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

This study inquires into the rewards that political militancy generated in the development of young people’s trajectories in political party organizations in the city of Resistencia (Chaco, Argentina) in the period 2012-2017. We present partial results of a broader project that applied a qualitative approach to reconstruct trajectories of militancy from the actors’ perspectives. Our first task was to identify what it was that they actually received, how they received it, and how it made them feel as material or symbolic rewards. We understood that the rewards operated in a circuit that defined what the organized parties could offer their members and outlined a horizon of expectations and aspirations. Our study contributes to conceiving rewards as elements that make it possible to unravel processes of professionalization that result from political participation, processes that can have distinct destinations, from a career in the heights of political power to lower-impact grassroots activism. It also reveals the types of rewards most closely-linked to the reproduction of the division of political labor inside political parties. The essay thus constitutes a contribution to the study of such important topics as young people in politics, political militancy, and party structures; that is, to our knowledge of political dynamics in sub-national contexts.

This study was conducted with the following objectives: a) to characterize the weakest actors in the productive chain in the citrus-growing region of Nuevo León by locating them in a scheme that represents the processes involved; b) to analyze this sector based on real production, information generated by the actors through an analysis of focal groups and the creation of a model designed to present responses on their fragility; and c) to establish mechanisms of incorporation into the agroindustrial sector by resolving the daily problematics that producers face. We began by interviewing 156 citrus producers using the theoretical focus called Localized Agroalimentary System (LAAS), strengthened by integrating qualitative and quantitative methods and considering the historical context. The information gathered through fieldwork allowed us to identify the producers and insert them into typologies created on the basis of similarities and differences, among other factors. The next step consisted in constructing a strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats matrix that represented adverse or problematic situations and potential options for reinforcing the productive chain. This allowed us to generate an alternative model that would transform producers into strategic actors with a greater capacity for self-management and innovation in their orchards. Through a focus on regional analysis and specific resources, we obtained a typology of producers that emphasizes associative strategies, agroindustrial linkages, proposals for transforming intermediaries into system negotiators, the generation of risk management measures in decision-making, and a prospective alliance.

Mexico’s national economic model must include a principle that obliges the state to take indigenous municipalities into account in national planning in order to avoid situations that negatively impact the lives of their inhabitants, such as increases in public municipal government debt, while simultaneously guaranteeing access to a dignified life and the maximum enjoyment of their human rights. To justify this, we analyze the context of the indigenous municipalities of the state of Chiapas and the challenges that arise from the economic model. Finally, we propose promoting the participation of indigenous peoples and communities in economic decision-making through an intercultural constitutional economic model.

This paper analyses the dynamics of poverty in Mexico from 2002 to 2012 based on the results of Mexico’s National Survey of the Quality of Life in Homes (Encuesta Nacional sobre el Nivel de Vida de los Hogares). Our objectives were, first, to determine the principal differences between the categories of chronic and transient poverty and, second, analyze two key issues: which social groups are found mainly in one category situation or the other; and the influence of work, social policy, and sociodemographic characteristics on people’s ability to transcend poverty. We used a multinomial logistic regression model to explore the relation between trajectories of poverty and the independent variables selected in order to estimate the specific influence of each variable on those trajectories. The main findings reveal significant differences between the chronic and transient poor in the study period, and that the factors of social class and work in the formal economy carry greater weight for the transient poor than social policy and the other sociodemographic characteristics pondered. The paper ends with some recommendations for social policy based on our analysis.  

Political clientelism is a phenomenon that has been widely researched due to its prevalence and importance; however, analyses from a gender perspective have received scarce attention. The aim of this article is to reinterpret clientelist dynamics in light of feminist theory, using gender as an analytical category to make the resulting power relations between men and women visible. The text begins with a literature review, followed by a theoretical and conceptual analysis of clientelism. The third part presents an analysis of political clientelism from the perspective of feminist theory in relation to the Mexican context. As a main result, feminist theory is identified as a useful tool for understanding the role of women in clientelist dynamics. The study reveals that this has been determined by gender roles and stereotypes that foster increasing inequality and, often, women’s subordination in the political arena. Finally, we propose the concept of the “political subsidy of gender”.

This essay analyzes the principal characteristics of the VW-AG’s corporate structure and its effects on working conditions at its Mexican subsidiary. The main thesis is that the representatives of German workers in the company’s governing bodies influence factory citizenship in the Mexican installations through a process that begins with a dialogue between trade unionists in both countries that IG Metall promotes in the corporate structure, and whose decisions are operationalized at the local level. The profit strategies adopted by management, chosen by its decision-making bodies, have impacted the bridges of cooperation between the corporation’s different labor unions. The analysis of the relations between the productive and labor spheres and the articulation between the international and local domains form the central contribution of the paper. Research included reviewing German labor legislation, official documents from the transnational corporation, collective labor contracts, and the union statutes at the factory in Puebla, as well as interviews with Mexican and German trade unionists.

This article analyzes the extraction of water for beer production and the relative weight of this activity in the regional economy of Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, with an emphasis on water consumption, the principal ingredient of that beverage. Based on statistics from CONAGUA (Mexico’s National Water Commission) and Economic Censuses, the water consumption of several industrial companies is analyzed through the construction of indicators of concentration and dispersion using the shift and share technique to identify the economic impact of water consumption on the regional economy. Results show that the two main water consuming industries, beer and steel production, play fundamental roles in that economy.  

This essay presents a theoretical reflection on the ways in which data are constructed in handwriting studies in the field of documentology. It takes as references the main proposals of authors in Spanish-speaking areas, especially one from Argentina. The approach to these texts is from a historicist perspective that emphasizes the inferential processes involved in handwriting analysis and a dialogue with consolidated patterns. The reconstruction of the graphic features of handwriting –its individualizing aspect– implies a dialectic instance among diverse processes of inference. Abduction plays a fundamental role in this context by making it possible to decode the unique features of graphism and, in this way, construct a datum inserted into a data matrix system. The study of a document traverses various levels of integration in the construction of categories of analysis, a process through which guidelines are discovered, validated, innovated, and applied during movement from a hermeneutic to an objective datum that makes it possible to explore, describe, and explain.

The scientific discipline of urban history studies the construction and transformation of cities, topics that bring together urban studies from several disciplines, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Far from elaborating narrative syntheses of the history of cities, this field has produced specialized, monothematic, descriptive works on urban development. Given this lack of one, clearly defined, object of study, the city has been examined as an inert space through which history is seen to transpire from a scenographic perspective. Studies of this kind are well-known in Mexico, where a formula that aligns the nation’s cities with key periods of national political history continues to be produced. However, in the specific case of Nayarit, recent historiographic production has revealed this urban history in a more immediate way and from the local perspective. This article aims, precisely, to identify and characterize the publications that have expounded part of the urban historiography of Nayarit in the last three decades. Through an extensive bibliographic search and review, numerous studies published in books, articles, and theses have been systematized and categorized according to their object of study, level of analysis, and disciplinary field, in order to appreciate distinct approaches and disciplinary interpretations in the study of cities in Nayarit and, on that basis, elaborate an analysis of the production of this urban history.

This article analyzes the practices of justice performed by state agents during oral criminal trials in an effort to elucidate the role played by the juridical sensibilities of the traditional penal system in interpretations of the laws and principles of the accusatory penal system and their influence in constructing juridical facts. The penal system is observed from a sociocultural perspective using a methodology based on ethnographic fieldwork. The study was carried out in the criminal courts of the judicial district of Querétaro, Mexico. The article is divided into three sections. The first outlines the process of implementing penal reform, while the second and third present the sociocultural analysis of the oral hearings witnessed.