Political Report #1460 - The Census, Skin Color and Social Analysis

by Esteban Morales Domínguez

Although it still causes many prejudices, misunderstandings and challenges, there is no choice but to pay attention to skin color. Above all, in its consideration within the media and national statistics.

Cuban society is a multiracial society, or rather, multicolored, mestizo. And that reality has to be registered statistically. Not by handling the Census as a simply numerical matter, but as a cultural demographic one.

It is about the fact that color is a legacy of slavery. It is not possible to avoid it, since it has marked Cuban society since its origins.

When the Spaniards arrived in Cuba, in 1492, they did it with white credentials and that is how they stayed. Those who came of their own free will did so in search of a fortune, which they often found.

But Spain is not White. Colonized by the Arabs for 800 years, it is impossible to consider it as such. Even when the Spanish do not assume that identity.

So, the colonizers of our Archipelago were not white. Their power did not consist in being white, but in having arrived with the cross and the sword.

They arrived in a territory of indigenous people, of low culture and they only used them to find gold. They exploited them mercilessly and their population mass did not last long, although we still have representatives of that original population in Cuba.

Chinese also came, brought by means of a system of contracts that turned them into slaves. The so-called “culíes” [coolies], who since then added their beauty to the population of the Island, becoming a part of our nationality. These three large groups were the ones that formed the Cuban population. Later, other Antilleans joined, although not in the magnitude of the first ones, also merging with our population.  

Political Report # 1407 Using Renewable Energy and the Circular Economy to Fight Poverty in Argentina

By Daniel Gutman Toward Freedom

(IPS) - On the outer edges of Buenos Aires proper, where the paved streets end and the narrow alleyways of one of Argentina’s largest shantytowns begin, visitors can find the En Haccore soup kitchen. The community endeavor is using renewable energy and the circular economy in an effort to improve quality of life for local residents. “We were overrun by trash, because the garbage trucks don’t always come. Thanks to a biodigester we are now converting that waste into biogas, which enables us to spend less on energy for cooking. It’s a dream come true,” Bilma Acuña, the founder and head of the soup kitchen, told IPS. She explained that she started the soup kitchen in 1993, after losing her job at a meatpacking plant, at a time that many others in the neighborhood also became unemployed during the government of neoliberal president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), when the unemployment rate climbed to almost 20 percent. She named it En Haccore (En-hakkore), the Aramaic name of a spring in the biblical story of Samson and Delilah. The soup kitchen is on the southern edge of the Argentine capital, a 15-minute drive from downtown, at the entrance to the overcrowded shantytown of 25,000 people known as Ciudad Oculta (Hidden City).

Abstract, Community-Based Tourism and Political Communitarianism in Prainha do Canto Verde, Brazil

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Community-Based Tourism and Political Communitarianism in Prainha do Canto Verde, Brazil
by Francisco Javier Ullán de la Rosa, Antonio Aledo Tur, and Hugo García Andreu

Community-based tourism is advocated by indigenous organizations and leftist actors throughout Latin America as a tool for furthering their political and cultural agenda. The ideological biases and structural weaknesses of this model become apparent in a case study of the fishing village of Prainha do Canto Verde, Brazil. The communitarian agenda currently being implemented by means of the community-based tourism project in Prainha is based upon an ideological construct and being imposed through political engineering upon what is simply a local segment of Brazilian rural society. As a result, it is encountering strong resistance. There is also structural tension between the inevitable sociocultural change caused by the development of tourism and the rigidity and essentialism of a community-based tourism model offering a “traditional way of life” as a touristic product. The model is ultimately conflictual and unstable, and there is serious doubt about its long-term sustainability.

