This dissertation analyzes the emergence of the criminal justice system in modern Argentina, focusing on the city of Buenos Aires as case study. It concentrates on what I call the formative period of the postcolonial penal system, from the installation of the second Audiencia (superior justice tribunal in the viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata) in 1785 to the promulgation of the Argentine national constitution in 1853, when a new phase of inter-regional organization and codification began. During this transitional period, basic features of the modern Argentine criminal justice system emerged which I study in detail. They are: (a) institutional subordination of the judiciary; (b) police interference and disruption in the judiciary-civil society interface; (c) manipulation of the initial stages of the judicial process (sumario) by senior police officers (comisarios); and (d) utilization of institutionally malleable penal-legal procedures as a punitive system, regardless of the outcome of criminal cases judicially evaluated.

This dissertation analyzes the gender and ethnic dimensions of cultural authority and power within the process of colonial rule in Guatemala. To do so, I focus on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts of the lives and practices of female healers, midwives, sorcerers, and clandestine cult leaders in the capital, Santiago de Guatemala. Colonial authorities often called these women mujeres de mal vivir, "women who live evil lives." Community members from all sectors of colonial society consulted women who practiced sexual witchcraft, magical healing, and popular religious rituals in multi-ethnic urban communities such as Santiago. These women were asked to intervene in a wide variety of conflicts in everyday life, in sexual and familial relations, disputes between neighbors, petty theft, instances of abusive colonial officials, employers, and husbands, and in cases of bewildering and often bizarre illnesses. Women's power in urban communities was maintained through reputation, informal material bases of power, social ties between inhabitants of the capital and surrounding indigenous towns, and public displays of healing, violence, and devotional acts. Women possessed authority in everyday life through their knowledge of the body and the natural world, which drew on Spanish, African, and Mayan religious and supernatural beliefs. I base my analysis on Inquisition cases prosecuted in Santiago de Guatemala from 1650 to 1750, supplemented with civil and ecclesiastical correspondence, city council records, and other sources. The examination of women's practices of healing, sorcery, sexual witchcraft and popular devotional acts revealed opportunities for women's partial cultural and symbolic autonomy in everyday life in Santiago de Guatemala. Women reinforced their power through public displays and informal social ties to friends, family, and neighbors, ties that often crossed ethnic, class, and urban and rural divisions of colonial society. On the one hand, women's alternative practices revealed the crucial, but often overlooked, gender dynamics of power within the broader framework of ethnic and cultural resistance to colonial rule. On the other hand, however, women's cultural resistance also became opportunities for the reinscription of colonial hegemony through institutions such as the Inquisition, and for encompassing urban communities within the Spanish colonial state.

This dissertation examines popular credit and material culture in Mexico City in the "long" nineteenth century. It considers the social relationships that constituted the pawning process, the development of pawning businesses, and the regulatory role of the state. The focus is on three sets of people--clients of pawning services, pawnbrokers, and state agents--as well as the material goods used to secure loans. For city residents, daily life was cash poor, a phenomenon that crossed class lines. Middle-class housekeepers, merchants and artisans as well as lower-class homemakers, carpenters and other workers faced daily challenges of meeting household, business and recreational needs with a scarcity of specie. The most common way to raise cash was to pawn material possessions such as clothing, tools, and jewels. The nature of the pawning process linked material culture and popular credit together as it was shaped by relations between pawnbrokers, pawning customers, and state agents. In order to obtain cash one had to have possessions for collateral, and the value of material goods determined one's credit line and the arena in which pawning occurred. Short-term credit secured by household goods financed cultural events, lifestyles, and further consumption. Pawnshops not only supplied credit, but they injected cash into a cash-starved economy. This study of pawning in Mexico City reveals a culture of negotiation: over what will be pawned, over values of goods and terms of credit, and over the freedom or pawnbrokers to make profits. This culture of negotiation was also one in which possessions served as tools of identity, cultural currency in the complexities of daily ethnic, gender and class relations in Mexico City. Pawning arenas included retail establishments in the colonial and early national period, the state-sponsored Monte de Piedad beginning in the late colonial period, and casas de empeno which emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. Colonial and national states regulated the pawning business throughout this evolution, until the revolutionary state seriously curtailed interest rates and hence profits in the early twentieth century.

