This concluding chapter first brings the reader up to date in Complexo da Maré and Rio de Janeiro. Since concluding fieldwork in 2015, much has changed in Brazil. Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016 and Jair Bolsonaro became president in 2018. More importantly for Rio de Janeiro, Wilson Witzel, an extreme right wing candidate, was elected governor in 2018 and took control of the state’s public security apparatus. The dynamics of policing and violence have changed accordingly. Rio’s public security apparatus confronted and violently engaged Rio’s gangs with an intensity never before seen. Police shot into densely populated favelas from helicopters, showing little restraint even when innocent bystanders were present. In 2019 alone, Rio police killed an estimated 1,600 citizens. This chapter reflects on these developments and contemplates possibilities for the future. Finally, it addresses the generalizability of the book’s findings for other cities in Brazil and beyond while suggesting several avenues for future research.

Plants have played a central role in cultural imaginaries across South and Central America and the Caribbean. This chapter, organised chronologically from the colonial period to the present, focuses on key literary traditions and/or works from Latin America and the Caribbean that engage directly with plants, including sugar cane, the ceiba pentandra, and rubber. The chapter includes discussion of a number of works in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, including John Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764), Euclides da Cunha’s À margem da história [The Amazon: Land Without History] (1909), and Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte [The Wilderness] (1954). Although the works under discussion belong to different historical, national, and linguistic contexts, recurrent plant-inflected tropes and concerns emerge, including those relating to questions of aesthetics and literary form; cultural identity and belonging; environmental care and destruction; and the complex and ever-evolving relationships between human and non-human worlds.

The concluding chapter discusses the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious politics within the global context of democratic backsliding and spontaneous mass mobilizations. We highlight the contributions of our theoretical framework and the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious pathways for hybrid regimes and beyond.

In the conclusion, I return to two central arguments: the importance of studying Black organizing in spaces of Black invisibility and that we cannot understand social movement mobilization, solidarity, and outcomes from a solely macro- or solely micro-level analysis. Pain into Purpose shows that by putting international, national, local, and interpersonal histories in conversation we can come to understand how even in a country where the disenfranchised group includes a small minority that is largely invisible, a social movement can indeed emerge, gain traction, and achieve some of its goals. Finally, the conclusion explores new directions that the Movimiento Negro and research on the movement may take given its increasing visibility and representation amid the simultaneous persistence and widespread denial of racism.

This chapter introduces Argentina’s Black movement and situates it within discussions of Black movements in Latin America and social movements theory more broadly. I introduce evidence that the movement has made progress in combating historical erasure and racism and show that despite societal denial, activists mobilize collective emotions to raise awareness, increase participation, and access state resources. The book argues that emotions, both at the societal and interpersonal levels, play a crucial role in the efficacy of transnational Black social movements in spaces of invisibility. Focusing on Argentina’s understudied Black movement, I employ critical race theory and Black feminist perspectives to examine racialization processes, challenge myths of homogeneous Whiteness, and highlight Afrodescendants’ marginalization in Argentina. Additionally, I show that this study contributes to understanding emotions in social movements by analyzing emotional opportunity structures and the role of emotions in mobilization, particularly within the context of Black feminist activism.

Mesoamerica is one of only three world regions to have developed pristine cities, that is, without outside influence. Mesoamerica scholarship, especially the influential work of Richard E. Blanton, has vigorously applied world systems theory to the region in a way reminiscent of Mesopotamia studies. Teotihuacan, for which this analysis is apt, bears similarities to today’s migrant magnets, replete with expat neighborhoods and multilingual apartment blocks. Moreover, it reaped the benefit of trade relations outside its sphere, growing to massive size. The chapter culminates with Tenochtitlan, the apogee of Mesoamerican urbanism, at its height when Europeans arrived in 1519. It did not directly hold territory, making the Spanish-derived term “Aztec Empire” somewhat misleading. This chapter stresses the multiplicity of exchanges between cities. Environmental scarcity was central to the ebb and flow of urbanization. Tenochtitlan, like modern world cities, inspired European imaginations much the way Venice did. Its imagery fascinated renaissance figures in Europe such as Albrecht Dürer, in this sense making it the first “global” city.