Abstract, Interrupted Constructions: The Brazilian Health-Industrial Complex in Historical Perspective

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Interrupted Constructions: The Brazilian Health-Industrial Complex in Historical Perspective
by Valbona Muzaka

Officially launched in 2007, Brazil’s health-industrial complex can be seen as an institutional innovation that seeks to overcome social inequality in health care, dependency on foreign technology, and weaknesses in the national innovation and productive structures. An analysis adopting a historical perspective and deploying Celso Furtado’s concept of the marginalization-modernization polarity shows how misarticulated social and economic policies hindered earlier efforts to construct a robust domestic health-pharmaceutical sector. To the extent that this polarity persists, an understanding of the trajectory of this (indeed, any) high-tech sector can be achieved only by considering the social and economic dynamics that continue to shape Brazil’s development. Despite its promise, the rise of the hybrid neodevelopmentalist state has not succeeded in overcoming the marginalization-modernization polarity. Without resolving old inconsistencies between industrial, macroeconomic, and social policies, it has introduced new ones that, as in the past, risk hindering the success of this institutional experiment.

Abstract, Territory and Public Policy in Brazil

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Territory and Public Policy in Brazil

by Kilma Gonçalves Cezar and Elimar Pinheiro do Nascimento

A new, territorial focus, replacing the regionalization of the past. emerged in state planning in Brazil between 1950 and 1970 and again between 1995 and 2010. From the traditional conception of the region predominant throughout the twentieth century, a shift occurred in public policy making to application of the notion of differentiated territories, with two dominant perspectives: one based on the economic potentials of territories, under the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government, and the other, under the Lula government, based on the concept of socially vulnerable territories. The causes of this change have to do with the reduction of the importance of regional inequality in favor of social inequality, with the risk of separatism being replaced by the loss of social cohesion. The new territorial focus in government planning seemed to point to a loss of power of regional oligarchies, but this practice was interrupted for political reasons in 2007.

Abstract, The Political Economy of the New Left

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The Political Economy of the New Left
by Megan Pickup 




New Left regimes have been underpinned by a reliance both on labor and nontraditional social groups and on capital interests related to the primary commodity sector, and the state has played an important overseer role in these relationships. These states have attempted to accommodate all these groups by pursuing incompatible populist and pragmatic policies. Study of the particular configuration of these regimes is important because they have become simultaneously more inclusive and closed off, generating heightened social fragmentation. Divisions among the left, the hardening of the right, and economic frailty render these governments unstable.

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Introduction, Open Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America

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Open Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America
by Nicole Fabricant and Linda Farthing


Ever since the search for the elusive El Dorado began in the sixteenth century, the history of Latin America has been a tale of resource extraction. Key resources (such as silver, gold, tin, and copper) drew foreign investment but left local populations deeply impoverished. As Eduardo Galeano (1973: 29) described it, “the Spanish colonies’ economic structure was born subordinated to the external market and thus centralized around the export sector, where profit and power were concentrated.” Five centuries later, this overall pattern remains unchanged.

Its persistence propelled twentieth-century social scientists to use Marxist analytic frames, Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer’s theories on declining terms of trade, and dependency theory more generally to explain how resource extraction created geographic and historic asymmetries between nation-states and peoples.....

Abstract, Between Public and Private Media: Toward a Definition of “Community Media”

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Between Public and Private Media: Toward a Definition of “Community Media”
By Mauro Cerbino and Francesca Belotti


Constitutional reforms in Ecuador and Bolivia and the subsequent laws on communications have opened up the media space to new social and political actors: public and community media. While the former tend to be associated with the state in form and with governments in substance, the latter are not clearly defined and occupy a place in the midst of the hegemonic struggle between the public and private sectors to enable citizens to actively intervene in the competition for shaping public opinion. It is therefore necessary to lay the groundwork for a definition of “community media” that includes both its legal and sociopolitical dimensions. Indeed, operationalizing such a definition might allow community media to recognize themselves in it and to take the measures required to fully project themselves as subjects of the law.

ENTREVISTA CAMILA PIÑEIRO HARNECKER Cuba e o cooperativismo por Joana Salém Vasconcelos

published in Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil

Joana Salém Vasconcelos, doutoranda em História Econômica (USP), autora de História agrária da revolução cubana e coorganizadora de Cuba no século XXI, entrevista Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, uma das maiores referências em estudos sobre cooperativismo em Cuba

