Ellen Schneider’s description of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in her provocative article on Nicaraguan democracy sent me scurrying to my oversized scrapbooks of newspaper articles. I wanted to show her that rather than being perceived as a caudillo
After an exhausting game of soccer with a crew of Mexico City street children, Vicente, a young teenager of 13 said, “Vamonos a la verga.” It was my third day with Casa Alianza, the international…
Two first-time visitors to the Galapagos archipelago begin their experience in exactly the same way. Two hours after departing mainland Ecuador, their plane descends towards the island of…
In the late spring of 1934, towards the end of my sophomore year at Harvard College, I received a letter from Dr. Frank E. Lutz, Entomology Curator at the American Museum of Natural History in…
The cover of Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced depicts the Guatemalan journalist Irma Flaquer holding up a page in her left hand as if proofreading. Yet, her eyes are not looking at the paper…
As the new coordinator of Brazilian Studies at the David Rockefeller Center, it is a treat for me to write a few words on Kenneth Maxwell’s arrival to DRCLAS, where he is now a Senior Fellow. To…
Traditionally, anthropologists have divorced themselves emotionally and physically from their subjects, placing the highest priority on objectivity and the role of the anthropologist as expert…
On January 6, 2002, el cabildo habanero, hundreds of dancers and musicians reenacted the activities of las comparsas of nineteenth-century Cuba. During the era of Cuban slavery, these…
Cuba is often on our minds for geopolitical reasons, but the island nation has long fascinated students of flora and fauna…
The spiky jaws of the Deioaea Miscupula (Venus’ flytrap) leaves and the gaping, pouch-like bodies of theNepenthes sanguinea (Pitcher Plant) conjure up child hood tales of carnivorous…
Art historians, biologists, anthropologists, historians of science, Latin Americanists and fish experts aren’t known for frequent intersections in their academic life…
first met Kevin “Benito” Healy a little over four years ago at an information session he gave to a group of State Department Foreign Service officers on their way to assignments in the Andes. After the session, I asked Healy…
On a warm August 30 in Roslyn, NY in the year 1922, a brave seven-year-old David Rockefeller picked up an inch-long brown beetle with fearsome pinching mandibles and plunged it into a jar…
A house can provide much more than basic safety and shelter from the rain. As an intern for Habitat for Humanity in San Ramon, Costa Rica, I discovered that for many Habitat partner…
Sixty-five chairs sat empty in protest for the denial of visas to the same number Cuban academics. A book launching party transformed into a special session on “Academic Freedom…
The dirt road crossed the pass at about 15,000 feet and entered a wide treeless valley, without any sign of human presence. Flanked by jagged hills, thevalley spread below the peaks…
In 1998, as the Zapatista uprising continued to simmer in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, two U.S. academic researchers began setting up a “bioprospecting” agreement there. With funds…
wo strange-looking black-and-white butterflies found themselves swept up in nets one warm morning in March this year in the eastern Domini can Republic, far from chilly Cambridge…
During the political crisis that almost toppled the government of President Ernesto Samper, no one examined the role played by business. This was despite the fact that, on several occasions…
Carlos Beita and his cousin Alfonso, rugged-looking ranchers both, squat beside biologist Ruth Tiffer as she explains how to take samples from a stream bed. Scooping a rock from the current…
