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.
The image begins in my mind with the Old Man, sitting, legs crossed, eyes shut and his head bowed to his chest. The way he sat most mornings (and how he could be found most other times of the day).
You never know what to expect from a Frank Romero exhibit.
As I look in the mirror, I feel a sense of fear and shame.
And one day, your life changes. After weeks, or even months, spent perfecting your university application, the long-awaited email arrives. Most of the time, it begins with:
“Congratulations, I am happy to inform you of your acceptance into Harvard.”
There were two deciding factors, of many, that strongly influenced my decision to commit to Harvard for college:
In Latin America, many communities face escalating risks from climate change. Driven by a curiosity to understand how innovative, technology-driven solutions can address these challenges, I joined Suyana—a parametric insurance startup focused on climate risk.
Manuel Bandeira’s poem “A Morte Absoluta” (“Consummate Death”), first published in Portuguese in 1940 and newly translated by Candace Slater in 2018, contemplates the relationship between death and oblivion.
I used to imagine the Amazon Rainforest as a big piece of flat land with trees growing on top of it, farmers and ranchers grabbing land while Indigenous people fought off the invaders.
At 7:20 a.m. on July 26, 2024, I landed at Galeão, Rio de Janeiro’s international airport.
