European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
ERLACS – European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies is an Open Access, scientific journal. It publishes peer-reviewed articles in English and Spanish. Contributions reflect substantial empirical research and/or are theoretically innovative concerning major debates within social science research (understood in the broadest sense, including history and economics) on Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to research articles, ERLACS includes Special Collections, 'Explorations' (a section in which new themes are presented and new debates are stimulated), review essays, book reviews, and film reviews. Articles are published online soon after they have been accepted. Please see our Guidelines for Authors Sign up for our newsletter! Special Collections: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas, guest edited by Eveline Dürr & Adrienne Johnson. Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and upcoming developments. Carceral citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean, guest edited by Caroline Mary Parker, Julienne Weegels Heritage, protests and coloniality in contemporary Latin America, guest edited by Manuela Badilla, J. Renée Clark, Robert Mason Violent configurations of power in Mexico, guest edited by Adéle Blazquez, Romain Le Cour Grandmaison Venezuela's crisis from global perspectives, guest edited by Benedicte Bull, Antulio Rosales Elite and popular responses to a left in crisis, guest edited by Thomas Chiasson-LeBel, Manuel Larrabure Mega-projects, contentious action, and policy change in Latin America, guest edited by Eduardo Silva, Maria Akchurin, Anthony J. Bebbington ERLACS – Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe es una revista científica de Acceso Abierto. Difunde artículos bajo revisión de pares en inglés y español. Las contribuciones reflejan la investigación empírica sustancial y/o son teóricamente innovadoras con respecto a los grandes debates dentro de la investigación social (en el sentido más amplio, incluyendo la historia y la economía) en América Latina y el Caribe. Además de los artículos de investigación, ERLACS incluye Números Especiales, 'Exploraciones' (una sección en la que se presentan nuevos temas con el fin de estimular nuevos debates), ensayos de reseña, reseñas de libros y críticas de cine. Los artículos se publican en línea poco después de su aceptación. ¡Suscríbase a nuestro boletín de noticias!
Gender in Colombian development policies (1998-2026): Continuity and change
Section: Articles Keywords: Colombia, gender, policies, development, intersectionality, ferminism, feminismo, interseccionalidad, género, desarrollo, políticas This article examines how gender is constructed in development policy over time. It draws on the concept of epistemic inertia, where long-held paradigms persist despite new discursive framings. Based on this concept, we use discourse analysis to explore the (dis)continuities of gender logics within the National Development Plans (NDPs) of Colombian presidents Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002), Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010), Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018), Iván Duque (2018–2022), and Gustavo Petro (2022–2026). We find that Colombian NDPs tend to reproduce entrenched notions of women, family, and heteronormativity. Yet these traditional gender notions coexist with rhetorical and conceptual policy innovations that rearticulate how gender is framed – particularly in recurring domains such as violence, peace, and family – by introducing intersectional language and more substantive policy design. By tracing these dynamics, the article shows how gender approaches in public policy change, often while remaining tied to enduring cultural assumptions.
Copyright (c) 2026 Felipe Jaramillo Ruiz, Alberto Lioy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cultura preventiva: Preventive healing in the Northwestern Amazon, Brazil
Section: Special Issues Categories: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas Keywords: healing, Northwestern Amazonia, cosmology, shamanism, Indigenous anthropology, cosmología, chamanismo, antropología indígena Indigenous anthropologists from the Upper Rio Negro call what their religious specialists do a “preventive culture” (cultura preventiva), referring to a specific temporality that structures their strategies of healing. Their form of healing reaches back to a mythical primordium, drawing on the transformative power of creation time to secure existence in the present. Preventive healing in Northwestern Amazonia is based on a cyclic understanding of time, tantamount to accompanying foreseeable, periodic moments of transformation at every cosmic level. Regular interventions through healing methods, or “applications”, provided by ritual specialists (kumuã) offer protection against the consequences of inherent conflicts within the temporal and spatial framework of the cosmos. Such “preventive healing” in Northwestern Amazonia can also be seen as healing of damage done during creation time.
Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas
Copyright (c) 2026 João Paulo Lima Barreto, Silvio Sanches Barreto, Jaime Moura Fernandes, Rosijane Fernandes Moura, Wolfgang Kapfhammer, Eveline Dürr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The concept of paju in Napo, Ecuador: Scaling the healing powers of plants, objects and climate
Section: Special Issues Categories: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas Keywords: healing, money, non-human, Ecuador, sanación, dinero, no-humano This article explores the Amazonian Kichwa concept of paju in Ecuador’s Napo Province, contributing to discussions on the extension of individual bodies to social relations, economic exchanges, and environmental conditions. While anthropological scholarship has often contrasted paju with shamanic knowledge by portraying it as feminine, cooperative, and oriented towards reciprocity, this article complicates this binary. By challenging the established masculine/feminine opposition between shamanic knowledge and paju, the article offers a more nuanced account of Indigenous healing practices. Using ethnographic evidence, I demonstrate that paju, like shamanic practices, entails the accumulation of power and, at times, strategic control over knowledge. I argue that the differences between the two lie not in gender or competition but in the attribution of healing powers to different entities and the offering of distinct explanations for illnesses and climatic changes.
Copyright (c) 2026 Markos Panayiotou https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘Conecta con el río’: Perspectivas de cuidado para la sanación y la transformación socioecológica
Section: Special Issues Categories: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas Keywords: feminist care, socio-ecological healing, multi-scalar transformation, socio-environmental justice, urban rivers, cuidado femenino, sanación socioecológica, transformación multiescala, justicia socioambiental, ríos urbanos This article examines care practices around the Santa Catarina River in Monterrey, Mexico, and their potential as forms of socio-ecological healing in urban contexts shaped by environmental inequalities. Drawing on the healing approach developed in this Special Issue, as well as insights from feminist geography and care studies, the article analyses the tensions between dominant approaches to flood control and urban infrastructure and forms of citizen-led resistance that propose alternative ways of relating to the river. Based on urban ethnographic fieldwork (2024-2025) and documentary analysis, the article focuses on the actions of the socio-environmental movement Un Río en el Río, particularly its Conecta con el Río walks. The analysis shows how these practices articulate material, relational, and political dimensions of care, linking embodied experiences, urban relations and socio-environmental struggles over the river’s future. It argues that such practices contribute to reimagining care as a form of ecological and collective repair, capable of strengthening relationships among human, more-than-human life and the territory.
Copyright (c) 2026 Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Planetary healing and care through popular education:Transformative pathways shaped by waste picker-led action
Section: Special Issues Categories: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas Keywords: healing, waste pickers, popular education, grassroots knowledge, knowledge co-creation, sanación, educación popular, conocimiento popular, cocreación del conocimiento Increasing global waste generation is both a visible manifestation and a systemic indicator of the contemporary ecological crisis and climate change. In this context, waste pickers are critical, yet often overlooked, in environmental governance. By recovering recyclable materials and reducing reliance on landfills, they advance circular economy practices, conserve natural resources, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite these contributions, waste pickers continue to face precarious working conditions, social stigma, and exclusion from formal recognition and decision-making. Established in 2023, UNICATA, the University for and with Waste Pickers, emerged as a transformative response. Grounded in Buen Vivir and Paulo Freire’s popular education, UNICATA strengthens waste pickers’ protagonism and enhances waste management. With two classrooms in Brazil, it equips participants to influence policy and expand regenerative practices. This paper presents initial outcomes, showing how popular education advances environmental justice, planetary healing, and relational care through grassroots knowledge and collective action.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jutta Gutberlet, Lenín Alfonso Morales, Leandro Luiz Giatti, Lucas Assumpção da Silva, Alexandre Mendes Domingos, Samantha S. Alves Dias https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Educación en tiempo de catástrofe: Estrategias de sanacióna través del currículo intercultural chileno
Section: Special Issues Categories: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas Keywords: body, memory, Chile, juegos ancestrales mapuches, educación intercultural, sanación colectiva, cuerpo, memoria This paper examines the incorporation of ancestral Mapuche games into formal Chilean education as a pedagogical strategy for collective healing and social transformation. It argues that the inclusion of traditional games must move beyond isolated or symbolic initiatives toward a systematic implementation involving public policies, teacher education, and active collaboration with Indigenous communities. From an intercultural and decolonial perspective, the playing body is understood as a key mediator of the memory–identity–territory triad and as a living archive of historical experiences and knowledge. The study proposes that ancestral games function as a transformative healing process by challenging cultural hegemony and educational coloniality, activating community agency, and fostering cultural recognition as a basis for social justice. Although grounded in local contexts, these practices have multiscalar trans-formative potential, contributing to the reconfiguration of power relations and the development of critical intercultural education in contemporary Chile.
