Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The floating population as a social phenomenon has a direct impact on the cities through which its members pass. Given its increasing presence in contemporary urban settings, there is a need to ascertain the impact of the floating population on the city and its urban development. Based on a review of 40 articles, this paper presents a critical and integrative analysis of papers published on the floating population for the period spanning 1990 to 2019. The literature review guides the socio-spatial focus by including this population segment and its correlation with the city in social and spatial terms, understanding the city as the space in which social interactions take place. The results reflect the findings and limitations of an issue that has different variants, and which changes depending on the local, regional and global context. Recommendations for future research are also included.

One key factor in the studies carried out on cross-border regions, are the value chains that are established through economic trade. This article examines this issue with respect to the Dominican Republic/Haitian border (Elías Piña-Departamento Central), through an analysis of agri-food chains. For this purpose, a study was made of six agricultural products that cross the border in both directions. This work included observations, the gathering of statistical data, and interviews with key stakeholders in these processes. The value chains highlight typical features of unequal cross-border trade. Moreover, they also show how the region, and specifically local producers, have limited access to the profits generated by such cross-border economic activity.

This article presents the results of a research project based on an ethnographical approach, aimed at analyzing the hostile manifestations towards migrants on a street in downtown Antofagasta, and interprets these as a process of local racialization. Since the on-going arrival of migrants from the Caribbean and countries in the northern part of South America (Dominicans, Colombians, Peruvians, Bolivians,) and their increased visibility on downtown streets, practices and discourses have developed that identify these people as malevolent subjects that have made the downtown area “go bad.” Focusing the analysis on State institutions and engaging Marxist, anti-racist, critical race theory and black feminist perspectives, I posit that the "undesirable immigrant" emerges as a fetish and is converted into a commodity and an artifact exploited by some political sectors and the State itself to justify their existence and reinforce immigration policies. Practices such as the racial fencing of downtown Antofagasta are used to explain the rejection of immigrants as a tabula rasa, the symbolic and material conservation of national hegemony and performances of national order. Antofagasta's downtown area and Condell Street have become the backdrop for a process of racialization based on the fantasy of insecurity.

This paper aims to understand and explain the factors that prompted an economic powerhouse like Japan to propose a strategic alliance with Chile in 1994. The hypothesis is that Chilean financial stability in the 1990s and an opportunity for the Japanese to access the MERCOSUR economies were the factors that drove this alliance. However, the impact of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which led Japan to be replaced by China as the primary market for Latin American exports in Asia, prevented this idea from materializing as it was originally meant to. In response, a series of high-level official visits took place between the countries, which highlighted the gap between Chile’s foreign policy agenda and the interests of the country’s business sector.

The extraordinary demand for raw materials from the People's Republic of China led to an unusual increase in commodity imports. However, after the 2008 world food crisis, China favored Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as a mechanism for guaranteeing its domestic food supply. As a result, agriculture became a priority within the Going Out strategy. Despite the abrupt disembarkation of Chinese FDI into primary-extractive sectors in Argentina, the academic literature focused limited attention on the advance of Chinese capital in agriculture. This article analyzes the way in which China deployed its agricultural FDI strategy in Argentina between 2010 and 2016. A qualitative methodology is used based on a survey of Chinese initiatives in Argentina based on news coverage, academic publications and government sources. This has led to the identification of three modalities within the strategy in which investments were directed to land, to agricultural services and to the agricultural value chain.

Reseña

Integration has been studied and practiced from the centrality of the State towards supranational integration mechanisms. However, our regional reality, which is shaped by the inability of States to develop strong integration, helps explain the failure of the process. Today, integration and border studies seek to reverse the vertical relationship from the State to the local through the articulation of sub-state mechanisms such as Border and Integration Committees, which based on their characteristics, should be considered the first and most important link in the regional integration chain. We propose that small-scale mechanisms such as Border and Integration Committees have proven effective for resolving and identifying border issues and are more flexible when it comes to adapting to the changing scenarios of the regional political landscape. However, they have not reached a sufficient level of autonomy with respect to key state decisions, and as such, have not become more relevant in regard to influencing and forging a relationship with the regional process. This highlights the importance of an approach that can include civil society in paradiplomatic actions.

This text analyzes the achievements of and obstacles faced by the Border Integration and Development Committee (Comité de Integración y Desarrollo Fronterizo - CIDF) on the Chilean-Peruvian border between 2012 and 2016 as a space of cross-border consultation. The strategies deployed by the social and business world in Arica are analyzed based on interaction with key stakeholders within and outside of the CIDF. Interviews were conducted with social, economic and state actors from Arica who exhibited different attitudes regarding the border and its institutional spaces for contacts. The authors conclude that the business association linked to transport and construction is reluctant to engage in cross-border contact, while the union linked to tourism service has developed in a way that is more open to engaging with their peers in Tacna in Peru. For its part, the social world has adopted an open, integrationist outlook.

This study presents the results of research conducted on the movements and migratory processes of the Chipaya people towards the Chilean north. The main focus of the research is the situation and condition of migrants in northern Chile who come from the town of Santa Ana (Bolivia). Women and men who had lived in different locations for at least four years were interviewed using a qualitative approach. The data show that historical seasonal displacements have tended to be replaced by permanence in towns and cities. Although the subjects of the study maintain their connections to their community of origin, they have distanced themselves from the rural life and undergone a process of depeasantization and the translocalization of the community's social networks in urban spaces. The study reveals the socio-economic, socio-ethnic and cultural dynamics of one of the indigenous peoples of the Andean south that has received little attention from scholars in the 21st century.

Since its inception, Dominican immigration policy with respect to Haiti has consisted in a Janus-faced strategy. On the one hand, an increasingly repressive and discriminatory legal order that is prejudiced against Haitian immigrants and their descendents has been established. On the other, extra-institutional exceptions are routinely generated in terms of regulations in order to create an uprooted and forsaken population with a precarious political and legal status. This strategy is a concrete aspect of a political hegemony built on a racist and conservative narrative about citizenship and identity in the Dominican Republic. In order to confront this strategy and redefine Dominican democracy in terms of pluralism, it is necessary to reconfigure the citizenry as the subject of democracy. If we define democracy as the constitution of citizenship following Balibar, or rather as inclusion in a political community of peers, we can expand the horizon of the political struggles of denationalized Dominicans and migrant workers in the country.