How do mothers deal with chronic violence and the constant presence of guns in their neighborhoods? How do they build situated meaning and discursive practices out of their experiences and relationships with armed actors? We compare the experiences of women in two poor and working-class neighborhoods in Caracas. Through this comparative ethnographic project, we aim to show how, in the midst of state-sponsored depredation and with an overwhelming presence of guns in their lives, women use their cultural roles as mothers to perform everyday forms of resistance vis-à-vis the different armed actors that impose their presence in the barrios. In the mothers’ daily struggles, dramatic discursive actions—from more openly oppositional ones, such as shouting, scolding, and talking, to more hidden ones, such as both “circulating gossip” and “captive gossip,” to more vulnerable ones, such as whispering—are main resources in the micropolitics of their neighborhoods. Our findings suggest that strategies are context dependent and most likely vary according to numerous factors, including the history of civic organizing, policing practices, and the type of armed actor with whom they cohabitate in their neighborhood.

El presente artículo examina el fenómeno del homicidio en Colombia y busca comprender las condiciones de vulnerabilidad que afectan al homicidio en las ciudades colombianas. A través de un enfoque teórico y metodológico basado en la vulnerabilidad se analizó dicha relación entre la violencia homicida con los mercados ilegales, los mercados laborales pauperizados y la repartición de la riqueza. La muestra se compuso de las treinta y dos ciudades capitales departamentales de Colombia. Se usaron herramientas estadísticas multivariadas (PLS-SEM) para analizar la relación entre estos factores y el homicidio. Los hallazgos sugieren que los bajos ingresos, la falta de empleo, la desigualdad y la violencia están asociados con un mayor riesgo de homicidio.

This article examines the construction of a multifaceted collective memory through the main female protagonists in Song of the Water Saints (2002) by the Dominican American author Nelly Rosario. By bridging memory studies, Latin American studies, and Afro-Latinx studies, the book examines racial and gendered constructs, intergenerational struggles, US imperialism, and Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship to show the interconnected nature of memorial articulations for subaltern subjects. Through a literary close reading, this article dissects the lives of three generations of female characters—Graciela, her daughter Mercedes, and Graciela’s great-granddaughter Leila—and how they challenge, reinforce, and suffer racialized, political, and gendered subjectivities. By examining intersectional and historical trauma simultaneously, this study contributes to the field of memory, Afro-Latinx, and Latin American studies by showing the muddled construct of memory for Dominicans and Dominican Americans.

This article explores the workings of social and territorial stigma among residents of an stigmatized neighborhood in Santiago de Chile in the context of nationwide conflict. By attending to the narratives of social organizers, it shows how stigma framed the narratives of the Chilean revolt of October 2019 produced by two female organizers older than fifty years without tertiary education. It argues that, for those with less educational and political resources, stigma can help think through a social conflict by translating broader political issues into everyday life experiences and can both constrain and enable different forms of engagement in the revolt. The narratives were obtained by ethnographic interviews carried out in a broader project of the unfolding of the unrest in Santiago’s peripheries between November 2019 and July 2020.

El siguiente artículo propone una revisión de los presupuestos temáticos y estructurales utilizados en las novelas de Lina Meruane Las infantas (1998) y Fruta podrida (2007), desde una perspectiva socioliteraria basada en algunas ideas desarrolladas por Slavoj Žižek en sus distintos análisis sobre la violencia, la ideología y el poder. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es descubrir si, a modo de actualización, Fruta podrida supone una reformulación de las premisas antisistema que movilizan a los personajes en torno a puntos centrales en ambas novelas como las corporalidades, la marginalidad o el exceso escatológico, entre otros.