Copyright (c) 2026 Valeska Díaz-Soto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Healing as political care:Kallawaya ethnomedicine in Bolivia’s plurinational state
Section: Special Issues Categories: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas Keywords: Kallawaya, healing, Bolivia, recognition, decolonisation, sanación, decolonización, reconocimiento Bolivia’s transformation into a plurinational state, explicitly recognising the existence and rights of its Indigenous peoples, was ideologically underpinned by an agenda to decolonise quasi-colonial political structures while being unable to escape them. This article engages with Dürr and Rohrer’s call to recognise Indigenous practices of healing as crucial responses to the planetary crisis, through ethnographically examining how the Kallawaya, an Andean Indigenous nation famed for expertise as healers, engages with the environment and political institutions that impact life at different levels of scale, through an idiom of healing. Kallawaya healing practices act on recursive relations between the human and more-than-human world, constituting forms of socio-ecological repair that address both colonial legacies and ongoing disruptions in the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Such healing imagines socio-ecological transformation beyond resilience or adaptation, suggesting that decolonial healing must be understood as a project of world-making that is at once political, ecological, and ontological.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jonathan Alderman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Recognition, healing, and co-stewardship: The case of landless tribes and conservation in California
Section: Special Issues Categories: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas Keywords: recognition, healing, Indigenous peoples, Amah Mutsun, California, reconocimiento, sanación, pueblos indígenas We develop the notion of “justice as healing” and draw on the concept of “recognition”, with its internal and external dimensions, to forge pathways towards healthier relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Our analysis is rooted in the case of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of California (AMTB) – a non-federally recognised Indigenous Tribe that has experienced successive phases of genocide and assimilation by colonial powers of Spain, Russia, Mexico, and the United States. Combining qualitative research methods with Indigenous political theory, we present an environmental narrative of the AMTB that emphasises the ways the Tribe has resisted cultural assimilation and resource extraction since the late 1880s. We argue that recognition, together with Indigenous strategic engagement and coalition-building with settler entities, are important components to the healing journeys of Indigenous peoples in the United States, Latin America, and globally.
Copyright (c) 2026 Adrienne Johnson, Alexii Sigona https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
I’ll Samba Someplace Else: A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity and Displacement in São Paulo,
Section: Book Reviews | Reseñas Keywords: Brazil I’ll Samba Someplace Else: A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity and Displacement in São Paulo, by Andrew G. Britt. Duke University Press, 2026
Copyright (c) 2026 Mirtha Lorena del Castillo Durand https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Brazilian Amazonia in Change I and The Brazilian Amazonia in Change II
Section: Book Reviews | Reseñas Keywords: Amazonia The Brazilian Amazonia in Change I: Opening Up and Colonisation in the 1970s, by Jan M. G. Kleinpenning, Transcript Publishing, 2025 The Brazilian Amazonia in Change II: Five Decades of Exploitation, Deforestation and Attempts at Sustainable Development, by Gerd Kohlhepp, Transcript Publishing, 2025
Copyright (c) 2026 Frederico Brandão https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Conceptualising healing in human-environment entanglements
Section: Special Issues Categories: Healing in the damage: Towards novel perspectives on human-environment entanglements in the Americas Keywords: healing, enviromental crisis, disaster recovery, decoloniality, Anthropocene, sanación, crisis medioambiental, recuperación de desastre, deolonialidad, antropoceno This special collection advances “healing” as an analytical lens for examining (non)human–environment relations amid planetary crisis in the Americas. By shifting attention from damage to the practices that seek to heal disrupted relations, it argues that centring Indigenous and local perspectives can generate innovative responses to environmental challenges and broader social transformation. Drawing on de-colonial and feminist approaches, the collection conceptualises healing through three intersecting dimensions: a) its transformative potential; b) its emergent, non-linear temporalities; c) its material dimensions, including the diverse forms of knowledge it activates. Further, we also discuss the challenges of using and translating notions of “healing” across cosmologies and different socio-political contexts. We therefore understand healing not as a static framework or a solution but rather acknowledge its inherent incompleteness and view it as a continuously evolving process.
