Objective/context: This article examines the household fuel crisis in Bogot & aacute;, specifically the cocinol (a low-cost, petroleum-derived liquid fuel) crisis, during the 1970s and 1980s to demonstrate how domestic energy provision became a battleground of political contestation intertwined with gender. It shows how various actors-organized women, opposition politicians, and technocrats (some linked to the state)-mobilized the figure of the housewife in their discourses to define responsibilities for access to, use of, and the transformation of energy sources in the city's popular neighborhoods. Methodology: The research combines historical and qualitative analyses of documents from the Ministry of Mines and Energy, debates in the Bogot & aacute; City Council, press coverage, educational materials, and archival records from community organizations. Originality: Exploring this case allows for the incorporation of a gender perspective to analyze the discourses produced regarding the main mobilization actions related to the demand for solutions to the energy needs of low-income households in the second half of the twentieth century. Conclusions: The supply of a highly flammable fuel was part of a state policy aimed at providing domestic energy to the most excluded sectors of the urban population; however, its use and distribution ultimately shaped a landscape of political contesta-tion over the country's energy policies, domestic work, and responsibility for urban inequalities.
Objective/context: Historiography has established an inextricable link between the globalization of clocks and the worldwide expansion of the Society of Jesus. Based on the positive results obtained in the Far East through the gift of these machines, historians have dated the beginning of this phenomenon to the second half of the sixteenth century, tracing a route on the world map from Europe to China and Japan. This has implied that the Jesuits were clockmakers and that the Eastern empires were familiar with these mechanisms before the New World. The lack of studies on the Spanish viceroyalties led to the assumption that, in fact, they were introduced later and through the Church, extrapolating the Jesuit experience from the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western Hemisphere. This study aims to balance this historiography by specifying the number of Jesuit clockmakers worldwide and assessing their role in the globalization of clocks. Methodology: As much literature as possible on the Jesuits and clockmaking has been compiled for comparison with Spanish-American sources from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Originality: This work makes a valuable contribution to the study of the global history of the Society of Jesus, science, and technology by demonstrating how clocks circulated among the New World, China, and Japan and by assessing the Jesuits' role in each hemisphere. Conclusions: This article revises the timeline and map of the globalization of clocks. Contrary to the prevailing historiographical consensus, this technology did not first leave Europe for the Far East around 1550. Rather, it departed from Spain via the Atlantic route in the early sixteenth century. In the New World, clocks were introduced as administrative tools decades before the Society of Jesus or the Church adopted them. In China and Japan, the Jesuits offered them as diplomatic gifts to spread Christianity, initially relying on an Indigenous clockmaker from the Canary Islands whose journey to Zhaoqing provides clues about other key actors in understanding the global phenomenon of the clock.
Objective/context: In this article, I analyze the six lesbian marches held in Mexico City between 2003 and 2013. To do so, I explain how these marches enabled the lesbian movement to persist in the post-Cold War context, challenged the district government's actions on LGBT rights, and drew criticism of feminists' approach, as well as of the sexual diversity movement, toward formal government institutions. Methodology: This research examines newspaper and documentary sources from the historical archive of Prensa Editorial LeSVOZ, whose owners were the primary organizers of the lesbian marches. The collection includes documents from the Lesbian March Organizing Committee, pamphlets, letters, and magazine articles. These materials reconstruct the origins, evolution, and continuities of the lesbian marches in relation to feminist activism, LGBT groups, and Mexico City government institutions. Originality: I examine acts of protest that contribute to knowledge in the fields of sexual diversity and feminism. I also review a broad but little-known historical archive that enables the study of novel organizational and political processes within a periodization framework that is scarcely addressed in existing historiography. Conclusions: The six lesbian marches reshaped the protest actions of lesbian feminism during the PAN's two six-year terms (2000-2012) by opposing the rise in femicides and widespread violence in the country. They also strengthened a lesbian separatist agenda by creating a march exclusively for women and by demanding specific rights as lesbians.
Objective/context: Although Colombia and Mexico did not experience military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s, they, like most Latin American countries, did experience counterinsurgency violence stemming from political and ideological conflicts rooted in the Cold War. In the absence of institutional breakdowns, such as military coups, establishing socially accepted frameworks to distinguish this cycle of state violence from others is challenging. This article aims to analyze how the Colombian (2022) and Mexican (2024) truth commissions periodize violence in their recent histories. Methodology: We examined the reports of these two commissions comparatively and focused on how the boundaries, milestones, and temporal rhythms that distinguish the period of counterinsurgency violence from other periods are delineated. Originality: Our contribution lies in identifying the role that periodizations proposed in these transitional narratives play in the historical characterization and interpretation of counterinsurgency. Furthermore, we investigate how the reports establish-or fail to establish-a distance between a past in which the state was a protagonist in human rights violations and a present in which it proposes to serve as a guarantor of peace, justice, and reparations. Conclusions: In the Colombian report, counterinsurgency violence is situated within a longer period, encompassing layers of political conflict and conflict linked to organized crime, whereas in the Mexican report, it appears as a distinct period, temporally inscribed within the counterinsurgency cycle that swept across the continent. The boundaries between a before and an after are clearly established in the Mexican case but remain porous in the Colombian one. Finally, their periodizations shape different strategies for understanding the politics of time: Colombia's approach focuses on historicizing peace and democratization efforts in the face of persistent violence, while Mexico's aims to acknowledge the long-standing presence of state violence.
Objective/context: This article reconstructs the private provision of military clothing in Colombia between 1896 and 1942, aiming to demonstrate its usefulness for understanding state-building. To this end, it shows how the incorporation of civilian settings into the military structure transformed the military budget into war capabilities during a period of consolidation of the professional armed forces and the emergence of industrial production. Methodology: The research reconstructed a database of 1,755 contracts between the Colombian state and a plurality of private actors, extracted from the annexes of 17 reports submitted by the Ministry of War between 1898 and 1942. Values were standardized to constant 1923 prices using the price index of Maria del Pilar L & oacute;pez-Uribe, and units were converted to meters and pieces. Descriptive statistics, time-series analysis, and network analysis were applied to the corpus. Originality: The analysis examines military spending through individual contracts, showing how the interaction between public employees and private businesses transformed the budget into concrete military capabilities. Women played a prominent role in this process: their entry into the market for military clothing led them from home sewing to selling manufactured goods, prompting a broader historiography on the armed forces and state-building. Conclusions: This article shows how approaches to the contracting state and militarization offer analytical perspectives for studying the complex and multifaceted state-building process in Colombia.