Em memória de Paul Singer

“Os clássicos parecem ter caído num reducionismo evidente. Pensavam que, se a propriedade privada dos meios de produção é a causa da divisão da sociedade em classes, a abolição daquela implica eliminação desta. Mas a abolição da propriedade privada exige a criação de um regime de propriedade coletiva, sobre o qual eles nada tinham a dizer (…). O planejamento centralizado, que foi a marca registrada do ‘socialismo’ soviético, nada tem a ver com a socialização dos meios de produção. Se todos eles pertencem ao Estado, em tese cada cidadão é proprietário de meios de produção. Mas isso não passa de uma ficção jurídica. Na prática, o controle sobre a economia era exercido pela cúpula do partido, que também era a cúpula do Estado. E os trabalhadores continuaram tão subordinados quanto no capitalismo. A experiência do socialismo ‘realmente existente’ constitui uma grande lição histórica, que nos ensina que socializar tem que necessariamente significar descentralizar o poder, ou seja, o controle dos meios de produção tem que ser exercido diretamente pelos trabalhadores sobre cada unidade produtiva”.

Paul Singer, 1999[1]

Desde que as reformas econômicas destinadas a ampliar o setor privado em Cuba foram anunciadas, em 2011, muitas interrogações surgiram sobre os destinos do socialismo na ilha.[2] Será que o país iria seguir os rumos mercantilistas da China? Seria uma perestroika cubana? Será que, apesar de anunciar a continuidade do socialismo, as reformas conduziriam a uma espécie de “retorno controlado ao capitalismo”? Com qual intensidade e em qual ritmo? Ou seria mesmo uma mudança lenta e dentro dos marcos do socialismo? Nesse caso, como lidar com as novas desigualdades sociais? Afinal, quais critérios determinam a fronteira entre capitalismo e socialismo no mundo contemporâneo?

Abstract, Applying Stavenhagen’s Analytical Approach to Research on Argentine Agrarian Social Structure

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Applying Stavenhagen’s Analytical Approach to Research on Argentine Agrarian Social Structure
by  Adriana Chazarreta


Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s analytical approach, as laid out in his 1965 “Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America,” prioritized a dialectical perspective and relationships of functionality between two dynamics within a single structure and crystallized in fundamental conceptual proposals such as internal colonialism and a focus on the analysis of agrarian social structure. Application of the approach to current research problems in Argentina sheds light on the changes in agrarian social structure that have taken place in recent decades, in particular changes in dominant forms of land tenure, the relations of production, and the functional relationships between areas at different levels of development.

Abstract, Received Wisdom: Stavenhagen’s “Erroneous Theses” and the Mexican Maquiladora Industry

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Received Wisdom: Stavenhagen’s “Erroneous Theses” and the Mexican Maquiladora Industry
by María del Rosario Fátima Robles Robles


Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s “Seven Erroneous Theses about Latin America” has contributed to a social science–based understanding of the processes of development and underdevelopment in Latin America. Fifty years after its publication, its analysis applies to a form of industrialization that has emerged along the northern Mexican border. The received wisdom about the maquiladora export industry and the implementation of an export-oriented development model—that they should foster regional industrialization and dynamism and increase employment—has not been realized. Examination of this industry highlights the relations between national economic structures and transnational corporations that deepen and transform current modes of internal colonialism.

Introduction, The Urban Informal Economy Revisited

:::::: Introduction ::::::

The Urban Informal Economy Revisited
by Ray Bromley and Tamar Diana Wilson                                     


One of the most cited definitions of the informal economy is “a process of income generation characterized by one central feature: it is unregulated by the institutions of society, in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated” (Castells and Portes, 1989: 12). Among those the International Labour Organization (ILO) (2013: 3) identifies as being part of the informal economy are those who work in the informal sector as employers and employees in informal enterprises and as self-employed workers. Also included are those who labor outside the informal sector and are informally employed in formal firms or as domestic workers, not covered by labor law protections. The employees in the informal economy also include unpaid family workers, whether employed in informal enterprises or in formal firms or in domestic service.

For decades there have been debates over whether the informal economy is procyclical, expanding as the capitalist economy expands, or countercyclical, contracting as that economy expands. Both things may be happening, depending on which part of the informal economy is under scrutiny: the informally self-employed or informalized wage workers in either informal or formal enterprises (FORLAC, 2015: 2). For example, informal microenterprises that market their products directly to customers or retail outlets may show countercyclical tendencies, whereas informal microenterprises that are subcontracted by large businesses, whether national or multinational, may show procyclical tendencies. More domestic workers may be employed when the economy expands, whereas self-employment in artisanal work and vending may expand when waged employment dries up.

