Category: Fashion in the Americas

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.

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.