In the democratic cosmology of Brazil's MST landless movement, a meeting must occur before a decision can be reached—even if the decision was set before the meeting. I examine MST speech habits in an effort to understand the meeting as a symptomatically modern method for producing authoritative discourse. I identify four properties of MST meeting speech: (1) a lexicon that highlights verbs of speech, (2) the enforcement of tight semantic linkages between utterances, (3) the equal availability of one speech act to all participants, and (4) the generation of a distinctive species of collective voicing. By virtue of these properties, the meeting becomes a crucial site for the construction of equality and participation as political values. It is these values that are ultimately in play when a speaker mobilizes other people's words to make—or prevent—a decision.

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<p>Originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Havana in 1939 and first published in 1940, this text is a classic of Latin American anthropology and a key statement on racial and cultural mixture in the Americas. Following the tradition of the Latin American essays of national interpretation, Fernando Ortiz discusses the social and cultural bases of Cuban nationhood. He distinguishes <em>cubanidad—</em>Cuba's unique culture—from <em>cubanía—</em>the consciousness and attachment to that culture—and argues that the latter first emerged among Black and poor Cubans. As for cubanidad, he defines it as both the process and the ever-changing results of the mixture of uprooted cultural elements coming from different world areas, especially Europe and Africa. He interprets Cuban culture as a permanent flow, located in "the complex process of its very formation, disintegrative and integrative." Ortiz describes cubanidad through the metaphor of the <em>ajiaco</em>, a stew that never stops cooking because the multifarious ingredients that compose it are constantly renewed, mixing with each other and dissolving into a broth. The text discusses the cultural contributions of the different groups that moved to Cuba and interprets Cuban history as based on violent processes of migration, exploitation, and conflict.</p>