Introduction, The Urban Informal Economy Revisited

:::::: Introduction ::::::

The Urban Informal Economy Revisited
by Ray Bromley and Tamar Diana Wilson                                     


One of the most cited definitions of the informal economy is “a process of income generation characterized by one central feature: it is unregulated by the institutions of society, in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated” (Castells and Portes, 1989: 12). Among those the International Labour Organization (ILO) (2013: 3) identifies as being part of the informal economy are those who work in the informal sector as employers and employees in informal enterprises and as self-employed workers. Also included are those who labor outside the informal sector and are informally employed in formal firms or as domestic workers, not covered by labor law protections. The employees in the informal economy also include unpaid family workers, whether employed in informal enterprises or in formal firms or in domestic service.

For decades there have been debates over whether the informal economy is procyclical, expanding as the capitalist economy expands, or countercyclical, contracting as that economy expands. Both things may be happening, depending on which part of the informal economy is under scrutiny: the informally self-employed or informalized wage workers in either informal or formal enterprises (FORLAC, 2015: 2). For example, informal microenterprises that market their products directly to customers or retail outlets may show countercyclical tendencies, whereas informal microenterprises that are subcontracted by large businesses, whether national or multinational, may show procyclical tendencies. More domestic workers may be employed when the economy expands, whereas self-employment in artisanal work and vending may expand when waged employment dries up.

Book, Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions

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Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions
by Marc Becker

Revolutions are a commonly studied but only vaguely understood historical phenomenon. This clear and concise text extends our understanding with a critical narrative analysis of key case studies: the 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution; the 1944–1954 Guatemalan Spring; the 1952–1964 MNR-led revolution in Bolivia; the Cuban Revolution that triumphed in 1959; the 1970–1973 Chilean path to socialism; the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in power from 1979–1990; failed guerrilla movements in Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru; and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela after Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998. Historian Marc Becker opens with a theoretical introduction to revolutionary movements, including a definition of what “revolution” means and an examination of factors necessary for a revolution to succeed. He analyzes revolutions through the lens of those who participated and explores the sociopolitical conditions that led to a revolutionary situation, the differing responses to those conditions, and the outcomes of those political changes. Each case study provides an interpretive explanation of the historical context in which each movement emerged, its main goals and achievements, its shortcomings, its outcome, and its legacy. The book concludes with an analysis of how elected leftist governments in the twenty-first century continue to struggle with issues that revolutionaries confronted throughout the twentieth century.

Interview with Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli on Macri's Presidency in Argentina

Dr. Tomas Crowder-Taraborrelli, a coordinating editor for LAP, discusses the economic and social policies of current Argentine president Mauricio Macri and popular resistance against them.

Argentina a Decade after the Collapse: The Causes of the Crisis and Structural Changes 
Latin American Perspectives 
Issue 200 Vol. 42 #1 January 2015
Available here.

Argentina a Decade after the Collapse: Old and New Social Movements
Latin American Perspectives 
Issue 201 Vol. 42 #2 March 2015
Available here.

The Chilean Earthquake of 2010: Challenging the Capabilities of the Neoliberal State

Edited by: Kirsten Sehnbruch

Issue 215 | Volume 44 | Number 4 | July 2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS

On February 27th 2010, southern Chile was hit by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake followed by several devastating tsunamis. The disaster cost 575 lives and economic losses equivalent to 18% of Chile’s GDP. Although Chile’s earthquake resistant construction prevented far greater damage and its institutions proved to be relatively well equipped for disaster relief, all the weaknesses of an atrophied neoliberal state became evident during a reconstruction process based on decentralized public-private partnerships formed to implement over 100 local “master plans.” This special issues analyses the responses from politicians, policy makers, corporations, and civil society and situates them in their institutional and constitutional context.

