Perspectives in Times of Change

Samuel “Koko” Erazo is a Honduran artist who understands that his country’s electric sector is not an abstract thing for the citizens of his country, particularly the poor.

I first explicitly began to explore the theme of Cuban Blackness in 2014 at BE.BOP 14, Spiritual Revolutions & “The Scramble for Africa,” a theoretical and anti-colonial event in Berlin, Germany, organzied by the late Dominican writer and curator Alanna Lockward. I presented my project “Túmbenlo,” which supported the duo rap group Obsesión in their 2010 demands on the Cuban government to demolish the statue that glorifies racism in Cuba: the statue erected in 1936 of José Miguel Gómez, the second president of Cuba, responsible for the 1912 massacre of thousands of Afro-Cubans who were members of the Independent Party of Color (PIC, after its Spanish acronym).

Grendy Isabel Nina Huaycane, who comes from the southern Peruvian Andean region of Puno, grew up in an urban area of Puno, where she heard both Spanish and Aymara, though she remembers that most of her interactions where “only in Spanish.” Her entrance to university was a turning point in her life.

I read in a recent report by the Norwegian Refugee Council that the violence in Honduras is similar to that experienced in war zones.

Mexico, a country of extraordinary cultural richness, is a place where ancestral roots intertwine with the present in a unique way. I remember a childhood where even the names of streets evoked history and tradition.

Beneath the comal, the flames swayed with a gentle warmth, mirroring the graceful cooking style of my late maternal grandmother, Emilia Velazquez, as she artfully crafted her tortillas. The tortillas puffed up, releasing an aroma known only to those who truly appreciate and understand the art.

I remember being in the school patio. My grandfather had been arrested the day before. I didn’t say anything about what had happened. I didn’t understand. I wanted to tell someone something, but I knew no one would understand what I was saying. In my school in 2002, they didn’t teach us anything about the history of contemporary Argentina

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni faced a dilemma: she didn’t want any more immigrants, but she was facing severe population decline in her country. She needed young people who wanted to start families to settle in Italy; however, she didn’t favor those immigrants arriving from Africa.

“The lake was our mother and father. Now, we are orphans,” said Don Rufino Choque, whose words echo through the desolate, windswept salt flat that had once been the thriving shore of Lake Poopó, Bolivia.

Everywhere we went in Guatemala, we saw shops with Hebrew names—Eben Ezra Pharmacy, El Shadday Fertilizer.