This article explores the spatial politics of Peru’s gastronomic revolution and corresponding efforts to territorialize Peruvian agricultural products by tracing the spatial dynamics of quinoa’s trajectory from highland dietary staple to coveted national food. Efforts to codify Peru’s national cuisine have involved mapping ingredients and dishes onto specific regions while dramatically reshaping agricultural production geographies and culinary topographies. Because of quinoa’s success as a high-value export crop, the Peruvian altiplano is no longer perceived as a landscape useful exclusively for livestock pasture and mining. Instead, it is imagined as agriculturally productive: the country’s quinoa heartland. At the same time, quinoa’s trajectory illuminates spatial contradictions in the gastronomic boom’s purported objectives and its tangible effects. The revalorization of quinoa led to a geographical expansion of its production outside the high Andes, undermining the spatially bound concepts of authenticity promoted by gastronomic leaders in Peru. Broadly, efforts to commercialize marginalized food products and their corresponding regions can at once reconfigure territorial discourses in important ways, reinforce long-standing geographical inequalities, and generate contestations of the geographic imaginaries of food and nation.

Mikhuspa ukyaspa ima tinkuyku is Quechua for “eating and drinking, we encounter one another.” Food and drinks have historically been important mediators in the development and renewal of relationships of reciprocity in the Andean region. This article demonstrates how contemporary Andean people continue to use food and drinks to mediate encounters where knowledge transmission and community building take place. In particular, the article explains how members of a dance troupe in Cusco, Peru, use food and drinks to integrate its new members into the dance troupe, teach them the traditions of the group, and explore and (re)define their relationships of reciprocity. By sharing food and drinks, dancers connect their Quechua heritage with their lived experiences to explore and (re)shape their own identities. The article employs a research methodology that centers local epistemology, particularly the Quechua concept of tinkuy, defined as an encounter of different elements that creates something new.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Alzate family, of Medellín, Colombia, grasped the magnetism of the Natural Man (a malleable myth with porous edges that combines both the Edenic and the cannibalistic visions of indigenous peoples) and its economic potential and orchestrated a family craft business of fake pre-Columbian pottery. They created pieces that would engage in dialogue with collectors’, anthropologists’, museums’, and tourists’ desires and imaginaries, as well as authenticity criteria, about indigenous pre-Columbian peoples. This article shows the relationship between these forgeries’ production, circulation, and consumption and the ways Latin American indigenous peoples have been conceived of by others. Moreover, this research stresses how authentic fakes, together with official and popular discourses and images, certain exhibition and validation rhetorics, and other mises-en-scène construct what is sacralized as uncontaminated, original, and traditional. Such fakes operate politically by undermining social hierarchies linked to essentialized race and identity.

Este ensayo discute el arte de Brus Rubio, artista amazónico huitoto-murui, quien en sus trabajos informa cómo su cultura entiende su historia, incluidos sus momentos de explotación, tradiciones, creencias y presente. Para ilustrar las diferencias entre sus obras y el discurso de la Amazonía más común en el pasado, incluyo, también, una discusión sobre la manera en que se caracterizaba a las poblaciones indígenas en la zona a principios del siglo XX —en torno, principalmente, al debate de los crímenes del Putumayo. En Rubio se evidencia un choque entre “historias oficiales” —saberes verticales que explican una realidad sin ser parte de ella ni aceptarla como interlocutora válida— y la de la comunidad —reflejado en estas obras como un saber horizontal, en que se incluye las voces que suelen no ser escuchadas. Así, la obra de Rubio presenta un nuevo modelo para entender la historia y el presente de la Amazonía.

Este artigo busca compreender o legado autoritário brasileiro e sua relação com os recentes episódios de censura às artes. Para tal, o estudo realiza um levantamento das produções culturais censuradas e/ou alvo de ataques de grupos conservadores no período entre junho de 2017 e março de 2020. Foram consideradas as produções que se enquadraram em três critérios: foram alvo de ação conservadora de julgamento ou criminalização da arte; tiveram repercussão nacional na mídia mainstream; envolveram reação e/ou mobilização em defesa das manifestações artísticas. Argumentamos que o atual cenário de ruptura democrática aflorou o passado autoritário do país, o que contribuiu por desencadear diversos episódios de censura. Partimos dos conceitos de autoritarismo, censura e liberdade de expressão aliados à análise de conteúdo para empreender tal reflexão.