This dissertation is about moral complexity. It shows how a focus on moral contradictions elucidates everyday life in Mazatlan, Mexico, and it uses this ethnography to develop analytical perspectives on more-general issues. This work treats the ways that people of Mazatlan-- mazatlecos--manage conflicting pressures to be both "traditional" and "modern," as they conceive of these ways of being. These two moral frameworks appear to be contradictory, yet mazatlecos expect themselves and other locals to combine them in a multitude of ways and contexts. This ethnographic and historical analysis supports yet reworks academic claims about a longstanding, pervasive, and significant contradiction between "traditional" and "modern" ways of being Mexican. Even relatively "modern" Mexicans employ a meta-expectation that good people will simultaneously combine various aspects of their identity. This preference contradicts "modern" social organization, which emphasizes the separation of identity into contextualized facets. Nonetheless, even the most "traditional" mazatlecos favored various aspects of "modernity," including contextualized identities. Individuals had different possibilities and desires and faced different consequences, based on other aspects of their identities. After introducing Mazatlan and my fieldwork experience (Chapter Two), I analyze Carnaval to delineate a key aspect differentiating "modernity" and "tradition" (Chapter Three). Then I analyze various elections to highlight another contradictory aspect of these frameworks and to show that this contradiction is important outside of entertainment contexts (Chapter Four). Chapter Five uses Mazatlan's disco utopias as a springboard for discussing the promise of tourism and for developing a process for avoiding unhappiness. Chapter Six assesses mazatlecos' "moral geographies" through a comparison of communicative practices in different zones. Chapter Seven is a vignette about a date that spanned two local zones and several issues. Chapter Eight contains a social-semiotic account of locals in the tourist zone and elsewhere, showing that even apparently trivial practices had lasting importance. Moral contradictions are an inherent part of human life. They are not solely the artifacts of globalization or other processes of intercultural domination, although these processes are likely to sharpen them. Moral contradictions sometimes spring from or engender conflict, but they sometimes result from or in integration.

This study attempts to demonstrate the uniqueness of the work of Gilberto Mendes (b. 1922) in the panorama of twentieth-century Brazilian music, through an examination of selected piano pieces. Even though Mendes is mainly known through his choral works, pieces specifically meant for the piano appear throughout his career, allowing the tracing of his evolution as a composer as well as to detect common characteristics that define his style. The list of works chosen includes two Preludios (1945, 1949), four pieces from Pequeno Album para Criancas (1947-1951), Sonatina Mozartiana (1951), two Pecas para Piano (1957-1958), Musica para Pianono 1 (1962), Blirium C-9 (1965), Vento Noroeste (1982), Il neige ... de nouveau! (1985), Um Estudo? Eisler e Webern Caminham nos Mares do Sul ... (1989), and estudo extudo eis tudo pois (1997). Even though the time span of these works allowed for a fascinating development of Mendes' style towards maturity, the pieces chosen for this study share many common traits such as pervasive use of musical quotation, free manipulation of form, and use of intensive repetition. The freedom and flexibility utilized by the composer when combining these elements make him a unique figure among Brazilian contemporary composers.

This dissertation examines the causes and the process of decentralization in Latin America. Decentralization, the transfer of functions from higher levels of government to lower ones, has both political and fiscal forms. The current literature suggests ten possible explanations for both political and fiscal decentralization. Using data from 18 Latin American countries between 1985 and 1995, I tested these different explanations. Political decentralization (measured as the election rather than the appointment of governors) resulted from federalism, legitimacy, presidential power, democracy, economic conditions, level of development and ethnic diversity. Economic and social factors including structural adjustment, level of development, urbanization, and social and religious diversity, in addition to presidential decree authority, played a strong role in predicting the election of mayors. Federalism, presidential power, structural adjustment, level of development, and social and religious diversity were all predictors of the level of subnational expenditures (a measure of fiscal decentralization). As a companion to the region-wide statistical analysis conducted above, I also studied the process of decentralization in Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. These case studies allowed me to observe the broader variables studies above "in action." In each of the case studies I traced the path decentralization has taken and I considered the major actors in the process of decentralization. I found that decentralization in both Colombia and Venezuela is relatively advanced. In contrast, decentralization in Costa Rica is not nearly as advanced. Among the most important causes of these differences is the absence, in Costa Rica, of strong local actors demanding decentralization and the fact that while presidents have supported decentralization, they are weak relative to the congress. In Colombia and Venezuela, the opposite is true, in part explaining the higher levels of decentralization.

