It would be impossible to summarize Fernando Coronil’s work in a short essay. I thus offer a few reflections here on dimensions of his work that have provided challenges to my own scholarship.

Regional elections do not usually attract international media headlines. But Sunday’s gubernatorial race in Venezuela was not a typical regional election. This was the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999 in which he was unable to actively campaign in an election.

On a cool morning in the central plaza of the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City, a group of volunteers wearing identical black t-shirts stands under a small tent. They are part of Jornaleros Safe, a project funded by several Mexican and American organizations whose members have spent the last year researching the exploitation of Latin American workers contracted for agricultural jobs in the United States.

On December 8, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez announced that his cancer has returned. Unlike past announcements, this time around Chávez publicly acknowledged that his odds of survival may not be great. Chávez took the astonishing, and quite unprecedented, step of naming a successor, foreign secretary Nicolas Maduro.