In this essay I examine how the Torre Latinoamericana, constructed between 1948 and 1956, was represented through a modern-historic discourse, how it transformed urban space in Mexico City, and what forms of technology were used in the construction. I demonstrate how the Torre Latinoamericana was both material evidence of progress (modernity) and a metaphor for Mexican aspirations of modernity. I use the “modernist sensibility” of the Mexican Miracle as a lens through which the architecture and technology of the Torre Latinoamericana may be seen as part of the modernist project prevalent in Mexico during the 1950s. “Modernist sensibility” refers to framing the building within cultural history that concerns itself with the creation and registration of affect within the Mexican modernist discourse. I examine the Torre Latinoamericana through various forms of media – newspapers, photographs, film, tourist pamphlets and engineering journals—which generated the discursive construction of the highway and justified its material existence. This study explores how the building's sophisticated construction materials represented abstract concepts such as modernity, progress, and technology. This study shows how the Torre Latinoamericana served as a sign of progress, and a discourse of progress, thus projecting a vision as to where Mexico was headed as a nation and society in the 1950s–60s. By showing that the Torre Latinoamericana was transformed into a symbol of national pride and identity, this research highlights the importance of investigating material culture, in this case architecture, and the affects of such in the production of national discourse.

Bolivia's current TIPNIS (Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure) crisis has highlighted the diverse and often conflicting interpretations and applications of indigenous rights and environmental rights and how these have impacted the goals and structures of governance of the MAS party and the indigenous-based presidency of Evo Morales. Special attention will be given to environmental concerns as a core, but clearly contested, element of national development and the defense of Bolivian sovereignty. In the struggle over the construction of the road through the Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park, which sought to link Bolivia and Brazil and ultimately provide land-locked Bolivia more ready access to the Pacific, social movements have been marshaled and mobilized both for and against the government's project. What has this meant for Bolivia's populist and social-movement-based democracy? Has this rainforest crisis been another example of an “overdose of democracy,” a condition that appears to have dogged the Morales presidencies? This paper seeks to explore these, and related issues.

The study of natural disasters and their effects on the societies afflicted has increased during the last decades. The analysis of such instances of crisis created by these natural events has served to understand unusual patterns of political, economic, social, and cultural performance that traditional historiography has been unable to explain. Richard Olson (2000) emphasizes the relationship between disaster and politics. He states that a disaster can easily become a political crisis because of the increase of demands on the political system, and the complexity of such demands. The 1687 earthquake of Lima provides a case study to evaluate these ideas because the chaos and destruction of the city required the immediate attention of both the civil and religious authorities, who were supposed to respond to the material and spiritual needs of the population. In this particular case, it is possible to observe a quick, organized and positive response from the royal officials which contrasts with the segregated and even elusive response of the ecclesiastical institutions. This post-disaster situation clearly differs with the traditional images of a strong Church and a weak colonial regime that is usually associated with the late seventeenth – century Spanish Empire.