current issue
Technology: Artificial Intelligence and Beyond
Read the Fall 2025 issue
Recent Articles
Post-Secondary Education Access in Peru
Over the summer, I visited four public schools in Peru located in two regions, about 1,200 miles apart from each other. I interviewed teachers, principals and high school juniors and seniors. I wanted to discover their perspectives on perceived opportunities and barriers for students to plan for and fulfill their higher education goals. I also interviewed the superintendent at each school district to learn about local initiatives aimed at decreasing barriers to higher education transition.
Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas: Community-Building through Public Programs and Curricular Development
Blackness has reshaped the fabric of the Americas. From the Middle Passage to contemporary diasporas, Blackness has constituted a transhemispheric demographic, cultural and historical reality.
A Review of The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening
Alejandro L. Madrid’s new book challenged me, the former organizer of a musical festival in Mexico, to open my mind and entertain new ways to perceive a world where I once lived. In The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening, he introduced me to networks of Mexico City sound archive creators who connect with each other as well as their counterparts throughout Latin America. For me, Mexico was a wonderland of sound and, while I listened to lots of music during the 18 years I explored the country, there was much I did not hear.
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 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
El Salvador: Waves of Erasure – Chapter 2
Drawing your line on a wave while surfing, your board goes where your eyes go. The Surf City campaign communicated a clear and unequivocal message to the world: El Salvador is now safe.
El Salvador: Waves of Erasure – Making Peace
“El Boyita”—little buoy—is only a couple of years away from coming of age, but his eyes have already seen four murders. They were perpetrated by mareros—gang members—years ago, at a hillside of the Bálsamo—Balm—Coast, near the slum of El Chumpe, in El Salvador.
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 Afrocentroamérica: Entre memoria y olvido
In graduate school at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, I knew that I wanted to work on Central America, on U.S. involvement there, and on social or labor history. What I knew about Central America came from the news, from the Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees whom I worked with as a volunteer with the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, and from local solidarity events, visiting speakers and documentaries.
A Review of The Amazon in Times of War
Marcos Colón’s book The Amazon in Times of War offers a compelling collection of essays exposing the physical, economic and institutional violence that devastates the Amazon. He argues that much of this destruction stems from deliberate state policies enacted under former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023). Colón not only documents the struggles of Indigenous and other traditional communities but also critiques the role of profit-driven industries such as logging, mining and cattle ranching in the ongoing exploitation of the Amazon and its peoples.
A Review of Historieta Doble: A Graphic History of Participatory Action Research
In 1997, I attended the worldwide Action Research Conference in Cartagena, Colombia. One of the sessions opened a space for action research from industrial settings. I presented a project on learning in a network of small businesses in a region of Norway. A Mexican professor raised his hand after the presentation and said: “Excuse me for being direct, but do we live in the same world?”
DRCLAS Podcast: Faculty Voices
Join our email list
Get the latest information about ReVista!