the current moment emerged through the practice of going to the movies in Santiago and Buenos Aires between 1915 and 1945. Using cinema and variety magazines published in both cities, she analyzes the technology, architecture, attendance, behavior, language, censorship, and overall experience of cinema-going. These publications regularly engaged with important topics such as morality and urbanization and helped build…

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The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela

|9780822947127|Revolution, Crime, and Policing During Chavismo| Crime and violence soared in twenty-first-century Venezuela even as poverty and inequality decreased, contradicting the conventional wisdom that these are the underlying causes of violence. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela explains the rise of violence under both Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro—leftist presidents who made considerable investment in social programs and political inclusion. Contributors argue that violence arose not from the frustration of inequality, or the needs created by poverty, but rather from the interrelated factors of a particular type of revolutionary governance, extraordinary oil revenues, a reliance on militarized policing, and the…

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Claiming Brazil

|9780822947219|Performances of Citizenship in the Centenary of Independence|Brazil marked its centennial as an independent country in 1922. Claiming Brazil explores how Brazilians from different walks of life commemorated the event, and how this led to conflicting ideas of national identity. Civic rituals hold enormous significance, and Brazilian citizens, immigrants, and visitors employed them to articulate and perform their sense of what Brazil was, stood for, and could be. Gregg Bocketti argues that these celebrations, rather than uniting the country, highlighted tensions between modernity and tradition, over race and ethnicity, and between nation and region. Further, the rituals contributed to the…

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