Copyright (c) 2026 Eveline Dürr, Adrienne Johnson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Between the Individual, the Familiar, and the Public in Mexico: An Ethnography of the Mobilization to Search for the Disappeared
Section: Articles Keywords: disappearances, colective action, violence, Mexico, desaparecidos, acción colectiva, etnografía, violencia, ethnography, México The article presents an ethnographic study of collective action and mobilisation in the search for disappeared persons in Zacatecas, Mexico, between 2022 and 2025. Drawing on a dialogue with the existing literature, it argues that mobilisation for the search constitutes a form of dignifying agency embedded in ongoing tensions and negotiations across the individual, familial, and public spheres. The results are situated within a discussion with the specialised literature in Mexico, identifying three ways in which these tensions and negotiations manifest: acting out of necessity; containing emotions within the private sphere; and confronting and negotiating with the State.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jairo Antonio López https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
La pervivencia de la memoria: Una cosmopolítica del daño y la justicia en el movimiento indígena del Cauca, Colombia
Section: Articles Keywords: memoria, justicia restaurativa, comunidades indígenas, territorio, cosmopolítica, memory, restorative justice, indigenous communities, territory, cosmopolitics Abstract: The survival of memory: a cosmopolitics of harm and justice in the Indigenous movement of Cauca, Colombia This article analyses the spiritual repertoires of memory developed within the territories of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) in the context of the harms caused by the protracted violence of the Colombian armed conflict. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research, the article examines the spiritual practices that shape this Indigenous memory as expressions of a political cosmology seeking to preserve and repair the network of relationships that constitute Indigenous territory. The notion of pervivencia is analysed as an active and relational affirmation of forms of life specific to the Indigenous world, in which the territory acts as a subject of memory and an agent of re-harmonisation. The article concludes that the Indigenous memory analysed here constitutes a living, relational and territorial repertoire that cannot be fully represented either by the categories of law or by the frameworks through which memory is understood within the established system of transitional justice.
Copyright (c) 2026 Gabriel Alberto Ruiz Romero (Translator); Pedro Jurado Castaño, Daniel Castaño Zapata https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Little pains” and endurance: health narratives and practices among migrants in transit through Mexico
Section: Articles Keywords: migración en tránsito, México, enfermedad, cuidado, sufrimiento, transit migration, care, health, suffering, Mexico How do migrants in transit through Mexico interpret and manage the injuries and diseases they experience on their route? We argue that migrants in transit attempt to minimise their ill-health while at the same time engaging in health practices to keep moving to arrive at their destination. Through ethnographic research in migrant shelters in Mexico, we examine the reasons migrants give to minimise their injuries: 1) they believe pain is contingent to transit; 2) their tolerance to pain is informed by how they tolerated pain and disease in Central America; and 3) they choose temporary pain to avoid falling into more serious crises. At the same time, however, migrants are engaging in preventative care, self-medicating, in-group care, and accessing safe medical services in Mexico. We show the importance of noticing how different forms of suffering are naturalised while crossing Mexico and how the social sources of suffering are obscured.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alejandra Díaz de León, John Doering-White https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A History of the Aviation Industry in Latin America: Nationalism, Develop-mentalism and Neoliberalism in Chile
Section: Book Reviews | Reseñas A History of the Aviation Industry in Latin America: Nationalism, Developmentalism and Neoliberalism in Chile, by Diego Barría Traverso. Routledge, 2024
Copyright (c) 2026 Jorge Gibert https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Section: Film reviews | Críticas de cine Frida, directed by Carla Gutierrez. Mexico and the United States, 2024.
Copyright (c) 2026 Maurice Fitzpatrick https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Life and Death in Latin American Cities: The Necropolis at Stake
Section: Book Reviews | Reseñas Life and Death in Latin American Cities: The Necropolis at Stake, by Christien Klaufus. Bristol University Press, 2025
Copyright (c) 2026 María José Peláez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Section: Book Reviews | Reseñas Keywords: Colombia, river, río Artery: Racial ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River, by Austin Zeiderman, Duke University Press, 2025
Copyright (c) 2025 10.32992/erlacs.11474 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Section: Book Reviews | Reseñas Keywords: love, mexico, porfiriato, history Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City: A Social History of Working-Class Courtship, by Michael Matthews, University of Florida Press, 2025
Copyright (c) 2025 Kevin Anzzolin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Creating partisans. The organizational roots of new parties in Latin America
Section: Book Reviews | Reseñas Keywords: organizational, partisan, parties Creating Partisans. The Organizational Roots of New Parties in Latin America. By Mathias Poertner, Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pablo Velasco-Oña https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Section: Special Issues Categories: Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments Keywords: Latin America, Caribbean Since its inception in 1965, the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (ERLACS) has sought to advance global academic knowledge of Latin America and the Caribbean. To commemorate the 60th anniversary of ERLACS, the Editorial Board decided to organise a special issue on “Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments”. We are very pleased with the critical and creative ideas and timely proposals presented in the nine explorations of this special issue (ERLACS issue 120, 2025). Hopefully, this collection will inspire new debates and lines of research and result in innovative articles in the coming issues of ERLACS.
Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments
Copyright (c) 2025 Barbara Hogenboom, Rebeca Fernández Rodríguez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Indigenous and Afro-descendant territorial justice claims and sociolegal mobilization in Latin America
Section: Special Issues Categories: Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments Keywords: inigenous, afro-descendant, sociolegal mobilization, territory, climate justice The multicultural and plurinational constitutional turn of the late twentieth century in Latin America recognised the rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities to land. In the face of deepening neoliberal extractivism, defence of their ancestral territories has involved attempts to enforce legal rights through recourse to the courts alongside advocacy, direct action, and strategies to strengthen place-based forms of autonomy. This essay reviews the balance of scholarship on Indigenous and Afro-descendant mobilisation for collective rights to land through the courts in Latin America and outlines areas for future research. These include the implementation gap; climate justice litigation; rights of nature; transitional justice; cuerpo-territorio; courts and the authoritarian turn; and criminalisation of protest and extrajudicial violence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rachel H. Sieder https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Urban Indigenous territoriality and the politics of climate urbanism in Latin America
Section: Special Issues Categories: Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments Keywords: decolonial urbanism, indigenous climate urbanism, territoriality, urban governance Indigenous peoples in Latin America are increasingly urban, yet state imaginaries and scholarly frameworks continue to locate indigeneity in rural spaces. This rural/urban binary is sustained by a model of neoliberal multiculturalism that celebrates cultural difference while denying Indigenous territorial agency in the city. This article challenges these assumptions by arguing that Latin American cities are emerging as key arenas in which Indigenous territoriality is being reconfigured, governed, and defended. Drawing on urban socio-political ecology, it conceptualises Indigenous urbanisation as a reconfiguration of ancestral territorial life rather than its erosion. Through an analysis of Ma-puche organisations in Santiago de Chile, among other cases, the article examines how Indigenous collectives enact territorial claims through environmental stewardship, spiritual practice, and political mobilisation. It situates these practices within uneven urban geographies of climate change, showing how Indigenous ontologies of care and reciprocity underpin resilient socio-ecological governance. The exploration proposes Indigenous climate urbanism as a praxis that contests colonial spatial orders while advancing alternative urban futures grounded in ecological collective authority. Recognising Indigenous urban territoriality as legitimate, structural, and transformative is essential for building climate-just and decolonial cities in Latin America.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dana Brablec https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The changing face of oligarchy in Latin America
Section: Special Issues Keywords: Latin America, oligarchy, technology, development, democracy This exploration analyses the evolving nature of oligarchy in Latin America amid technological change and global wealth concentration. While traditional family-based elites rooted in land, commodities, and protected industries continue to dominate, a new tech-based elite has emerged through fintech, e-commerce, and digital platforms. These actors differ from old oligarchs in origin, global mobility, and dependence on digital infrastructure, yet increasingly intersect with established elites through investment alliances and shared economic interests. The exploration argues that their power lies less in direct political intervention and more in infrastructural control over data and digital services, reinforcing new forms of dependency and state capture. Although the tech elite introduces innovation and entrepreneurial dynamism, its limited commitment to taxation, redistribution, and democratic accountability suggests continuity in wealth defence strategies. Rather than transforming power structures, Latin America faces a reconfigured oligarchy with uncertain implications for democracy and development.
