Twelve actors were seated on a game board, staring intently at us. I entered and took a seat in a chair in the corner. Spectators were scattered across the board, clustered in small groups of five or six around each actor. In front of me on the floor sat actor Daniel Tonsig, who looked deep into our eyes for long, silent seconds.
My first morning in Santiago, Chile, the city greeted me with a kaleidoscope of life. The Andes rose sharply in the distance, their peaks dusted with snow in the early Chilean winter. Street vendors sold fresh empanadas and pastel de choclo, their aromas blending with the crisp mountain air. That morning, I also met my host family, who would become my home away from home for the summer (Boston’s summer is Chile’s winter).
The young girls led me through tall wet grass along a muddy footpath to a clearing behind their house. I had recently asked to film them as part of a year-long Sensory Ethnography production course at Harvard, and I had not expected such swift acceptance into their group. The
“The past is in front of us and the future is behind us.”
This phrase, repeated by DRCLAS Mexico Student Coordinator Lorena Rodas many times across the two months I spent in Mexico, transcends time
In my grandmother’s foyer in Guatemala City sits a massive round table of solid mahogany, its lion-shaped feet gripping the rug like it’s been there forever. I grew up admiring it, running my hands along the carved details and pondering the skill required to make it.
What does it mean to be eena dem saal?
I asked my mother who referred me to my grandmother who referred me to my great grandmother.
“Eena dem saal?… Mi neva hear dat one before,” my great grandmother told me.
In rural communities in the United States, it takes an average of 34 minutes to reach the nearest hospital. In rural Haiti, the average is two hours. Infectious diseases including tuberculosis, cholera and HIV/AIDS go untreated due to the lack of basic healthcare infrastructure and the violence disrupting the provision of health services.
On February 28th, the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project held the inaugural Nahuatl Workshop “Yoltajtol, A Word from the Heart.” The workshop had the twofold goal of offering an introduction to the Nahuatl language and showing to the participants that Nahuatl is a constitutive part of present-day indigenous peoples’ worldview.
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One of the simplest yet most effective ways of saving a life in the case of sudden cardiac arrest is cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). It’s an accessible procedure to be trained on, as almost anyone of any age can learn it. Knowing this, and that performing CPR right after cardiac arrest increases survival chances two to three times, why hasn’t everyone been trained on CPR at some point in their lives? (American Heart Association).
The moment I stepped foot back on the island, I was no longer the 14-year-old boy who once proudly wore his school uniform to Wolmer’s Boys High School—the oldest school in the Caribbean—and to Maranatha Gospel Hall, my local church. I had become something else entirely in the eyes of the state: a criminal. An illegal presence.
I write these words not based on my experience from a distant field site in another country but from clinics and community spaces in our neighborhoods in Massachusetts and long video calls—spaces where I’ve had the privilege of listening.
Rabinal Achi’ and Las Guacamayas are among the oldest dances in Guatemala, whose origins date back to before the Spanish conquest.
In November 2021, Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), presented the agency’s “New Vision for Global Development” to the audience at Georgetown University.
For undergraduate students at Harvard, the completion of a senior thesis represents the culmination of years of academic exploration and for me, this journey was particularly memorable as it helped me combine my passion for law and politics with my personal connection to Latin America.
As I walked into the sweeping courtyard of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí (UASLP) in Mexico, flanked by its grand stone pillars, I knew that EAAMO’24 was going to be unlike any other academic conference I had ever attended.
In the Río Bravo borderlands, there is a site of a thousand wonders.
I write these words as someone who teaches, researches and resists in the global periphery.
I read these words as I gaze from a car window, looking out at colorful, animated drawings of smiling elephants, toucans, and parrots, outside of a school building in San Francisco de Macorís, the Dominican Republic’s primary cocoa-producing region.
When I think about Mexico, my family’s home country, I think about Jalpa, Zacatecas, where my family migrated from so many years ago.
As I boarded a flight from São Paulo to Brasília at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday, full speed toward the Brazilian Congress, I reflected on my past few weeks spent in Brazil.
