On any given day, millions of South Americans—in the subcontinent and around the world—would engage in the same ritual. We heat water (making sure it doesn’t boil), prepare the mate, and sip, sip and sip. But where does that green, earthy, addictive, and for many outside South America exotic, drink comes from?
Editor’s Letter From the Maya in Guatemala to the Mapuche in Chile, Latin America’s Indigenous peoples are on the forefront of fighting for rights, whether against mining and deforestation or for land rights or the right...
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In the year 2000, we participated with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in a medical-humanitarian project in impoverished indigenous communities in San Juan Cancuc, in the region of Los Altos de Chiapas.
I traveled to Los Angeles from my home in Chicago in the autumn of 2017 to experience the massive, Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which mounted some 70 exhibitions of Latin American and Latinx art at cultural institutions across southern California.
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It’s a sunny Saturday in the small mountain town of Ocongate, Cusco in the Peruvian Andes, towering 3,533 meters (11,591 feet) above sea level. People from nearby rural communities arrive to sell and buy goods, ranging from quinoa to construction bricks.
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Nawa Nika, or Nelita Rodríguez Campos (as she’s known in Spanish), gets up every morning very early to light the kitchen fire. Some fireflies still leave halos of light on the horizon and the stars are beginning to fade into morning.
Around the time I was born, the Oglala Lakota activist—at the time—associated with the American Indian Movement (AIM), Russell Means, visited Nicaragua and met with Indigenous peoples who had sided with the contras against the leftist Sandinista government.
Paula Abramo’s Fiat Lux is a new bilingual edition of one of the most interesting poetry collections in contemporary Mexico.
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In my experience as a Zapotec writer, translator, speaker and activist in the Zapotec diasporic context, I have been working to write and maintain my Indigenous language in the United States.
Almost twenty years ago, Thomas Friedman claimed that globalization had made the world flat. From Shannon O’Neil’s point of view, the topography is a bit more rugged.
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Runasimi is my mother tongue. My infant babbling and discovery of words were made in that language, also known as Quechua.
As President of Chile’s recent Constitutional Convention, I and my fellow delegates aimed to present an inclusive, democratic constituent process written by the Chilean people, and defining Chile as a social and democratic state of law: plurinational, intercultural, regional and ecological.
I burst into laughter when someone suggested calling our new student organization “Children of the Corn.” My mind snapped to the horrifying slasher films based on Stephen King’s short stories.
In Escape a los Andes, journalists Raúl Peñaranda and Robert Brockmann seek to reconstruct the efforts by Mauricio Hochschild, better known as Bolivia’s tin baron, to facilitate the massive entry of Jewish refugees escaping from the Nazi racial policies of the 1930’s.
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I’ve been thinking a lot these days about what it means for an Indigenous person to navigate a colonial world.
Right now, some days ago, five hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, fifty years ago, thirty years ago, ten years ago, some days ago, Indigenous people have been killed.
We often think of food sovereignty as a response to not having enough food to eat. However, throughout Latin America (Abya Yala) and the Caribbean, people do not have enough food because they have been dispossessed from their territories, not because the land cannot produce.
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My family in Bolivia keeps the weaving tradition alive. We are Quechua speakers from a community called Candelaria in the state of Chuquisaca.
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In January 2023, the Brazilian Minister of Health — faced with a regional scenario of malnutrition and a lack of medical assistance — declared a state of emergency on Yanomami lands.
In Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom, political scientist Mneesha Gellman aims to show how access to Zapotec and Yurok language classes encourages youth resistance to culturecide—defined as the killing of Indigenous culture.