My dissertation explores the episcopal dimensions of power as exercised by one of the more polemical figures in Mexico's colonial past, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. Known to historians as the seventeenth-century bishop-viceroy who challenged the political, economic, and social standing of the Society of Jesus, Palafox also instituted broad ecclesiastical reforms that transformed the local spirituality of Indians and Spaniards into a new Tridentine Catholicism. While I examine the institutional sources of Palafox's episcopal power, namely the decrees of the Council of Trent, I conceive of my dissertation as a cultural history of Church power and authority in the daily lives of Indians and Spaniards in colonial Mexico. Bishop Palafox wielded his crozier, or shepherd's staff, to activate conciliar reforms in the Diocese of Puebla, an exercise that influenced the ways in which the laity experienced the sacramental and the profane. Moreover, I analyze the broad range of cultural changes that illuminate both the extraordinary and routine dimensions of Palafox's pastoral sentiment, such as daily prayer life, episcopal visitation, seminary education, overhauling the material conditions of parish churches, jurisdictional conflicts with the monastic orders and the Society of Jesus, as well as the bishop's efforts to harness the financial and human resources of the diocese to construct the material symbol of his office, the Cathedral of Puebla. Finally, I assess the bishop's capacity to structure the broader political and material contexts of Catholic culture in Mexico.

Empirical research on political parties has shed light on many aspects of party organization and behavior. Unfortunately, there is a great deal that we do not know about small parties, especially in presidential systems. I take a two-pronged approach to studying small parties in Latin America's presidential regimes. First, I examine the factors that impact the election of small parties across Latin America's democratic regimes from 1980 to 1998, accounting for both institutional and cultural factors. Next, I move toward an examination of the representation and governance roles that small parties play in three carefully selected presidential democracies: Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela. Since small parties are rarely studied, it is unclear what, if any, impact they have on the representativeness of the political system. Small parties may act as promoters of new policies which reside outside the boundaries of traditionally dominant parties. This may mean identifying with issues that are important to those sectors of society that have been ignored (e.g. minority rights) or representing new issues that cut across sectors of society (e.g. decentralization). Alternatively, they may promote mainstream issues, or they may have no substantive policy import (acting primarily as personalistic vehicles). With respect to governance roles, they may play an important supportive role in major party coalitions. Indeed, their coalition behavior may substantively impact the legitimacy of the system by supporting minority governments.

Of the many aspects which influence Third World urban systems, the historical role of large metropolitan areas as the centers of political and economic power is particularly important. In this detailed study of the evolution and development of Peru's urban system, the complex interactions among social, economic, historical, and political forces will be demonstrated as they affect urban primacy. In spite of the considerable growth of secondary cities in Peru since 1940, Lima remains the dominant city in the urban hierarchy of Peru. Nevertheless, the data presented here indicates that urban primacy in Peru peaked in 1961 and has declined since then. Although it still exists, the pattern of primacy in Peru is currently less conspicuous than in previous years. The growth of population and the expansion of economic activities in coastal cities have been particularly important in building a more balanced urban system in Peru.

The Brazilian military possesses an institutional ideology separate from that of civil society. This ideology has in the past mistakenly been identified as the National Security Doctrine (NSD). However, the NSD is merely the codification of a flexible and continuous ideology that began to develop in the nineteenth century. The ideology is based on geopolitical theory which the military believes offers an objective and scientific approach to the problems of national security. According to the ideology, the organic state's national security is in a constant state of peril which grants the military the role of state guardian. As guardians of the state the military also views itself as society's tutor in the process of preparing the nation for the responsible exercise of democracy. As long as the flexible and authoritarian military ideology is present, democracy in Brazil cannot be institutionalized and will, at best, be a limited democracy.