Mexican Conservatives, Clericals, and Soldiers: the 'Traitor' Tomás Mejía through Reform and Empire, 1855–1867

General Tomás Mejía (1820–67) became a leading Mexican opponent of the Liberal Reform Movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Originating from the Querétaro Sierra Gorda, where for twenty years he had a strong power base, he took his stand in defence of the Catholic religion. A devotee of the local cult of the Virgin of the Pueblito, Mejía cooperated first with the Conservative Party and subsequently with the Second Mexican Empire (1862–67). Beween 1864 and 1866, he became the Empire's principal military commander. Juárez had him shot, along with Maximilian, when the Empire fell. Triumphant Liberals blotted out his name from the history of the nineteenth century. Mejía defended an alternative, Catholic vision of Mexico to the Liberal secular state and its Revolutionary successor.     

‘A Sick,Weak, and Ignorant People’: Public Health Education and Prevention in Rural Colombia, 1930–1940

This article analyses Salud y Sanidad (Health and Sanitation), a government journal edited in 1930s Colombia. It examines the state's model of public health, which proposed education and prevention as strategies to guarantee the success of its programmes. It argues that despite the journal's more progressive approaches, editors and contributors reproduced stereotypes about Colombia's rural inhabitants that contradicted state rhetoric and showed the limits of public health models that do not address the underlying social inequities that drive the propagation of poverty and disease in rural areas, and that ultimately continued to blame victims for their illness and misfortune     

Aquí en el Ghetto: Hip‐hop in Colombia,Cuba, and Mexico

Hip‐hop music has become an important tool worldwide for poor, marginalized youth to reflect on their lived experiences. This article traces the genre's production from its spontaneous origins in the urban ghettos of New York to its commoditization for global consumption and its evolution in three different Latin American settings: Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. The article explores how hip‐hop has been appropriated in each country and has been used to express the performers’ reflections on social, political, and economic problems. It also looks at the interplay between the homogenizing tendencies of global hip‐hop and its local reception.