BY SUSANNA SHARPE Sarah Lopez Migration and home, history and the built environment. The work of Sarah Lopez sits at the confluence of these themes. An assistant professor in the School of Architecture, Lopez studies cultural landscapes, exploring how the history of the built environment also … [Read more...]
The Canary in the Mine: Anti-Black Violence and the Paradox of Brazilian Democracy
BY CHRISTEN A. SMITH The Brazilian political crisis of 2016 has sent shockwaves through the nation. Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, has been accused of corruption and is facing impeachment proceedings. Millions of Brazilians have demonstrated in the streets against the … [Read more...]
Struggles and Obstacles in Indigenous Women’s Fight for Justice in Guatemala
BY IRMA ALICIA VELÁSQUEZ NIMATUJ Transitional justice refers to measures both judicial and non-judicial that are intended to redress large-scale human rights abuses. In this article, I focus on two recent cases of transitional justice in Guatemala. The first is the 2013 trial against General and … [Read more...]
LLILAS Benson and the Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Patrimony of Mexico
BY KELLY McDONOUGH One of the main attractions among the rare books and manuscripts at the Benson Latin American Collection is a group of late-sixteenth-century manuscripts and maps known as the Relaciones Geográficas (or RGs for short). As described in the Benson’s web portal to the RGs, these … [Read more...]
Where History, Science, and Coral Reef Conservation Meet: A Case Study from St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands
BY CARLOS E. RAMOS-SCHARRÓN Landscape is . . . a land shape, in which the process of shaping is by no means thought of as simply physical. —C. Sauer (The Morphology of Landscape, 1925) For Karl I am still relishing being a fashionable latecomer to the field of geography, particularly to … [Read more...]
Departing Reflections: Charles R. Hale
BY CHARLES R. HALE I take this opportunity—the last Portal produced under my directorship—to offer a few words of thanks, an expression of excitement for the future, and some reflections on the past seven years. By the time this Portal reaches your hands, Professor Virginia Garrard-Burnett will … [Read more...]
García Márquez’s Pentimenti
BY JOSÉ MONTELONGO On the morning of November 24, 2014, The New York Times published the news that The University of Texas at Austin had acquired the papers of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. A few months earlier, Stephen Enniss, director of the university’s Harry Ransom Center, and … [Read more...]
A Tale of Two Tomatoes: The Fair Food Program as a New Paradigm of Social Responsibility
ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT BY SEAN SELLERS In December, the Los Angeles Times published a searing exposé on the grinding poverty and rampant human rights abuses faced by workers in the Mexican tomato industry. Over the last decade, Mexican farm exports to the U.S. have tripled to nearly $8 billion … [Read more...]
Masculinity and Gender in Kaqchikel Sololá, Guatemala
BY RIGOBERTO AJCALÓN CHOY “The law is giving many freedoms to women,” notes an interviewee with some dismay when I ask him about the current status of indigenous women in the rural Guatemalan town of Kaqchikel Sololá. This response exemplifies men’s reactions to the slow but steady pace at which … [Read more...]
Politics or Fish? What the Normalization of Cuba–U.S. Relations Means for Food
BY SARA LAW My fieldwork and the last year of my master’s research occurred during a remarkable time in Cuban politics and Cuba–U.S. relations. On December 17, 2014, President Barack Obama announced a shift in policy toward normalizing relations between Cuba and the United States: Today, the … [Read more...]
