current issue
Inequality
Read the Spring 2025 issue
Recent Articles
It’s Time For Women
“I believe we are in an exacerbated crisis of non-guarantee of women’s rights throughout the country, with the peculiar characteristic of finding ourselves in a moment of different rhetoric — of it being the time of women — because we now have the first woman president, seventy years after women gained the right to vote in this country,” said my interviewee, an organizer for a women’s rights organization in Oaxaca.
A Chair in the Room: The Semiotics of Sitting
In Latin America, the chair occupies a central and often overlooked place in everyday life. It is present in rural homes and public plazas, inside crowded city schools and at the edges of municipal offices.
A Review of Brazilian Socio-Economic Dynamics: Contexts and Contemporary Realities. Contributions to Economics
Gilmar Masiero’s Brazilian Socioeconomic Dynamics arrives at a critical juncture in the intellectual conversation about Brazil. In an era in which international headlines often oscillate between portrayals of Brazil as an eternal “country of the future” or a nation mired in perpetual crisis, Masiero, a professor of business management at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), offers a welcome and rigorously argued third path: a blueprint for activating Brazil’s latent “socioeconomic dynamics.” He does that by offering a nuanced perspective that goes beyond economic metrics—he incorporates Brazilian social and political dynamics as forces that have shaped the nation.
From Our Current Issue
When the Water Rises, Inequality Overflows: A Tale of a Foretold Tragedy
Tatiane Flores, a physical therapist in her early twenties, arrived at the place where her first-floor apartment used to stand. All she saw was a pile of mud and debris. The acrid smell of dirty water still lingered in the air. “ Now I come here and don’t even know if I have a home anymore.
Waxing and Waning: Institutional Rhythms of Inequality
Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall was famous in her time, well-known as an archaeologist, an Americanist, an antiquarian, an ethnologist, a folklorist and “a lady scientist”; she was a woman “making it” in a man’s world from the 1880s to the 1930s. Deeply engaged in research about ancient civilizations in Mexico, she led a remarkable life as a pioneer in the evolution of anthropology as a field of study.
Urban Divide: The Structural Roots of Housing Inequality in Tijuana
The transformation hits you as soon as you cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Spotlight
Perspectives in Times of Change
Check out these reflections on social, economic, cultural and political transformations in Latin America, the Caribbean and Latinx communities in the United States.
El Salvador: Waves of Erasure – The End: With the Flow of Time
“If you can count on waves, time will give you everything,” explains Aitor Francesena Uría, AKA ‘Gallo’ (rooster), when asked about Surf City and El Salvador.
El Salvador: Waves of Erasure – Chapter 5: A New Barter
Our modern days mark the end of an era that began in the 15th century. King Henry the Navigator and his Portuguese caravels, joined by the Crown of Castile’s three ships under Christopher Columbus launched the exploration of Africa and America that ultimately led to globalization.
El Salvador: Waves of Erasure – Chapter 4: Yearning for home
Upstream from Chepe Aleta, following the winding road alongside the river that ends at El Palmarcito, after crossing what Yovani Hernández Ramírez calls the “Puentes de Plata y de Oro” (Silver and Gold Bridges), you arrive at the hamlet of Acahuaspán
StudEnt Views
Bridging Worlds: Learning, Culture and Connection in Chile
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).
Contacto y probando
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 as the Future
“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
Book ReviewS
A Review of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States
As something of an old hand in the history of coffee enterprise, I don’t very often discover a new work that so effectively answers questions I’ve had for decades. Michelle Craig McDonald accomplishes this and much more in her multifaceted study of the coffee trade and consumption from the early 18th to late 19th centuries in what became the United States. Beyond this, however, she managed to produce an accessible, engaging text based on deep archival research, a gem for both general readers and scholars in her own field.
A Review of Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now
When I was in undergrad at Emerson College, I met a student from Croatia who spoke to me in perfect Spanish. When I asked her how she was so fluent, she predictably told me she’d studied it in school. To my surprise, however, she punctuated her explanation with, “I [also] grew up watching Mexican telenovelas!” It was the turning point at which I began thinking of telenovelas as existing beyond televisions in Mexican households.
A Review of The Years of Blood: Stories of a a Reporting Life in Latin America
Her new book, The Years of Blood, offers, as its subtitle suggests, “stories from a reporting life in Latin America.” A widely decorated journalist, Guillermoprieto has written, in fact, several lives’ worth of reportage on the region. While she began chronicling Latin America in 1978, this volume collects essays published in the 21st century—most after 2010.
DRCLAS Podcast: Faculty Voices
Join our email list
Get the latest information about ReVista!