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

The purpose of this article is to address the transformations in the valued attributes of workers, through the analysis of policies based on labor competencies.The hypothesis is that the competences paradigm facilitates the implementation of individualized work management models, in which soft skills take relevance. These management modalities displace unions from participating in the definition of valued attributes. We will use a qualitative methodology. The data sources were documents from national and international organizations in charge of implementing labor competencies policies in Argentina, and collective labor agreements in the automotive sector. In addition, in-depth interviews were used with workers and group leaders from a Japanese automotive terminal.

This essay tries to answer the following questions: how and under what conditions do social actors become citizens? And how does the principle of citizenship work among different groups? Through a qualitative and ethnographic methodology focused on the stories of sixty neighborhood leaders in a Chilean commune, we propose 1) citizenship as a series of links between society and the State, in which meanings are daily constructed around social inclusion and exclusion, which are brought into play in face-to-face contacts through differentially distributed resources, skills and capacities; 2) sociopolitical ties beyond the absolute distinction between clientelist and contestatory actors to analyze their similarities and differences.

This article presents an account of the memory an historic experience of the Wampis people through different political regimes that have tried to influence and intervene in the governance of the ancestral territory. It wants to offer a vision of their interaction with these regimes, taking as a startpoint their collective memory. The article collects some of the central characteristics of the Wampis’ experience in handling and defending their territory facing the institutional changes that are lived in the high Amazon. So, the article takes into account the problems related to the intensification of the influence of the national Peruvian state and the trade pressure that tries to make deep changes in the territory, due to the extension of legal and illegal border economies, as well as demographic changes. Then, the article shows the response of Wampis, which conforms their proposal of an autonomous territorial government.

One of the most important changes in the global mining industry has been the demise of the «mining town» model. For more than two decades it has been replaced by a «hotel» model, in which workers sleep while in the camp, leaving their families far from the mining settlement for several days. This article has three objectives. First, to put this transformation in the broader context of changes in the Latin American mining industry. Second, to summarize, based on my previous research, the ways this system has undermined the traditional strategies of Peruvian mining unions. Finally, to argue that, despite these transformations, workers are not merely passive actors in the new settings, but rather they have developed new forms of action, albeit with variations depending on the local and national contexts in which they occur.

The indigenous presence in Ecuador is not confined to street demonstrations. From local to national, organized Indians have made proposals that they hope will affect decisions that are taken without consulting them. In order to reflect and appreciate their approaches, I will make a brief tour of the image they express of the nation as a representation, without neglecting the question of racism. I am interested in questioning the idea of modernity as alien to indigenous people, to consider the democracy that characterizes our societies is exclusionary and, finally, approach female militancy to understand the opinions expressed by those who feel a fundamental part of a political structure such as the CONAIE.

Explorer and writer Alexandra David Neel is known first and foremost for her adventures in and travel stories about Tibet. The lengthy correspondence she maintained with her husband Philippe Neel was published posthumously. These letters, which are unmistakably unique, were the only link between the couple throughout their thirty-seven years of marriage. The present study focuses on the difficult early stages of this union, namely the years from 1904 to 1911 – a time when their matrimonial relationship quickly became a mere epistolary connection. This marriage, at first deemed a “folly” by this feminist turned out to be a great opportunity and marked the onset of a new life for Alexandra. Indeed, those first letters walk the reader through a remarkable example of individual transcendence but, even more importantly, they reveal the argumentative strategy deployed by the woman writer to convince her husband to let her trace her own path. The persuasiveness of this amazing woman eventually led her husband to offer her what she longed for deep down inside: traveling to a faraway land to nurture her writing creativity

Quatrevingt-treize is written in an urgent way in the aftermath of the defeat of France against the Prussian army. The inspiration of Hugo’s last novel is an observation of immense national distress. Hugo postponed other literary projects to grant his readership a hope for a better future. This future is symbolized by a number of characters, who mostly look vulnerable, but around which the plot is knotted and interpreted. Those are not warriors, but three children, two women, and an old man, who will inspire the male protagonists of the story. In his last no­vel, Hugo condemns all forms of absolute power. He denounces the Terror of the Revolution, the period of the Commune and all the crimes committed by the Old Regime. In this testamentary literary work, the forces of evil and their violent shades largely exist. However, for him, only the peace will make hope for people after war. Accordingly, for the peace to achieve triumph, there must be other forces that face violence. Thus, such forces that can achieve the triumph are the forces of good. This article aims to show the effectiveness of these forces against the forces of evil

The presence of the epistolary material in Marguerite Duras’s literary work evolves from its canonical definition as a means of communication to its progressive problematization. In Aurélia Steiner (1979) the letter becomes the enunciation device of the narrative to materialize its destruction: the epistolary sender becomes an I emptied of ipseity who writes to an impossible addressee. Both the call-invocation of the absent and the identity search fail. After this literary limit-experience, the epistolary material revives in the autobiographical space to generate its hybridization: with direct dialogue style in L'Homme atlantique and with narrative in Yann Andréa Steiner