LAP July Issue! The Chilean Earthquake of 2010: Challenging the Capabilities of the Neoliberal State

The Chilean Earthquake of 2010: Challenging the Capabilities of the Neoliberal State

Edited by: Kirsten Sehnbruch

On February 27th 2010, southern Chile was hit by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake followed by several devastating tsunamis. The disaster cost 575 lives and economic losses equivalent to 18% of Chile’s GDP. Although Chile’s earthquake resistant construction prevented far greater damage and its institutions proved to be relatively well equipped for disaster relief, all the weaknesses of an atrophied neoliberal state became evident during a reconstruction process based on decentralized public-private partnerships formed to implement over 100 local “master plans.” This special issues analyses the responses from politicians, policy makers, corporations, and civil society and situates them in their institutional and constitutional context.

To read the complete issue: click here!

Political Report # 1252 Un Triunfo por Construir Lo mas difícil no es hacer la revolución, es mantenerla

by Veronica Silva,   writing from Madrid, Spain LAP Participating Editor

El 2 de abril de 2017 los ecuatorianos nos enfrentamos a dos opciones: terminar con el Gobierno de la Revolución Ciudadana a cualquier precio o fortalecer una década de transformaciones históricas que han hecho de nuestro país un referente mundial de buen gobierno. A pesar de la reñida contienda, la Revolución Ciudadana ganó las elecciones. Ahora, la tarea urgente es analizar cuáles fueron las debilidades que pusieron en riesgo este proceso y a partir de ello mirar hacia adelante. Los resultados de las elecciones 2017 nos impulsan a repensar la ruta que como Movimiento País hemos tenido en este proceso. Aunque se logró el triunfo, la respuesta del electorado no fue la esperada. En Europa, Asia y Oceanía, por ejemplo, el Movimiento obtuvo el 54,02% de los votos, frente a la votación arrasadora del 2013, cuando logró el 82,25% de respaldo. En este caso, el desafío es que el proyecto de la Revolución Ciudadana vuelva a ser la apuesta de la gran mayoría de los ecuatorianos en Europa, estando aún más cerca de la realidad de nuestra comunidad migrante.

Political Report # 1250 Passive Revolution: The Transnational Capitalist Class Unravels Latin America's Pink Tide

