BY LUIS E. CÁRCAMO-HUECHANTE Leer en español It was the winter of 1979. I was already in my fourth year of high school in Valdivia, in southern Chile, when my literature teacher surprised my class by bringing in a record player. As she turned it on, a singular voice came out, with an accent … [Read more...]
Mexico in Times of Violence and Impunity: Legal and Forensic Anthropology in Support of Human Rights
BY AÍDA HERNÁNDEZ CASTILLO Leer en español Mexico is engulfed in a human rights crisis. The current atmosphere of violence and impunity implies new challenges for social anthropology and, more specifically, legal anthropology. Long-term fieldwork in regions affected by violence involves … [Read more...]
Poverty Tourism: From 18th-Century London to 21st-Century Rio de Janeiro
BY BIANCA FREIRE-MEDEIROS July 31, 2015. O Dia, one of Brazil’s major newspapers, announces that residents from three favelas in Rio de Janeiro are offering a package of “tourism experiences” for visitors interested in an authentic “cultural exchange”: the Favelando entre as Favelas tour. The … [Read more...]
Reading the First Books: Colonial Mexican Documents in the Digital Age
BY HANNAH ALPERT-ABRAMS AND MARIA VICTORIA FERNANDEZ In 1595, in Mexico City, the Jesuit priest Antonio del Rincón (1555–1601) published a grammatical description of the Nahuatl language. Though other grammars of Nahuatl existed, Rincón’s Arte mexicana was the first to describe the indigenous … [Read more...]
Love, Cacao, and Chocolate’s Mesoamerican Origins
By PILAR ZAZUETA No other Western holiday is more closely identified with chocolate than Valentine’s Day. The seasonal aisles in stores and supermarkets are filled with chocolate, and food companies spend vast sums of advertising dollars trying to persuade us to celebrate by consuming it in large … [Read more...]
“We Will All Look Like This Someday”: Santa Muerte in Mexico City
BY KATHRYN McDONALD Over the past decade, La Santa Muerte, an unofficial Mexican skeletal saint, has prompted the curiosity of journalists, law enforcement, and popular culture in the United States and Mexico. The dramatic cover of journalist Michael Deibert’s book, In the Shadow of … [Read more...]
Rethinking Maya Studies: A Conversation with Ruud van Akkeren
BY SUSANNA SHARPE It is hard not to feel moved when talking to Ruud van Akkeren about his research. In such a conversation, it quickly becomes clear that Van Akkeren has his own nuanced, and possibly revolutionary, way of understanding Maya past and present in Guatemala, and that he doesn’t … [Read more...]
Derechos en Crisis: A Conference at the Frontier of Activism and Scholarship
BY RUTH ELIZABETH VELÁSQUEZ ESTRADA We became conscious of the right to have rights and of the right to belong to an organized community only when millions of people had lost their rights, and could no longer recuperate them. —Agustín Estrada Negrete, political asylee and immigrant rights … [Read more...]
Archiving Human Rights Documentation: The Promise of the Post-Custodial Approach in Latin America
BY THERESA E. POLK Guatemala’s internal armed conflict was brutal by all accounts, and justice for human rights violations has been notoriously difficult to attain in its wake. Yet there have also been some critical milestones, including convictions in 2010 for the forced disappearance of labor … [Read more...]
Transitory Ghosts: Haitians and Dominico-Haitians in Santo Domingo
STUDENT RESEARCH: CITIZENSHIP AND LIMBO IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC BY JOSÉ RUBIO-ZEPEDA “I’m a nobody in my own country.” These are the words spoken by Juliana Deguis Pierre, a Dominican woman who made national headlines in the Dominican Republic after being denied Dominican citizenship … [Read more...]
