Category: Issue #1 | Fall/Winter 2022

Unlearning el M(U)Chismo Cubano: How Grotesque Imagery Reveals the Paradoxes of Post-Revolution Masculinities in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s El rey de la Habana and Tomás Alea’s Fresa y chocolate

Posted on

Rebecca Barnes As the title indicates with the word mucho, machismo is associated with exaggerated masculinity: a lot of bravado and stoicism. Psychoanalytically, machismo is interpreted as “a reaction to deep-seated fears of inadequacy and latent homosexuality,” which results in the exaggeration of physical and personality traits traditionally thought to be masculine (Basham 127). In …

Notes from the Field: Everyday Performances of the Guatemala-Mexico Border in the Selva Lacandona

Posted on

Alicia Barceinas Cruz Early one morning in June, I joined a group of volunteers to work on a potrero (a piece of land with cattle pasture) neighboring the Guatemala-Mexico border. We spent the previous afternoon carefully packing seedlings of tropical trees in a rustic nursery in the Selva Lacandona, in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. …

Why Transdisciplinarity?

Posted on

Kata Beilin LACIS Review was conceived by a group of graduate students who took a LACIS seminar focused on Inter and Trans-disciplinary Latin American Studies between 2019 and 2021. It has not been easy to bring a new publication to life and we have done it slowly, but here it is. Welcome to the first …

Magic Circle of Education: Twenty Years of Telling the Cartonera Story I Heard from My Student

Posted on

Ksenija Bilbija Some twenty years ago, in 2003, a student in one of my undergraduate classes brought to my attention a strange 14-page long book that looked like something his grade school sister could have made at home (hand painted cover included!) and asked me if he could write a final class paper about it. …

Psique, Eros y Poiesis: Entre Literatura y Psicoanálisis

Posted on

Beatriz L. Botero En mi trabajo más reciente publicado en el libro The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis (2022), hago una revisión de la literatura latinoamericana a partir de cuatro conceptos del psicoanálisis: voyeurismo, exhibicionismo, sadismo y masoquismo. Todos estos conceptos referidos al dolor y al cuerpo. ¿Quién mira y disfruta del dolor? ¿Quién …

Food, Medicine, or Poison?: Understanding Relationships Between Apazote (Dysphania Ambrosioides) and Communities Across Guatemala

Posted on

Tabitha Faber One of the hallmarks of colonialism, and of Western hegemony embedded within colonialism, is the impulse to essentialize in order to assimilate. Ideas, technologies, and lifeways from other cultures are broken down to their smallest parts to more easily integrate them into one totalizing Western framework. One framework, though, cannot hold the vast …

Rebeldes y Valientes: Desigualdad de Género en la Práctica Cinematográfica Peruana (1913-2019)

Posted on

Gabriela C. Yepes-Rossel A fines del 2019, el Centro Cultural de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú me propuso organizar una exhibición sobre las mujeres del cine peruano, en el marco del 24 Festival de Cine de Lima del siguiente año.  Tenía solo algunos meses para prepararme – la muestra tendría lugar en agosto- pero …

Changing Dynamics of Race, Class, and Politics in Brazil and South Africa

Posted on

Gay Seidman South Africa and Brazil, two of the world’s most unequal countries, both have long histories of settler colonialism and racialized dispossession, and forced labor. But when both countries finally democratized roughly three decades ago, their popular leaders approached inequality in very different ways. In South Africa, apartheid had long enshrined white minority rule, …

Measuring Agroecological Performance of Dairy Cattle Systems in the Peruvian Amazon

Posted on

Dante M. Pizarro, Carlos A. Gomez, & Michel A. Wattiaux Abstract Agriculture’s contribution to climate change and social injustice related food systems have become major societal concerns around the globe. However, there is increasing evidence that agroecological practices can contribute to improving the sustainability, resilience, and equity of agriculture and food systems. Using a recently …

Rizoma: Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology, and Science

Posted on

Azucena Castro & Gianfranco Selgas Rizoma: Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology, and Science is an emerging environmental humanities web-based platform for dialogue, discussion, and exchange of ideas on issues concerning the relationships between art, ecology, and science in the Latin American context. Rizoma aims to nurture a radical and critical space to speculate and …