The article analyzes the conflict between the residents of Rincón de la Virgen in the department of Colonia (Uruguay) with the colonization company La Cosmopolita, which acquired state land in 1874. The purchase caused a local revolt that ended in a face up to with military and police forces. Once the conlict was over, the company had to respond to the claims made by the new settlers. From the study of this brief episode, we will seek to highlight some of the main tensions of the land disputes that characterized Uruguay in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the process of agricultural colonization, which was based on cheap public lands and immigrant labor.

The Cristero Rebellion of 1926-30 was the most important civil conflict in post-revolutionary Mexico. Many of the rebels were ethnic mestizos who rose in defence of the Catholic Church against the anticlericalism of the revolutionary regime. But these ‘Soldiers of Christ’ were joined by many members of the Indigenous Wixárika people (often known as the Huichol), famous for practicing an ethnic religion far removed from orthodox Catholicism. In this article, I argue that Wixárika support for the Rebellion was less religiously inspired and more a response to the Mexican state’s recent attempts to extend its power into their communities, in the context of long-running local territorial conflicts and more recent feuds rooted in the violence of the Revolution of 1910-20. Understanding this complex history challenges romantic popular ideas of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as somehow ‘uncorrupted’ by mainstream politics or as natural allies of “progressive” movements, and sheds light on the deep contradictions of both the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion.

This article examines the introduction of the French Decauville portable railway as part of the technological modernization of Mexican haciendas specialized on pulque and henequen. Previous research, focusing on production trends, has not paid attention to this technology that derived from a local innovation in the railroad system, and whose simplicity and affordability were determinant for its adoption in the agricultural sector. The main question we pose is the following: What features of this technology did contribute to haciendas’ specialization on pulque and henequen? In response, we argue that the creative local appropriation and adaptation of this transportation technology added significant advantages to the production-commercialization chain in both crops. The Decauville railway reduced costs and made it possible faster transportation to the market. This research is based on information from a variety of sources, such as government documents, newspapers, statistical yearbooks, bulletins, and Decauville catalogs.

Roads are social constructions shaped by material and symbolic practices, which not only organize everyday times and spaces, but also express power relations and produce solidarity and tension in communities. Based on this assumption and informed by the “mobility turn”, the proposal examines uses, customs and conflicts around rural roads in the province of Buenos Aires between the 1920s and 1960s, combining the investigation of the state sphere and the social subjects’ practices. From a social perspective, and using a variety of documentary sources (legislation, press, government acts and reports of road congresses), it seeks, on the one hand, to characterize the road panorama and identify its regulatory framework. On the other hand, it analyzes a series of documentary references that show inconveniences and transgressions to land use planning and transit in rural areas. The evidence reveals the existence of litigation associated with the varied forms of layout, use and maintenance of roads, which adds complexity and contradicts certain current historiographical notions.

This article discusses the role of transnational actors of German descent in the development of the agricultural sector in Chile, by examining the trajectory of the “Asociación de Agricultores Dr. Bertram Kalt”, in the 1950s and 1960s. This singular institution worked primarily in the realm of scientific and technological diffusion, within a context of demands for structural changes in the countryside. It also contributed to re-establish relations between West Germany and Chile after the Second World War, when transnational agents sought to restore German global leadership. Thus, the association was a transnational intermediary, serving both Chilean and German interests. The main sources employed in this paper are the association’s annual reports, which have not been previously used in historiographic research.

The article analyzes the communal restructuring policy of the Agrarian Reform Law, promoted by the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado, in a historic community located in the highlands of Lima, Lachaqui. Using the perspective of the decentralized state and understanding development as a tool for state subjection, the interaction and negotiations between private and public intermediaries and populations are examined. To this end, in-depth interviews and documents collected in the community and in Lima in 2018 are used. The main argument is that the government sought a modern, collectivist and productive community, based on the claim that the community was the sole owner of the land, without understanding its dynamism or diversity and the permanent tension between the family and the collective. The policy produced significant conflict over access to land in the community, between a sector that supported the measure and another sector that defended their right to individual property. The research contributes to the discussion on agrarian reform in the communities based on a state policy that is little studied, but which is important because it sought to reform them. In this sense, it gives an account of the local impact of the agrarian reform in relation to state objectives, showing how the state operates and is (re)affirmed in people’s daily lives, as well as its reformulation by them.