Copyright (c) 2025 Benedicte Bull https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Populism and the persistence of Latin America’s underperformance
Section: Special Issues Categories: Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments Keywords: populism trap, emulation, polarisation, bandwagoning, human capital, tax structures Populism helps explain democratic and economic underperformance in the region. Far from weakening, populism may be getting stronger. It is currently being boosted by the rise of far-right populism in the United States (and Europe), which was unusual until now. I draw on theories of International Relations to discuss how the Trump administration is boosting populism in the region. Next, I review how a reinvigorated populism will likely continue hurting democracy – it radicalises the state, renders actors less tolerant of pluralism, and opens new avenues of polarisation by reinforcing cultural wars. I then discuss populism and economic development. Although it is conventional to explain populism by invoking economic underperformance, I suggest that, in the region, the causal arrow also goes the other way. Populism yields economic underperformance, which in turn fuels populism. In short, the region seems to be caught in a “populism trap”.
Copyright (c) 2026 Javier Corrales https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Section: Film reviews | Críticas de cine Keywords: brazil, vide Incompatível com a vida [Incompatible with Life], directed by Eliza Capai, Brazil, 2023
Copyright (c) 2026 Marina Cheffe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Posverdad y democracia en América Latina
Section: Special Issues Categories: Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments Keywords: post-truth, truth, academia, latin america, posverdad, democracia, verdad, democracy La posverdad ha sido vinculada a los crecientes niveles de polarización y la erosión de la práctica democrática, así también en América Latina. Esta exploración plantea la necesidad de reflexionar y estudiar el fenómeno de la posverdad y sus efectos, atendiendo a los riesgos para la vida democrática y la convivencia. En ello preguntamos concretamente cuál es el rol de la academia, como generadora de conocimiento y portadora de la verdad, en un contexto en el que la verdad pierde importancia. Con base en una breve reflexión al respecto, se postula que la academia puede reivindicarse asumiendo el esfuerzo por buscar la verdad de la mano de la necesidad de crear comprensión, tal como conceptualizada por Hannah Arendt. Por último, se presentan algunos ejemplos de prácticas innovadoras y conceptos que emergen relevantes para resistir, trastornar y solventar la cultura política de posverdad.
Copyright (c) 2025 Soledad Valdivia Rivera https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Section: Special Issues Categories: Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments Keywords: caribbean, ecology, caribe, ecología This Exploration highlights recent and emergent themes in the study of Caribbean ecologies across the social sciences and humanities. It draws particular attention to the field of black ecologies, which extends a longstanding engagement with the socio-ecological legacies of colonialism and plantation slavery, foregrounding the racialized nature of environmental harm while also underlining the various forms of worldmaking and free-dom afforded by Caribbean ecologies. After sketching the main concerns in existing analyses of Caribbean ecologies, it explores how such approaches might be connected to new avenues for research, through four subsections that focus respectively on animals, beaches, stars and spirits. In so doing, it outlines the possibility of new conversations between Caribbean, black and more-than-human theory, demonstrating how Caribbean ecological thought and practice involve explicitly political post-humanist approaches.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alana Osbourne Rivke Jaffe Olivia Gomes da Cunha Wigbertson Julian Isenia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Section: Special Issues Categories: Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments Keywords: caribbean, Latin America Studies, Europe, US Virgin Islands, identities, politics, history In principle, Latin American studies tend to include the Caribbean. In practice, however, the non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean remains off the radar. It is time to rethink this marginalisation of the closest of neighbours. If Latin American studies have – at times implicitly, at times formally – added an “and the Caribbean” into their name, they need to do more to live up to that claim. They need to do so not for the sake of fairness towards smaller countries, but because the Caribbean is central to understanding how the world, Europe and Latin America have evolved over the past 500-plus years, and continue to evolve today.
Copyright (c) 2026 Bert Hoffman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Identidad étnica, modernidad y desarrollo en América Latina
Section: Special Issues Categories: Understanding Latin America and the Caribbean: Current and Upcoming Developments Keywords: modernity, development, ethnic identity, indigenous, Latin America, modernidad, desarrollo, identidad étnica, indígena, Latinoamérica The study of the relations of domination exercised over Indigenous peoples, as well as their responses to these strategies, has been a classic theme of Latin American studies. In this article, I want to explore the possibilities this theme offers by tracing the historical interweaving of two vectors that have helped shape the meanings and signifiers of Indigenous collective identities. These are the modernity-development tandem (modernity understood as a trans-secular process and development as its contemporary derivative), and ethnicity as a political platform that forms a significant component of the strategies of the subaltern sectors.
Copyright (c) 2025 Víctor Bretón Solo de Zaldívar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0