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Brazil was a slavery state for more than 350 years. This practice was legally extinguished in 1888, but left its legacy. After the whole of the 20th century and two serious dictatorships, we lived the hope of better moments with the political opening begun in the 1980s, the promulgation of a Constitution in 1988 and with it, the strengthening of individual civil rights, inaugurating a new stage in the struggle for human rights. Despite the advances made in this letter regarding labor rights, social rights, and individual freedoms, Brazil still lived with denunciations of slave labor, and such cases did not represent a survival of the past, but were and continue to be during this century, an expression of this modern society, reaching seemingly unsuspected areas such as agroindustry and even in the metropolitan regions of Southeastern Brazil. The trace of possible permanence to be observed between the past and the present is not in the attempt of confrontation or comparison between the model of exploitation of legal labor extinguished in the nineteenth century and the criminal and morally damnable practice verified today; but in the perpetuation of a brutal social distance between rich and poor that makes the country, in Hobsbawm’s words, a monument to social inequality.

Thirty years after the promulgation of the so-called “Citizens Constitution”, the Brazilian political system suffers, due to endogenous factors, a serious crisis of legitimacy. Added to this crisis of legitimacy there is still a global crisis, exogenous factors, of the bond between parties and society. To understand the nature of this crisis, proposed in this article, is to try to understand how such a young democracy can, in addition to its peculiar characteristics, be affected by phenomena that reach advanced democracies.

This paper analyzes the social roles played by indigenous troops in the barbarian war (guerra dos bárbaros) in Brazilian Seventeenth century, emphasizing their roles as agents of the colonization or as its adversaries, and reflecting about the military performance as mechanism to generate agency by indigenous social actors. To fulfil this objective, we analyze the main strategies and military tactics employed by the indigenous societies involved in the war as much as by the colonial troops, looking also for the changes in indigenous military culture provoked by the contact with Europeans and the colonization itself. Our considerations are based in the study of administrative correspondence written by colonial authorities, specially Pernambuco’s Governor and the Brazilian General Governor, today archived in the AHU (Lisbon) and the Nacional Library (Rio de Janeiro); a collection of sources analyzed under the light of authors such as Pedro Puntoni, John Manuel Monteiro, Pierre Clastres and Sherry Ortner.

This article proposes a reflection on the picture of Kena Lorenzini to think ways of social resistance and the maintenance of memory about the missing during the military dictatorship in Chile. Photographs of women in public acts against dictatorship are especially important to reflect on ways to give visibility in public space to political repression, torture and censorship that characterized that period of recent history Latin America. The work of photographers and photographers organized in independent agency, such as the AFI where played Kena Lorenzini, helped to give visibility to the resistance and the Chilean civil society struggle for the return of democracy. Almost thirty years after the return of democracy, the Chilean cultural field continues to present visual productions that incite reflection on the State terrorism that struck the country between 1973 and 1988.

This work aims to analyze the café con piernas phenomenon from a pharmacopornographic perspective proposed by the philosopher Beatriz Preciado in her books Testo Junkie (2008) and Pornotopia (2010), understanding and adapting it as a part of a by-product of the radical installation of the neoliberal system in Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, and its direct consequences on the democratic governments that succeeded it.

This article engages with the protection of human rights through networks in Chile that developed under Pinochet ́s civil-military dictatorship between 1973 and 1990, in a transnational context. As well as the good relations that the Popular Unity government had established with diverse governments through its embassies, the article suggests that there were other influential factors in the swift international support for the Chilean organizations established to assist the victims of the regime. It is argued that as much as the knowledge and contacts at the international level that had been generated by different church representatives in terms of refuge during the Popular Unity government, it was principally the impact generated by progressive sectors in Europe and Latin America with respect to the coup and the death of President Allende, that contributed to the immediate response of the international movement networks in support of the defence of Chilean human rights. Consequently, the ways in which international cooperation would function – from donor agencies, UN organisations, the World Council of Churches and diverse governments and international NGOs – were established in the early months following the coup, and would be maintained and consolidated over the following, almost 17 years of dictatorship. During this time, the Chilean human rights defence organisations, supported by international cooperation, learnt to operate as efficiently as possible, creating a modus operandi as well as a human rights culture, that had repercussions at the international level. This is illustrated by the work of FASIC. Finally, the article maintains that this culture has left its imprint on current social movements, where sectors of civil society, young people in particular, make claims for social, cultural and gendered rights that have been put off for a very long time.

