Latin American feminisms have roots stretching back to before the independence period and have, since arriving on the intellectual scene in the late 19th century, reflected diverse contexts and with distinct strategies and objectives. While the earliest uses of the term feminism emerged from debates over liberalism, with its universalist imaginaries, these early challenges to patriarchal authority promptly generated multiple feminisms alongside movements that engage feminist ideas but eschew the label. Over the past 150 years, these fractures along lines of class, race, culture, and location have both challenged and revitalized feminist campaigns for social, cultural, and political change. Throughout, Latin America has remained a particularly dynamic region for feminist activism, leading the way on the world stage to draw attention to issues such as human rights, maternalist politics, and decoloniality. While Latin American feminism, in the singular, continues to defy any tidy definition or description, Latin American feminisms, in their multiplicity, have consistently fostered creative and effective challenges to patriarchy, particularly in the areas of legal rights, reproductive justice, freedom from violence, and recognition of subsistence labors.
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Latin American Feminisms
Jocelyn Olcott
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Mexican Comic Books and NAFTA
Bruce Campbell
Mexican comic books are a cultural product whose development is tied to the history of the modern Mexican state. The consolidation of the state in the aftermath of the armed conflict period of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) shaped the conditions for the emergence of a domestic industry and market for comics, and in particular for comic books, alongside other important cultural industries such as radio, film, and television, through state supports for and controls over the nation’s culture industries. In the late 20th century, the neoliberal character of the Mexican state—for which official policy has centered on privatization of state economic enterprises, the reduction of public subsidies for goods and services, and the elimination of import tariffs—subsequently reshaped the conditions for production and consumption of the nation’s sequential art.
The term “comics” is applied to graphic narrative generally, which in turn is defined by the sequential use of images, usually in combination with language, in order to tell some kind of story. Comics are therefore a broad category of cultural production that includes newspaper strips, comic books, graphic novels, fotonovelas (comprising photographs in series with inserted dialogue text), and, more recently, webcomics. Comics are a cultural commodity the production and distribution of which are affected by changes in public supports, as well as by governmental controls over comics content. In the period of institutional consolidation that followed the armed phased of the Mexican Revolution, government supports were provided principally through the subsidizing of newsprint and the implementation of national literacy campaigns.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—a tri-national trade liberalization regime signed by Mexico, Canada, and the United States and implemented on January 1, 1994—significantly altered the circumstances of comics in Mexico, in terms of both the economic conditions for comics production and readership, and the political environment and public discourses addressed and communicated through Mexican comics art. The most direct impact on comics production came through the Mexican state’s retreat from control of the paper supply under the terms of NAFTA. Because paper is a key productive input, changes in paper cost and availability had the largest impact on the cost of long-form or sustained graphic narratives, such as comic books. As a result, the NAFTA period (1994 to present) is marked by the emergence of the Mexican graphic novel and of webcomics. Both of these cultural forms are based on a reorganization of the economics of comic-book production.
Comics production and consumption are therefore implicated in neoliberal policy constructs such as the North American Free Trade agreement, despite not being an explicit category of economic activity addressed by the treaty.
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Carlos Salinas de Gortari and His Legacy
Stephen D. Morris
Mexico’s President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came to power amidst crisis and controversy in 1988. Using a variety of old and new strategies and innate political skill, he largely surmounted the political crisis, gaining popularity and legitimacy for himself and support for the PRI, handing power off to his hand-picked successor six years later. During his six-year term, he implemented a series of neoliberal reforms, privatized state-owned enterprises, and overhauled and restructured the Mexican economy, turning the nation into a leading manufacturing exporter and one of the most open economies in the world. This included the historic signing of a free trade agreement with Canada and the United States in 1992. Yet many of the gains and achievements were tarnished by events in 1994. In the aftermath, Salinas would become one of the most reviled presidents in Mexican history.
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Neoliberalism in Chile
Alison J. Bruey
Chile was one of the first countries in the world to undergo a transition to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism became official state policy in 1975, during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), during which time it generated two deep economic crises and historicall high unemployment. Since 1990, civilian administrations have continued to administer the neoliberal model, popularly referred to as el modelo, with selective reforms. Despite economic growth and reductions in poverty rates since 1990, el modelo has become ever more controversial. In the 21st century, public protest has increased as broad sectors of society negatively affected by the privatization of education, healthcare, and pension systems, among other ills, have organized collectively to express their discontent.
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Chile and the Pacific World
Edward D. Melillo
Since the early 1800s, Chileans have imagined their nation’s history and destiny through an ever-changing array of transoceanic connections with the rest of the planet. At a deeper level, Chile’s relationship with the Pacific Ocean is built upon myriad collective memories and aspirational identities. The long arc of Chile’s linkages with the Pacific World—or the peoples and ecosystems in and around the Pacific Ocean—has yet to be fully explored by historians. This article fills this lacuna by analyzing five diverse historical episodes that span more than two centuries: first, Valparaíso’s growth into a Pacific commercial hub during the early 1800s; second, Chile’s role in the Californian and Australian gold rushes of the mid-1800s; third, the Chilean victory in the late-19th-century War of the Pacific; fourth, Chile’s burgeoning commercial relationship with China, which began in the years following the Second World War; and, finally, the emergence of a Chilean-Pacific variant of neoliberal ideology in the final decades of the 20th century. These five developments reveal a litany of ambiguities and antagonisms in Chile’s complicated, ongoing association with its western ocean.
