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

This article deals with the inherited ideas from the romanistic and patristic tradition that contributed to the medieval formulation of women’s infirmitas or fragility. A long-term analysis is presented in which it is explored how the infirmitas discourses were reflected in legal compilations of Castilla in the form of restrictions on women’s capacity to act, prohibitions on the exercise and enjoyment of public offices and the articulation of legal figures tending to protect the supposed fragility of her body and mind, both in the civil and criminal spheres. This formal, theoretical perspective, closes with a critical approach to the data on women’s participation in Ancient Regime Castilian courts.

This paper will analyze the presence of women in the sanctuaries of Galicia from the government and administration of their temples to the festive space generated after the religious celebrations, in the atriums, festival fields, oak groves or poplar groves, understood as recreational spaces not free of conflict.

Faced with the Mexican State’s notoriously weak efforts to search for, find, and identify the tens of thousands of missing persons (personas desaparecidas) in the country, the relatives of those people have formed diverse organizations to lead search efforts. One of the recurring activities they carry out consists in organizing collective religious ceremonies. Adopting a sociocultural perspective, this study analyzes how one group of the relatives of missing persons and members of the Catholic Church in Coahuila, Mexico, are conducting religious ceremonies as part of their public strategy for demanding justice. We found that this group has modified, and intervenes in, religious ceremonies, introducing meanings, symbols, and activities related to the disappearance of their loved ones, including public denouncements and demands for searches and justice. Both the relatives of these missing persons and the religious actors include in their ceremonies the civil meanings of denouncement and State responsibility related to the pressing problem of missing persons, accompanied by demands that state institutions search for them. This civil demand is manifested in diverse forms of imbrication or tension with non-civil meanings that revolve around concepts like mercy, penitence, affective bonds, and fulfilling religious precepts. Producing these religious performances provides a privileged moment for the construction of meaning around a problem that affects over 90,000 families in Mexico. The many distinct narratives erected around the disappearance of persons, framed in distinct civil and religious meanings, constitute a cultural base for diverse social actions related to this phenomenon

Since at least 2006, Mexico has been immersed in a tornado of violence as a result of the frontal combat against criminal organizations launched and orchestrated by former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). This context of confrontation has led to the emergence of cultural forms and social representations that result from the security crisis that has ravaged the country, especially in states like Nayarit. At the local level, it was against this backdrop that drug-trafficking and narcoculture gained visibility, triggering a series of social problems that have severely disrupted the lives of residents of the capital city of Tepic (tepicenses). The objective of this text is to identify the content of the social representations that a group of young people from Tepic and its metropolitan area, Xalisco, has built around these two objects of representation: drug-trafficking and drug culture in Nayarit. Results show that this local knowledge, re-elaborated as a consequence of the security crisis that affected Nayarit between 2010 and 2012, is clearly evidenced in the discourses of the young people studied, which reveal a marked polarization in relation to these two problems. Our interpretation is that the unprecedented wave of violence in the state marked a breaking point in collective thought regarding drug-trafficking and drug culture, such that the construction of their representations has led to the development of divergent positions that range in valence from positive to negative. Finally, our approach allowed us to identify the relation that exists between these two social objects and to characterize two little-explored problems in Nayarit.

Young wage-workers in Mexico face more precarious employment conditions than adult wage-earners. Precarious jobs are those defined as uncertain, risky, and unpredictable for workers. From 1995 to 2019, Mexico’s labor market underwent several transformations and was impacted by three economic crises, generating the questions of how the trajectory of young workers has differed from that of their adult counterparts and how economic growth has differentially affected the labor precarity of these two age groups. Data to answer these questions are from the National Employment Census (Encuesta Nacional de Empleo, ENE, 1994-2004) and National Occupation and Employment Census (Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo, ENOE, 2005-2019), administered by the INEGI. A ‘precarious employment index’ is calculated for each year for the young and adult groups of wage-earners. The elasticity of this index due to an increase in real GDP is also estimated for both groups. Differences by sex and level of education are explored throughout the analysis.

The study of investigative journalism as a specific type of informative work in the field of communications, requires a much broader and deeper theoretical-conceptual review that considers analyzing the phenomenon in light of other disciplines in the Social Sciences, within which this professional practice is produced and reproduced, fields that include Sociology, Political Science, and History. Given this orientation, the objective of this text is to offer an account of this practice and its relation to political power in democratic systems from an interdisciplinary perspective that makes it possible to explain how this activity has been studied in approaches that proceed from other latitudes, languages, and contexts.