Editor’s Letter

ANIMALS!

From the rainforests of Brazil to the crowded streets of Mexico City, animals are integral to life in Latin America and the Caribbean.

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, people throughout the region turned to pets for company. Indeed, in places like Bogotá, Colombia, the only way people were permitted outside daily was to walk dogs. So people bought, borrowed or rescued dogs. When Colombian author Daniel Samper Pizano wrote for ReVista about “Discovering Nature” and his two dogs, Pandemia y Corona, the article planted the seed for a section of this issue of ReVista on writers on their pets (and other animals).

With the generous help of Professor Mariano Siskind in Harvard’s Romance Languages and Literatures Department, we reached out to writers in Latin America and beyond to talk about their experiences with animals. Their articles—from jaguars to cats to Noah’s Ark—provide a literary perspective on the subject—a first for ReVista, even though we aim to be interdisciplinary.

Indeed, this Winter 2023 issue may be the most interdisciplinary issue ever. Authors range from lawyers, conservationists, novelists, psychotherapists, History of Science scholars, archaeologists, museum curators, biologists and zoologists. They provide a spectrum of ways of looking at animals across the region, whether through the prism of wildlife trafficking or the rights of farm animals.

As often happens with each ReVista issue, unexpected themes emerge. This time, it was the rule of law and animal rights. I discovered the very innovative Animal Law and Policy Program, directed by Kristen Stilt at Harvard Law School, that brought a case about a woolly monkey to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court. The issue of rights occurs frequently throughout the magazine, even in the unexpected reference in Radcliffe Fellow Joe Roman’s compelling story about Cuba. He tells us of a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case defending the rights of 12 Kuwaiti detainees being at Guantánamo, the U.S. military base in Cuba. When a Cuban iguana crosses the perimeter fence onto the base, it becomes subject to U.S. law. If the courts extended jurisdiction to include the rights of iguanas while denying the detainees due process, the lawyer argued, they would be providing more safeguards for the reptiles than for humans. The detainees won.

Or as many of the authors in this issue point out, we are all animals: human animals and non-human animals. I hope you enjoy reading about our fellow beings.