Colombia’s Other Displacements
Of course, I knew about Colombia’s sad statistics on displacement, with the highest numbers in Latin America and vying with those of war-torn countries like Sudan and…
Category: Displacements
Getting Respect
When I first arrived in Brazil in the 1980s, I quickly learned that race in Brazil was not important there. The country that once had by far the largest slave population in the…
Ana Tijoux’s Radical Crossing of Borders
This summer, I was an intern in Santiago’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, the museum dedicated to the victims of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Since I was in Chile…
Displacements: Editor’s Letter
The sweet pure tones of a violin emanated through my grade school auditorium. Ten-year- old Florika, a refugee after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, was turning the warmth of once- living wood into a powerful source of communication. Florika spoke no English…
36 Hours (and More) in Cartagena
I arrived in Colombia in August 2014 on a Fulbright grant to research La Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas (The League of Displaced Women), an organization formed in the late 90s in…
Voices from the Atrato River
A traditional panga boat with thirty passengers cruises the mighty waters of the Atrato River in the Pacific region of Colombia, doing a 142-mile route from Quibdó to…
Urban Spaces of Internal Displacement in Mexico
When news came that the drug dealer Joaquín Guzmán, El Chapo, had escaped from a Mexican prison on July 2015, memories about cocaine cartels and urban gangs creating…
The Tupac Amaru Rebellion
On May 18, 1781, Spanish authorities in Cuzco executed José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera, also known as Tupac Amaru, in front of thousands of onlookers. Claiming to be the rightful…
A Search for Food Sovereignty
Displaced persons in post-conflict societies throughout Central and South America have been finding an unusual source of support: seed networks of food-growers…
The Octopus, the Spider and the Braying Burros
English + Español
Colombia has long been a country of civil wars. From the 1810 cry of independence to the early 20th century, the country had suffered a series of armed conflicts between traditional political parties…
A Nation Reconfigured by Displacement
English + Español
It was January 2004. Aurora was standing at the traffic light selling dish towels in the middle of a crowded Bogotá avenue. She was living with four of her eight children in…
Indigenous Displacement in Southern Chile
English + Español
In the dawn of January 4, 2013, Werner Luchsinger, 75, and his wife Vivianne Mackay, 69, a couple who farmed in the Araucanía region of southern Chile, were burned…
Flight, Exile and Identity
English + Español
Teresa lives in Ate, a working-class district in Lima. Until 1984, she resided in a rural community in the department of Ayacucho. That year, the terrorist organization…
A Communitarian Contestation
English + Español
We finally made it. In February 2008, after almost two days of long hours climbing the steep, muddy paths of the Serranía de Abibe mountain range, we got there at…
Sculpture and Displacement
When I began working on the Harvard Art Museums exhibition “Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning” five years ago, I could not have anticipated that the opening would…
Protecting Central American Families
All Maribel had wanted was to work in a beauty salon in her home country of Honduras, maybe one day doing well enough to open a salon of her own. Hair and nails, or maybe just…
Peace Education through Music
As my plane glided down toward the sea, I looked out from my seat at the beaming afternoon sun eclipsed by the rising Corcovado hill upon which stood the mighty…
Pain on the Border
Not a single seat is left in the humble dining hall decorated with murals of campesinos harvesting corn in the fields. Above rows of wooden tables ceiling fans spin frantically, failing…
Learning about Hunger
t is difficult for a middle-class professor to think at length about displaced people’s hunger. The fact itself is pretty straightforward: after displacement, people are…
Latin American Revolutionaries and the Arab World
The presence of an Arab diaspora in Latin America is reasonably well known. Step forward Shakira! But relations between Latin America and the Arab World have not been well covered in the…
