As the director of a doctoral program in spirituality, colleagues and students often ask me if I have any recommendations for articles or books they should read. Because the field of spirituality is a new one in academia, fresh research is always emerging. This year, my number one recommendation is Chris Tirres’ new book, Liberating Spiritualities.
Brooke Larson’s book on the history Indigenous education in Bolivia is a masterpiece. It is deeply researched, beautifully written, a pleasure to read and a gift to historians of Bolivia, education, Indigenous movements and so much more.
No one truly wants to leave their homeland.
That’s a saying I’ve heard countless times in two decades of reporting on immigrants and immigration policy in the United States for the Boston Globe and other newspapers. It’s almost conventional wisdom by now — a quiet, often-ignored truth that sits beneath the headlines and political slogans.
In graduate school at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, I knew that I wanted to work on Central America, on U.S. involvement there, and on social or labor history. What I knew about Central America came from the news, from the Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees whom I worked with as a volunteer with the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, and from local solidarity events, visiting speakers and documentaries.
Marcos Colón’s book The Amazon in Times of War offers a compelling collection of essays exposing the physical, economic and institutional violence that devastates the Amazon. He argues that much of this destruction stems from deliberate state policies enacted under former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023). Colón not only documents the struggles of Indigenous and other traditional communities but also critiques the role of profit-driven industries such as logging, mining and cattle ranching in the ongoing exploitation of the Amazon and its peoples.
In 1997, I attended the worldwide Action Research Conference in Cartagena, Colombia. One of the sessions opened a space for action research from industrial settings. I presented a project on learning in a network of small businesses in a region of Norway. A Mexican professor raised his hand after the presentation and said: “Excuse me for being direct, but do we live in the same world?”
The book Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America assumes great relevance with the shifting landscape of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis, whose papacy has signaled a renewed engagement with many of the themes central to liberation theology. From his emphasis on economic justice and ecological responsibility in Laudato Si’ to his advocacy for oppressed communities, Francis has revived aspects of liberationist discourse that were marginalized under previous pontificates.
Latin America, and the world more broadly, has been mired in crisis throughout the first quarter of the 21st century. From economic downturns to ecological disasters to legacies of racism and enslavement, the neoliberal trends of past decades have permeated our daily lives with instability amid longstanding narratives of constant progress. If, as we are told, our society is constantly progressing, why has precarity abounded? In The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times, Nicolás Campisi explores the ways in which contemporary Latin American authors confront these realities, focusing on the genre of the novel.
A cottage industry of academic research on Bolivia has flourished over the past twenty years. Unleashed by popular mobilizations and political transformation around the turn of the century, social scientists have dissected and debated Bolivia’s “plurinational” state-building project, which came to define President Evo Morales’s regime (2006-2019). Of course, Bolivia had long been the object of scholarly curiosity, thanks to its robust Indigenous movements, neoliberal experiments in multiculturalism, eruption of anti-global uprisings and the postcolonial turn in public discourse.
Rebecca Jarman, in her book, Representing the Barrios: Culture, Politics, and Urban Policy in Twentieth Century Caracas, explores the vibrancy and complexity of Caracas’s barrios. In Caracas, the term barrio refers to self-produced neighborhoods––usually defined as informal settlements––where communities self-organize the construction of their territory with no prior planning but through an incremental yet effective system of organization.
In 2013, I took a repurposed U.S. school bus from the south of Mexico, my adopted home country, to Belize City. Once across the border, we ended up making a lengthy stop when passengers with pre-purchased tickets found themselves unable to board the crammed vehicle and began to protest the perceived injustice. In the scorching heat, the initial exasperation among locals both on and off the bus quickly turned into visceral anger. The episode would stay with me as I wandered around Belize City, shocked by the generalized poverty.
About ten years ago, when I arrived at the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery in the mountain town of Orizaba, Veracruz, in Mexico, I was excited that the administrator I’d spoken with earlier had arranged a private tour for me. Founded in 1896, the Moctezuma Brewery was saved from bankruptcy when it was bought out by Mexico’s behemoth Cuauhtémoc Brewery in 1985. It is best known globally for its Dos Equis amber lager and for Sol, the light, golden, pilsner-style beer now sold in over 70 countries around the world.
I remember reading with emotion during my adolescence “Juan López and John Ward,” the poem that the great writer of fantastic literature Jorge Luis Borges dedicated to the Falklands War of 1982. What moved me, I think, was the idea that two young men who could have been friends (united by their love of literature, in addition to belonging to the same generation and sharing the same name) saw each other face-to-face only once, but since that one encounter was during a war, each became both Cain and Abel.
Panama has been in the news recently as the target of intimidating and ill-informed remarks by President-elect Donald Trump. Around Christmastime, Trump first accused Panama of charging “exorbitant” fees to U.S. commerce that transits the Panama Canal, which, according to him, was “foolishly” given away to a country that has been shown “extraordinary generosity” by the United States. “If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question“, threatened Trump, without explaining how he intends to force Panama into surrendering its most beloved asset, one that is at the very heart of its national identity.
One afternoon in 2014, driving along a dirt road that snaked through countryside several hours outside of the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, I came across an ancient woman on foot, carrying a load of firewood on her back. I pulled up alongside her and asked her if she wanted a lift. She didn’t seem to comprehend at first, whereupon I explained that was offering her a ride to her destination. She smiled and shook her head. She would carry on walking, she said, but said that if I had some alms—she used that term, limosna, in Spanish—she’d accept them.
Every time I travel back to Buenos Aires, my hometown, I immediately text my dad, “Can you get tickets to go to La Bombonera?” La Bombonera is Boca Juniors’ stadium, and Boca is our football team—just as it was my grandfather’s and as it is my nephew’s. When I was younger, before moving to the United States to pursue my Ph.D., I used to go on Sundays with friends to la popular—the standing terraces, akin to those in old British stadiums. Now, when I return, we need to get seats, as my father no longer wants to stand for three hours, and my nephew is still too young for the chaos of la popular.
In the late 1940s, a young aspiring journalist Stephen G. Bloom was having trouble finding work at any stateside newspaper. After a stint at his college newspaper, the University of California Daily Californian, Bloom worked as a waiter at a Berkeley eatery, got arrested in Canada with his girlfriend for trying to bring pot across the border and got turned down for a reporter’s job by a raft of newspapers. The opportunity came up for a vague promise of a job in the Brazilian English-language language newspaper the Brazil Herald.
On March 19, 2010, two graduate students at the Tec de Monterrey, Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, were killed by members of the Mexican Army inside the university campus. To cover up the murder, the Army and Mexican authorities initially claimed the victims were armed sicarios—hitmen— with organized crime connections. An investigation later revealed that Jorge and Javier were engineering students who did not belong to any criminal group and were unarmed when the perpetrators shot them.
While writing this review, I visited a big bookstore in Los Angeles, where I live in, and I observed that the comic and graphic novel section was put aside in a little corner, somehow hidden from the main and “serious” areas. During the hour or so I spent there, all the people who visited the section were kids and teenagers and I couldn’t help feeling as if I didn’t belong there. The logic which excludes adults as part of the natural public for comics reflects a long-time stigmatization that points them out as banal or childish.
Venezuela has undergone stark transformations in recent decades. Once hailed as one of Latin America’s most stable democracies, the country has more recently been afflicted by widespread economic and humanitarian suffering, causing a mass exodus of its population that has reverberated throughout the region. Despite its substantive importance, comparatively few deep academic studies of contemporary Venezuelan politics exist that can shed light on the causes of this crisis.