By William I. Robinson, Truthout

The day after the Organization of American States (OAS) met in Washington, DC, on May 31 at the behest of the US and right-wing Latin American governments to debate the crisis in Venezuela, judge Nelson Moncada was gunned down at an opposition protest in Caracas, in a crime that some claimed was an act of revenge for his involvement in the sentencing of a prominent opposition politician. The OAS, however, remained silent on the crime, as well as on the deepening crisis and escalating state repression against mass protests sweeping Brazil and Colombia. Bolivian President Evo Morales accused the OAS of seeking to "politically eliminate the anti-imperialist presidents and governments" in Latin America in line with the historic pattern of US intervention in the region to prop up right-wing dictatorships and crush revolutionary and progressive movements. The leftist governments in Latin America that swept to power in the early 21st century, known collectively as the Pink Tide, transformed the political landscape in the Americas and inspired popular and revolutionary struggles around the world. The Pink Tide governments came to power on the heels of mass popular resistance to the late 20th century juggernaut of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization in the region. Yet nearly two decades after the turn to the left, the right has resumed power with a vengeance in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Honduras, while the Venezuelan revolution is in deep crisis and the leftist projects in Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Nicaragua and El Salvador have been emptied of much of their socialist pretensions. If this ebbing of the Pink Tide demonstrates the limits of parliamentary changes in the era of global capitalism, it also points to the renewed hegemony of the transnational capitalist class over the region. The social model pursued by the Pink Tide governments involved the capture and redistribution of surpluses generated by the export of raw materials to global markets. Notwithstanding the leftist rhetoric, these governments oversaw a massive expansion of raw material production in partnership with foreign and local contingents of the transnational capitalist class, that is, the transnationally integrated ruling capitalist groups that emerged in countries around the world through globalization and that exercise collective control over the new globalized system of production and finance. As a result, the Pink Tide countries became ever more integrated into emergent transnational circuits of global capitalism and dependent on global commodity and capital markets. There was no attempt to break with this extractivist model, even in the more radical experiments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, where energy and other natural resources were nationalized. All three countries deepened their dependence on the export of hydrocarbons and industrial and precious minerals. Venezuela is even more dependent on oil exports in 2017 than it was at the turn of the century. Soy production in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia experienced an explosive expansion as transnational corporate agribusiness displaced millions of smallholders and converted the countryside into a vast sea of industrial-scale soy plantations. With the exception of Venezuela during the height of the Bolivarian revolution, what stood out were the absence of any shift in basic property and class relations despite changes in political blocs, a discourse in favor of the popular classes, and an expansion of social welfare programs. In effect, these governments carried out what Italian Marxist theorist and politician Antonio Gramsci referred to as passive revolution, whereby dominant groups undertake reform from above that defuses mobilization from below for more far-reaching transformation. The Pink Tide governments were "progressive" insofar as they introduced limited redistribution and restored a role for the state, less in regulating accumulation than in administering its expansion in more inclusionary ways. When we cut through the rhetoric, many of the Pink Tide states were able to push forward a new wave of capitalist globalization with greater credibility than their orthodox and politically bankrupt neoliberal predecessors. The commodities boom financed the expansion of social programs that reduced poverty and raised the standard of living of the working and popular classes. Yet because there were no more substantial structural transformations that could address the root causes of poverty and inequality, these social programs were subject to the vagaries of global markets over which the Pink Tide states exercised no control. Once the 2008 world financial crisis hit, they came up against the limits of redistributive reform within the logic of global capitalism. The extreme dependence on raw materials exports threw these countries into economic turmoil when global commodities markets collapsed, undermining governments' abilities to sustain social programs and generating political tensions that helped fuel popular protest and open up space for a right-wing resurgence. Brazil was most indicative of the mild reformist thrust of many Pink Tide governments, and the most tragic for the popular classes. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the 2002 election only after his wing of the Workers' Party moved sharply toward the political center and promised not to default on the country's foreign debt. In Brazil, as elsewhere, the Pink Tide state remained a part of the larger institutional networks of the global financial system and beholden to transnational finance capital. The Workers' Party government demobilized the mass social movements that brought it to power and then imposed austerity after the collapse. Only in this light can we understand the brazen return of the far right. US intervention, of course, is a critical part of the story of the unraveling of the Pink Tide. As in other historical moments of counterrevolution, such as in Chile under Salvador Allende in the early 1970s and Nicaragua in the 1980s, US strategists have been deft at exploiting mistakes and limitations of the Pink Tide governments and manipulating legitimate grievances among the popular sectors in these countries for the purposes of destabilization. This is especially the case with the Bolivarian project in Venezuela -- by far the most radical and socialist-oriented experiment among the Pink Tide -- that has faced an all-out strategy of US counter-revolution since its inception. There are other factors to consider as well, such as the particular dynamics of class and social struggles in each country that shaped the trajectory of Pink Tide experiences and the attempts at building an alternative regional economic bloc around the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). Yet these dimensions played out to the drumbeat of the expansion of capitalist globalization in the region followed by crisis. The transnational capitalist class used its structural power in the global political economy to defuse the Pink Tide challenge to its rule. In this way the transnational capitalist class demonstrated its capacity to subordinate leftist projects at the national and regional levels to its logic of global accumulation. The lesson seems to be that a viable project from below requires a more significant rupture with that logic than the Pink Tide was able or willing to undertake. Original article and sources can be found here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40837-passive-revolution-the-transnational-capitalist-class-unravels-latin-america-s-pink-tide

Book Review, Revisiting the Politics of Planning and Action in Latino Urban America

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Revisiting the Politics of Planning and Action in Latino Urban America

by Erualdo R. González                


In Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy, and Redevelopment, editors David R. Diaz and Rodolfo D. Torres offer a range of scholarship examining the way socioeconomic and political change and urban policy interventions influence the nature and functioning of cities with large Latino populations. They argue that the volume blends traditional critical urbanism perspectives with varied theoretical perspectives on political and policy interventions. The volume has three themes: (1) the limits of popular community development models in neighborhood and commercial spaces, (2) urban living experiences and the role of market-driven and racialized public policy, and (3) community organizations and change. Scholars with varied disciplinary backgrounds provide a mix of contemporary and historical case studies and essays.