The history of Chilean painting has been narrated by various hands and writing forms. Its history shows us different emphases and models that are the result of the vision and sensitivity of those who have participated in its construction. This paper reviews the theoretical contribution of diverse actors from the mid-nineteenth century to the years after the military dictatorship established in the country in 1973. It examines the way in which critical writing has evolved and its displacement from the media to the academic environment. On the other hand, it revises the historiographic model established by the critical Antonio Romera and his subsequent reformulations.

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In this article, I propose a comparison between the experiences of the Frente Amplio’s Base Committees in Uruguay and the Committees of Chilean Unidad Popular in the early 1970s. Both the FA and the UP constituted mass movements, that used a strategy of political mobilization through committees which had a broad popular basis. Since they were multiparty alliances, the committees of the Frente Amplio and of the Unidad Popular were frequented by militants and sympathizers of different forces, which sometimes caused friction and controversy. To carry out this comparison, I analyzed internal documentation of the political movements and press releases on them, as well as interviews with some of their former members. I could identify some polemics about these organizations real importance and its place in the party’s structure, revealing different positions within the left-wing forces in Uruguay and Chile.

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The images that outlined the “new” women ideal of the Portuguese New State government (Estado Novo), set an important guide to understand how the photography was used to establish a female role model consentaneous with the regime ideology. At first glance these images appear odd and contradictory,  but a closer look one can identify an intrinsic dialectic between “tradition” and “modernist” themes and forms. Taking as case study the Boletim de Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (Portuguese Women’s Youth Bulletin) (1939-1947), the aim of this work is to analyze how this dialectic was operated at the service of the New State propaganda.

The university publishers in Brazil were created only recently, in the years 1961 and 1962, respectively in the Universities of Brasília (UnB) and São Paulo (USP). This process, however, would be reactivated only in 1971, with the creation of the publishing house of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and would become more expressive from 1982, with the creation of 19 other university publishing houses in all regions of Brazil, among which Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, EDIPUCRS (1988). The role and academic meaning of these publishers, however, has been changing over the years, from service providers to active participants and integrated into the institutional project of training, production and scientific dissemination of the universities to which they belong. Analyzing these issues, therefore, constitutes precisely the purpose of this study, based on the case of EDIPUCRS.

When a war ends, it does not end with everything that is created, modified, violated, and destroyed. After a war, those who survive must rebuild and recompose their lives in accordance with this legacy in articulation with the reality that the end of the conflict inaugurates. These survivors survive and with them the legacies that the war left them. It is about some of these legacies that this text deals with a reflection on how the colonial war, that Portugal waged in Africa between 1961 and 1974, interfered with the existence of former African combatants who were part of the Portuguese Armed Forces (PAF) and lived in Portugal after the liberation of the territories where they were born. Based on qualitative research with the use of life histories, the paths of some of these men were reconstructed and it was tried to understand the sense that they attributed to their existences marked by discontinuities and particularly fractured moments in the construction of life projects. This article characterizes the different types of paths that resulted from this analysis as well as some of the discursive axes that these men mobilized to justify the diverse options that they took along them. This analysis, in turn, is used to discuss the problem of the construction of identities marked by apparently contradictory positions.

Public holidays represent key moments in the biography of a nation. In this regard, the 3rd of February enjoys a particular status in the festive calendar of São Tomé and Príncipe, as it evokes the Batepá Massacre, held as the ultimate incident of violence in the islands and registered as the founding event of the Santomean nationalism. Deriving out from this framework, my aim is to show, through distinctive moments in time, and thus, different sociopolitical contexts, that the 3rd of February is, on the one hand, a date that serves to legitimate the nation-state and that gives rise to a dominant national narrative; and, on the other hand, a public holiday that, at the same time, provides emergent discursive, symbolic and political spaces where to articulate non-dominant memories of this episode. What I hereby try to demonstrate is that although there are politics of memory ritualized and imposed by the State pertaining this historical episode and that naturally leave echoes along decades and across generations, there are a plurality of mnemonic, social and political processes in motion in the interpretation and discussion of this past. In fact, through the multiple lives of Batepá, different narrations and symbolic dimensions have been emerging by means of which the Santomean have been trying to inscribe themselves in this history.

