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Technology: Artificial Intelligence and Beyond
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Recent Articles
Of Salamanders and Spirits
I probably could’ve chosen a better day to visit the CIIDIR-IPN for the first time. It was the last week of September and the city had come to a full stop. Citizens barricaded the streets with tarps and plastic chairs, and protest banners covered the walls of the Edificio de Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, all demanding fair wages for the state’s educators. It was my first (but certainly not my last) encounter with the fierce political activism that Oaxaca is known for.
Extractivism and Colonialism in Argentina: A View from the Patagonia
It was snowing the day in early August when I arrived at Lof Pillan Mahuiza, a Mapuche-Tehuelche community around 60 miles from Esquel, the provincial capital of Chubut, Argentina.
A Review of Negative Originals. Race and Early Photography in Colombia
Negative Originals. Race and Early Photography in Colombia is Juanita Solano Roa’s first book as sole author. An assistant professor at Bogotá’s Universidad de los Andes, she has been a leading figure in the institution’s recently founded Art History department. In 2022, she co-edited with her colleagues Olga Isabel Acosta and Natalia Lozada the innovative Historias del arte en Colombia, an ambitious and long-overdue reassessment of the country’s heterogeneous art “histories,” in the plural.
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 – 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
El Salvador: Waves of Erasure – Chapter 3
Today, El Salvador’s passage from chaos to order relies on a modernization process that weaves a social and productive straw tapestry among Salvadorans as never before—such a tapestry is called “petate” in Central America
StudEnt Views
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.
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).
Book ReviewS
A Review of Bodies Found in Various Places
This bilingual anthology of Elvira Hernández, translated by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher and published by Cardboard House Press, offers a comprehensive entry point into the work of the Chilean poet. The translators’ preface offers a valuable introduction that provides important context to her work and explains aspects of her poetry present in the volume, such as Hernández’s self-effacing “ethics of invisibility,” an ars poetica in which the poems stand in front while the poet hangs back, in a call to observe rather than to be observed. In this sense, Hernández has long written from the edges of Chile’s public life, partly by choice, partly by necessity: her birth name is Rosa María Teresa Adriasola Olave, but she adopted the pseudonym of Elvira Hernández under the Pinochet dictatorship.
A Review of An Ordinary Landscape of Violence
When first reading the title, An Ordinary Landscape of Violence, I asked myself if there is really anything “ordinary” about a landscape of violence? Preity R. Kumar argues that violence is endemic to Guyana’s colonial history and is something that women loving women (WLW) contend with and resist in their personal and public lives.
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.
DRCLAS Podcast: Faculty Voices
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