Chapter 1 provides an empirical analysis of one of the principal grievances of Argentina’s Black social movement – anti-Black racism – with an analysis of the mechanisms of racialization in the country. While erasure and denial, racial formation processes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are still present, amid growing activism and an increasingly visible transnational Black community, the primary contemporary method of racialization is through foreignization. While Miriam Gomes provides the concept, I document with empirical examples how “foreignization,” the assumption that Black people and culture are never from Argentina, hence never Argentine, functions as a racialized mechanism that reproduces the pervasive myth of Argentina’s homogeneous Whiteness. I illustrate this mechanism by analyzing four racialized practices that were salient throughout my fieldwork: afrophilia, afrophobia, curiosity, and insecure Whiteness. By showing how both Blackness and Whiteness are constructed in racialized encounters, I demonstrate how racial hierarchies are reproduced by illuminating the symbolic capital invoked through such exchanges.

This chapter analyzes recent conservative efforts to build parties in Latin America. Its main case study is Argentina’s Republican Proposal (PRO) party, one of the most important examples of conservative party-building in Latin America. This chapter explains the success of right-wing parties born in nonauthoritarian contexts through the strategic decisions of leaders about whether to invest in high-cost resources (ideational and organizational) that will allow parties to take root in inhospitable contexts. This chapter demonstrates that the competitiveness of right-wing parties has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and an elite fear of the "Venezuela model."

In the conclusion, we review the book’s chapters and argue that Latin America has experienced a resurgence of conservative forces in recent years. We analyze the supply and demand of a broad set of conservative alternatives, paying special attention to the processes of party-building, adaptation, and rebranding. We find that new right-wing forces often have weak organizations, but have been able to mobilize voters along noneconomic cleavages, including security, gender politics, and reproductive rights. The adoption of a highly conservative profile has allowed parties to access lower-class constituencies and mobilize mass support among them. The politicization of cultural issues, such as LGBT rights and religious identities, has contributed to polarization and the rise of populist radical right parties. These parties have flourished within the context of political and economic shocks and benefited from cultural backlashes and the crises of traditional right-wing parties. In these situations, politics becomes a zero-sum game and the stakes get higher. Democratic stability in the region is arguably at its most tenuous state since the age of military dictatorships. Interrupted presidencies have become realities in many countries over the past fifteen years, raising concerns about democratic stability and potential threats to democratic institutions.

In recent decades, Latin America has experienced a resurgence of the political right after the “left turn” of the 2000s. The introduction argues that right-wing parties have adapted to social and political changes by emphasizing cultural issues, mobilizing voters along salient political cleavages, and crafting distinctive party platforms and political identities. It also introduces a typology of right-wing parties and movements that captures the diversity of the post-2000 Latin American right in both ideological and organizational terms. Looking at the demand side, the introduction sets the stage for our analysis of the changes and continuities in the attitudes of Latin American electorates. On the supply side, the introduction sets the groundwork for mapping the programmatic features that distinguish the post-2000 political right from right-wing parties created in previous eras. Finally, the introduction presents an outline of the book and summarizes its main findings.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

This chapter looks forward by looking back, examining the local production of COVID-19 vaccines in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region. The focus is on technology transfer for local production. That is, while efforts to produce original, "home-grown" vaccines are discussed, attention is primarily directed at the production in LAC countries of the leading vaccines that were most used internationally. Through analysis of technology transfer, as well as the accompanying regulatory challenges, the chapter sheds light on the intense challenges involved with pandemic vaccine production in the Global South. To be sure, with LAC vaccination rates among the highest in the world by late 2022, the issues discussed in this chapter may appear not to be pressing any longer. But building production capabilities – and tapping into existing capabilities – has important implications for preparedness for future pandemics.