current issue
Technology: Artificial Intelligence and Beyond
Read the Fall 2025 issue
Recent Articles
Public Universities in Peru
Visits to two public universities in Peru over the last two summers helped deepen my understanding of the system and explore some ideas for my own research. The first summer, I began visiting the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM) to learn about historical admissions processes and search for lists of applicants and admitted students. I wanted to identify those students and follow their educational, professional and political trajectories at one of the country’s most important universities. In the summer of 2025, I once again visited UNMSM in Lima and traveled to Cusco to visit the National University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC). This time, I conducted interviews with professors and student representatives to learn about their experiences and perspectives on higher-education policies such as faculty salary reforms and the processes for the hiring and promotion of professors.
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 Lula: A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future
André Pagliarini’s new book arrives at a timely moment. During the summer of 2025, when the book was released, the United States began engaging in deeper debates about Brazil’s political situation. This shift was tied to the U.S. government’s decision to impose 50% tariffs on Brazilian products—the highest level ever applied to another country, matched only by India. In a letter to President Lula, Donald Trump’s administration justified the measure by citing a trade deficit with Brazil. It also criticized the South American nation for prosecuting one of Washington’s ideological allies, former president Jair Bolsonaro, on charges of attempting a coup d’état. Sentenced by Brazil’s Supreme Court to just over 27 years in prison, the right-wing leader had lost his 2022 reelection bid to a well-known leftist figure, Lula da Silva, and now stands, for many, as a global example of how a democracy can respond to those who attack it and attempt to cling to power through force.
From Our Current Issue
Water Stewardship Is Strategy, Not Philanthropy: A Field Note from Latin America
The first time I sat across from a farmer in rural Latin America, water sat with us too—silent, almost taken for granted.
The AI-Era Digital Divide: Listening to Mexican Youth Voices
One Mexican teenager admitted in an on-line survey, “To summarize information or conduct research, honestly, it makes my work much faster, but it does worsen my research skills.” She was referring to AI as an educational tool.
Technology and Collective Memory: Commemorating the Unidad Popular
The one thousand days of Salvador Allende’s presidency, from 1970–1973, marked a period of political innovation in Chile.
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
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.
Amazonian Research Trip
Around the halfway point of my doctoral studies, I spent a year living between Boston and Belém in the Amazon region of Brazil to experience firsthand what I had until then been researching from satellite images and other people’s accounts. Belém became my base, from which I made frequent short excursions to surrounding areas to get a feel for life in the region. After that initial experience, I planned deeper immersions that recently brought me back for two longer field trips. This is a brief narrative of one of them.
What Your Naked Bodies Told Me
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.
Book ReviewS
A Review of Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq
Scott’s Wallace’s Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq is really several books at once that cohere into a magnificent whole. It is the evocative, at times nostalgic, at others harrowing, personal account of a young journalist’s coming of age during his first foreign journalism assignment, always keenly observant and thoughtful. But it also offers a carefully developed analysis of the nature of U.S. foreign policy, at least in those poorer parts of the world where it has intervened militarily or more clandestinely, or heavily supported the wars waged by its clients. Wallace has witnessed these wars both earlier and later in his life, as a citizen and journalist.
A Review of The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia
Brooke Larson’s book on the history Indigenous education in Bolivia is a masterpiece. It is deeply researched, beautifully written, a pleasure to read and a gift to historians of Bolivia, education, Indigenous movements and so much more.
A Review of Immigration, Policy, and the People of Latin America: Seven Sending Nations
No one truly wants to leave their homeland.
That’s a saying I’ve heard countless times in two decades of reporting on immigrants and immigration policy in the United States for the Boston Globe and other newspapers. It’s almost conventional wisdom by now — a quiet, often-ignored truth that sits beneath the headlines and political slogans.
DRCLAS Podcast: Faculty Voices
Join our email list
Get the latest information about ReVista!