Displacements
Winter 2017 | Volume XVI, Number 2
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
First Take
Displacements: A First Take
Although only three percent of the world’s population are international migrants, mobility is an essential part of the human condition. From our earliest origins…
Focus on Colombia
36 Hours (and More) in Cartagena
I arrived in Colombia in August 2014 on a Fulbright grant to research La Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas (The League of Displaced Women), an organization formed in the late 90s in…
Voices from the Atrato River
A traditional panga boat with thirty passengers cruises the mighty waters of the Atrato River in the Pacific region of Colombia, doing a 142-mile route from Quibdó to…
A Nation Reconfigured by Displacement
English + Español
It was January 2004. Aurora was standing at the traffic light selling dish towels in the middle of a crowded Bogotá avenue. She was living with four of her eight children in…
A Communitarian Contestation
English + Español
We finally made it. In February 2008, after almost two days of long hours climbing the steep, muddy paths of the Serranía de Abibe mountain range, we got there at…
Learning about Hunger
t is difficult for a middle-class professor to think at length about displaced people’s hunger. The fact itself is pretty straightforward: after displacement, people are…
La Espina
The two of us, leading an Emerson College international program, had just finished three weeks of round-the-clock work making a short documentary film with community…
Forced from Home
Colombia’s Other Displacements
Of course, I knew about Colombia’s sad statistics on displacement, with the highest numbers in Latin America and vying with those of war-torn countries like Sudan and…
A Search for Food Sovereignty
Displaced persons in post-conflict societies throughout Central and South America have been finding an unusual source of support: seed networks of food-growers…
Indigenous Displacement in Southern Chile
English + Español
In the dawn of January 4, 2013, Werner Luchsinger, 75, and his wife Vivianne Mackay, 69, a couple who farmed in the Araucanía region of southern Chile, were burned…
Flight, Exile and Identity
English + Español
Teresa lives in Ate, a working-class district in Lima. Until 1984, she resided in a rural community in the department of Ayacucho. That year, the terrorist organization…
Central America and Mexico
Protecting Central American Families
All Maribel had wanted was to work in a beauty salon in her home country of Honduras, maybe one day doing well enough to open a salon of her own. Hair and nails, or maybe just…
Pain on the Border
Not a single seat is left in the humble dining hall decorated with murals of campesinos harvesting corn in the fields. Above rows of wooden tables ceiling fans spin frantically, failing…
Fighting Displacement
The lonely road leading to the community of Ciriboya, in the municipality of Iriona, Colón, is one of the poorly maintained routes of more than 45 neglected Garifuna communities…
Displacement on the Border
GUADALUPE, Chihuahua — A shadowy mix of actors preparing for the start of oil and gas production has spurred large-scale land displacement here, allege hundreds of current and…
Exploring the Arts
Ana Tijoux’s Radical Crossing of Borders
This summer, I was an intern in Santiago’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, the museum dedicated to the victims of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Since I was in Chile…
Urban Spaces of Internal Displacement in Mexico
When news came that the drug dealer Joaquín Guzmán, El Chapo, had escaped from a Mexican prison on July 2015, memories about cocaine cartels and urban gangs creating…
The Octopus, the Spider and the Braying Burros
English + Español
Colombia has long been a country of civil wars. From the 1810 cry of independence to the early 20th century, the country had suffered a series of armed conflicts between traditional political parties…
Sculpture and Displacement
When I began working on the Harvard Art Museums exhibition “Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning” five years ago, I could not have anticipated that the opening would…
Displacement Here, Displacement Now
In the Americas, and in Latin American and African-American poetic traditions in particular, there exists a practice of subverting notions of landscape as beauty in favor of more…
(Dis)locations of Violence in Latin American Film
Transitioning back to cold in Boston invites me to a weekend of movies on Netflix. A curiosity self-justified, as research interest cascades into shameless binge watching…
Building Bridges
Peace Education through Music
As my plane glided down toward the sea, I looked out from my seat at the beaming afternoon sun eclipsed by the rising Corcovado hill upon which stood the mighty…
Book Talk
Getting Respect
When I first arrived in Brazil in the 1980s, I quickly learned that race in Brazil was not important there. The country that once had by far the largest slave population in the…
The Tupac Amaru Rebellion
On May 18, 1781, Spanish authorities in Cuzco executed José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera, also known as Tupac Amaru, in front of thousands of onlookers. Claiming to be the rightful…
Latin American Revolutionaries and the Arab World
The presence of an Arab diaspora in Latin America is reasonably well known. Step forward Shakira! But relations between Latin America and the Arab World have not been well covered in the…