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Inequality
Read the Spring 2025 issue
Recent Articles
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).
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.
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.
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.
Natural Disasters, Diasporas and International Adoptions
As a little girl, I was always afraid to cross bridges over turbulent waters. This irrational fear complicated things for my parents since I grew up in Valladolid, a small city in northeastern Spain with a river passing through it. Every time we crossed the Pisuerga River with its abundant current, I asked them to grip my hand and not let go.
Narrating the Future: A Call for Reflection and Humanity
As I prepared my speech for the graduation ceremony —my first as President of INCAE, an institution that, from Latin America, has cultivated leadership with purpose in more than 20,000 graduates over six decades—I found myself reflecting in silence on a few uncomfortable questions: Do we truly lead for the longstanding future or merely for today— perhaps for tomorrow at best?
Inside Peru’s Lurigancho Prison
Lurigancho Prison in Lima, Peru, is the largest and most overcrowded prison in the country. With a prison overpopulation and overcrowding of 9,735 inmates (August 2024 Statistical Report from the National Penitentiary Institute, INPE), despite having an actual capacity for only 3,204, and with a ratio of more than 100 inmates per security officer (compared to six inmates per officer in the United States, it stands as a grim giant.
StudEnt Views
Empathy Is Listening and Seeing Through: Mapping the Unseen Patient Journeys of Chagas Disease
I write these words not based on my experience from a distant field site in another country but from clinics and community spaces in our neighborhoods in Massachusetts and long video calls—spaces where I’ve had the privilege of listening.
A Journey of Encounter with the Rabinal Achi´and Las Guacamayas
Rabinal Achi’ and Las Guacamayas are among the oldest dances in Guatemala, whose origins date back to before the Spanish conquest.
Latin America In-Corporated: Multinationals and Development: a Bad Idea?
In November 2021, Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), presented the agency’s “New Vision for Global Development” to the audience at Georgetown University.
Book ReviewS
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.
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.
DRCLAS Podcast: Faculty Voices
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