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The journal publishes original manuscripts that address Latin America and the Caribbean from any of the disciplinary approaches of the social sciences and humanities. Researchers from all over the world are welcome to submit their manuscripts, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

A Tale of Tailings: The Origins of the Argentine Vice Presidency

By Ariel Sribman Mittelman, Stockholm University, Sweden

Throughout the independent history of Latin America, and especially during the decades after the Third Wave of democratization, the vice presidency has manifested itself as an institution of great political relevance. However, the knowledge about the origins of this office is startlingly scarce, and usually limited to the idea that it was modeled after the Philadelphia Constitution of 1787. There is actually much more to its genesis than that, and within that territory lie the keys to understand the current performance of this office. But that history has never been investigated thus far. This article aims to fill that gap in the literature for the Argentine case, enriching the scrawny reference to imitation with a fourfold argument based on the following elements: the growing trend towards receiving foreign influences through the period 1810–1853; the growing influence of the United States, which will be evident in the 1853 text and even more so in its reform of 1860; the little importance given to the presidential succession (both in Argentina and in the United States); the haste with which the Constitution of 1853 was written.

Urban Shrinkage and Suburbanization in Mexico: A View Based on the Last Census Data, by Simone Di Pietro, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany

The management of Latin American urbanization processes requires constant monitoring of urban dynamics and their particular characteristics. The aim of this work is to provide a macro-view of the dynamics of urbanization in Mexico through the analysis of urban shrinkage and suburbanization processes. The applied methodology is based on the identification of demographic variations at the municipal level using as sources the census data produced by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) from 1990 to 2020. Although the main causes and the differences between urban dynamics remain to be investigated more specifically, it is concluded that urban shrinkage and suburbanization are both decreasing phenomena in Mexico. Twenty-nine shrinking cities of Mexico are identified in the thirty-year period 1990–2020 and the ten-year demographic variations of the metropolitan municipalities are analyzed, detecting an ongoing catch-up trend among the growth rates of the central and peripheral metropolitan municipalities. This last is unlikely to occur; however, the trend indicates an ongoing stabilization of urbanization processes in Mexico after the boom of the 1990s .