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Inequality
Read the Spring 2025 issue
Recent Articles
The Opacity of Cuba’s La Habana Vieja
On a recent trip to Havana, two fellow visitors reminded me what it feels like to encounter the Cuban city for the first time and to become enamored with its paradoxes. The first, a young Kansan woman in my Airbnb, learning that I study Cuban architecture and urbanism, expressed a familiar curiosity about the dramatic contrast between austere 19th century mansions, colonial palaces and the surrounding blocks of ruinous buildings. The second, a Berliner, shared ceviche with me on a restaurant balcony overlooking a street bustling with tourists and art vendors. He pointed out with a laugh that our utensils came from Air France first class.
Extractivism and Colonialism in Argentina: A View from the Patagonia
It was snowing the day in early August when I arrived at Lof Pillan Mahuiza, a Mapuche-Tehuelche community around 60 miles from Esquel, the provincial capital of Chubut, Argentina.
A Review of Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq
Scott’s Wallace’s Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq is really several books at once that cohere into a magnificent whole. It is the evocative, at times nostalgic, at others harrowing, personal account of a young journalist’s coming of age during his first foreign journalism assignment, always keenly observant and thoughtful. But it also offers a carefully developed analysis of the nature of U.S. foreign policy, at least in those poorer parts of the world where it has intervened militarily or more clandestinely, or heavily supported the wars waged by its clients. Wallace has witnessed these wars both earlier and later in his life, as a citizen and journalist.
From Our Current Issue
When the Water Rises, Inequality Overflows: A Tale of a Foretold Tragedy
Tatiane Flores, a physical therapist in her early twenties, arrived at the place where her first-floor apartment used to stand. All she saw was a pile of mud and debris. The acrid smell of dirty water still lingered in the air. “ Now I come here and don’t even know if I have a home anymore.
Waxing and Waning: Institutional Rhythms of Inequality
Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall was famous in her time, well-known as an archaeologist, an Americanist, an antiquarian, an ethnologist, a folklorist and “a lady scientist”; she was a woman “making it” in a man’s world from the 1880s to the 1930s. Deeply engaged in research about ancient civilizations in Mexico, she led a remarkable life as a pioneer in the evolution of anthropology as a field of study.
Urban Divide: The Structural Roots of Housing Inequality in Tijuana
The transformation hits you as soon as you cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Spotlight
Perspectives in Times of Change
Check out these reflections on social, economic, cultural and political transformations in Latin America, the Caribbean and Latinx communities in the United States.
A Chair in the Room: The Semiotics of Sitting
In Latin America, the chair occupies a central and often overlooked place in everyday life. It is present in rural homes and public plazas, inside crowded city schools and at the edges of municipal offices.
Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas: Community-Building through Public Programs and Curricular Development
Blackness has reshaped the fabric of the Americas. From the Middle Passage to contemporary diasporas, Blackness has constituted a transhemispheric demographic, cultural and historical reality.
Your Struggle is My Struggle: Voices Against Alligator Alcatraz
On a sweltering, overcast Florida afternoon on July 4th, 2025, about fifty people congregated at a multigenerational Miccosukee Seminole camp, a site rooted in history and cultural significance. Just a quarter of a mile away looms the Dade-Collier Transition and Training Airport, now hauntingly renamed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
StudEnt Views
It’s Time For Women
“I believe we are in an exacerbated crisis of non-guarantee of women’s rights throughout the country, with the peculiar characteristic of finding ourselves in a moment of different rhetoric — of it being the time of women — because we now have the first woman president, seventy years after women gained the right to vote in this country,” said my interviewee, an organizer for a women’s rights organization in Oaxaca.
Amazonian Research Trip
Around the halfway point of my doctoral studies, I spent a year living between Boston and Belém in the Amazon region of Brazil to experience firsthand what I had until then been researching from satellite images and other people’s accounts. Belém became my base, from which I made frequent short excursions to surrounding areas to get a feel for life in the region. After that initial experience, I planned deeper immersions that recently brought me back for two longer field trips. This is a brief narrative of one of them.
What Your Naked Bodies Told Me
Twelve actors were seated on a game board, staring intently at us. I entered and took a seat in a chair in the corner. Spectators were scattered across the board, clustered in small groups of five or six around each actor. In front of me on the floor sat actor Daniel Tonsig, who looked deep into our eyes for long, silent seconds.
Book ReviewS
A Review of Brazilian Socio-Economic Dynamics: Contexts and Contemporary Realities. Contributions to Economics
Gilmar Masiero’s Brazilian Socioeconomic Dynamics arrives at a critical juncture in the intellectual conversation about Brazil. In an era in which international headlines often oscillate between portrayals of Brazil as an eternal “country of the future” or a nation mired in perpetual crisis, Masiero, a professor of business management at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), offers a welcome and rigorously argued third path: a blueprint for activating Brazil’s latent “socioeconomic dynamics.” He does that by offering a nuanced perspective that goes beyond economic metrics—he incorporates Brazilian social and political dynamics as forces that have shaped the nation.
A Review of La mirada imperial puesta en Galápagos
La mirada imperial puesta en Galápagos (The Imperial Gaze on the Galapagos), a collection of essays edited by Alberto Acosta, Elizabeth Bravo, Esperanza Martínez and Ramiro Ávila, brings together critical perspectives on the multiple meanings of the islands: ecological, symbolic, territorial and geopolitical. The collection is based on a fundamental premise: to understand the Galapagos beyond an instrumental and human perspective, refocusing on the plurality of the beings who have woven their memories there for thousands of years.
A Review of How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers
Dom Phillips, 57, was writing an environmentally significant book when he was brutally killed with Bruno Pereira in the Amazon on June 5, 2022. The crime that shocked the world interrupted their lives, their dreams, and his deep commitment to the Amazon. The book, just published, has four chapters and an introduction written by Dom. The manuscript was saved because he had left his computer back home after his last trip. Six dedicated journalists studied his notes, trying to capture his intention, his views and the places he had traveled. The title How to Save the Amazon has the terribly sad subtitle, A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers.
DRCLAS Podcast: Faculty Voices
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