Portuguese America should respond to laws, decrees, permits, and ordinations elaborated in the kingdom. Until the transfer of the court to Brazil in 1808, decisions regarding conquest in America, at least at the formal level, had Lisbon as the center. It was from the late eighteenth century that legislation focused on the forest issue began to be effectively formulated. This work aims to investigate such laws and decrees and the contexts under which they were elaborated, considering that they did not respond to preservationist interests, but rather economic ones. We will also consider the permanences, ruptures, and contradictions in the forestry legislation observed at the time. For this purpose, we present a case study on the island of Santa Catarina, from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. We seek to articulate the understanding of the construction of this legal framework with the society of the end of the Old Regime, thus clarifying issues such as territoriality and power relations with the objective of demonstrating a change in the way of understanding and coping with the theme.

The paper examines the circulation of knowledge in the universal exhibitions that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. This text intends to contribute to this discussion analyzing the patterns of presentation of the products in the Brazilian and Argentine pavilions. It is based on the documents produced by the Brazilian and Argentinean committees to demonstrate the importance of natural and agricultural wealth in a scenario of competition in international markets, besides the reports presented by the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce and Public Works and the Argentinian Department of Agriculture. In this sense, we proposed to discuss the changes generated by the strengthening of science and technicians, starting from the circulation of knowledge and technologies among a group of men – that included farmers, and statesmen. It was chosen to work in two directions: in linking the world expositions to the agrarian elite projects that prioritized the exploitation of natural wealth, and, at the same time, in bringing to light the link between world expositions and immigrant advertising.

The article reflects on the tension that is glimpsed between the History of International Relations and the transnational and global perspectives; a process of construction of knowledge that is renovating, questioning and complicating the way International History is being created, especially in the Ibero-American area. The article considers that such approaches and levels for observing historical interrelations overlap in a disciplinary field whose limits have been blurred, considering that this historiographical reality is linked to the problematization of the State as an actor and driving force of initiatives as well as with the disavowal of epistemological nationalisms and the context of both the subject and the object of study

The article deals with the founding of the College of São Paulo in Goa by the Society of Jesus, and presents the first period of its operation, from 1548 to 1558. The College of São Paulo was founded in Goa by the Jesuits from the experiences obtained in the direction of the Seminary of Santa Fe, founded by the Portuguese in 1541 and later delivered to the Company. After the Seminary, the Jesuits founded in 1548 their College of São Paulo, the first house being subordinated to the second. The work of formation of European Jesuits and also of natives continues during all the first decade being, in 1558, ordered in the College the first native priest, the “canarim” - Goan - André Vaz. We try to analyze the main facts, in search of the general lines of work, of the methods of the Jesuits in the College. Our sources are from the collections “Documenta Indica”, organized by Joseph Wicki and “Documentação para a História do Padroado Português do Oriente”, by António da Silva Rego. The temporal cut used goes from 1548, year of the foundation of the College of São Paulo, in Goa, to the year of 1558, when the order of André Vaz takes place. We understand, through this work, that the College of São Paulo was an institution dedicated to the Christianization and “aportuguesamento” of the native populations in Portuguese India, serving, at one time, both the objectives of the Church and those of the Crown.

This article explores the classifications and categories employed to rank Afro-descendants during the 1521-1821 period in New Spain, Mexico, including the use of categories such as nación, casta, calidad and race. The study starts with an examination of the African presence in historical perspective, as well as the economic and social role of Africans and their descendants in Mexico. Then, it engages with the different definitions employed to classify and categorize the African populations, and its links with the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade. In the last section, I examine how categories and classifications were employed, in order to stress how their uses were complex, ambiguous, and arbitrary. Despite the existence of social and racial classifications, social mobility and interactions prevailed in colonial Mexico, making efforts to classify and rank people even more subjective and problematic.