Lost in Santa Martha. Limitaciones para una etnografía en una cárcel de mujeres

En este artículo propongo un examen de algunos de los obstáculos establecidos por las autoridades penitenciarias para llevar a cabo un proyecto etnográfico en una cárcel de mujeres de la Ciudad de México. Mi intención es plantear la importancia de formas de investigación-acción en contextos que, como el mexicano, se ven afectados por una profunda crisis de los aparatos del Estado –en particular presto atención a los sistemas educativo, penal y de justicia- que impacta con mayor severidad a grupos vulnerables como es el caso de las mujeres en reclusión que están en el centro de este estudio de caso.     

Migración,lucha por la vivienda y transnacionalismo socio-político: El caso de Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio

Transnationalism is, within Mexican migration studies, the predominant perspective to explain collective action undertaken by Mexicans in the United States. It takes into account the Mexican “diaspora's” interest and political participation in their hometowns. This article challenges transnationalism's basic tenet and proposes, instead, the notion of socio-political transnationalism. Nevertheless, the article emphasizes on how migrants fist act collectively to improve their living conditions in the host societies, rather than organizing around their ties with their homeland. This kind of organizing does not imply indifference towards the situation in their country of origin. It does mean, however, that the transnational perspective falls into a second plane. To illustrate, we will depict the history of Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, an immigrants' organization in the City of New York, principally Mexican based, and their struggle against the gentrifying attempts taking place in East Harlem. We will also look at their political vision and the links they have created with organizations in Mexico.     

Sobre l’essència del gènere líric: una reflexió teòrica a l’entorn de la paraula poètica en el llindar de l’experimentació

Abstract

Aquest article defensa que la impossibilitat de definir el gènere líric deriva del mateix caràcter experimental de la praxi poètica, que indaga en els signes amb què opera en un context de màxima expressivitat, i amb independència de la conjuntura històrica i de les actituds deliberadament rupturistes. Així doncs, per bé que s’hi analitzen algunes de les pràctiques d’experimentació habituals – com l’acostament de la poesia a la pintura, la música, o la matemàtica –, el que es resol és que la mateixa tradició poètica suscita ja una fèrtil activitat exploratòria: promou, per una banda, la revisió de tipologies estereotipades; i per una altra, la indagació en la capacitat de la llengua d’expressar el no conscient, i de conceptualitzar la realitat tot reinterpretant-la. L’estudi para esment, però, en el territori català, i sobretot en el vessant poètic d’Albert Ràfols-Casamada, i en els poemes Uh, d’Enric Casasses, i Bratislava o Bucarest, de Manel Ollé.     

Integración,mestizaje y nacionalismo en el México revolucionario. Forjando Patria de Manuel Gamio: la diversidad subordinada al afán de unidad

This paper analyzes the integration program in Manuel Gamio's Forjando Patria as a national project arising in the historical context of revolutionary Mexico, where cultural diversity is conditional on the idea of unity. Firstly, we trace the relationship of the integration program with its history, the concepts of “mestizaje” and “mestizo” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Secondly, we analyze the influence of some European models of nationality and socio-cultural change on Gamio's integrationism, in the context of socio-ethnic heterogeneity in Mexico during 1916. Finally, we highlight the links between the concepts of cultural diversity become visible, nation and nationalism in this author's work.     

Borders Inscribed on the Body: Geopolitics and the Everyday in the Work of Martín Kohan

This article analyses the critique of militaristic geopolitical worldviews in two novels by Martín Kohan (Dos veces junio, 2002 and Ciencias morales, 2007). Drawing on ‘everyday nationalism’ and the insights of feminist geopolitics, it explores these novels' use of space and gendered violence to present Argentina's 1976–1983 dictatorship and the Falklands/Malvinas war as unexceptional manifestations of the relationship between the state and its citizens. This reading foregrounds Kohan's emphasis on the origins and consequences of national identity discourses, framed as powerful narratives capable of generating a vision of the nation-state that privileges the security of borders over bodies.     

‘A Pioneer in the Struggle for Social Justice’: Manuel Larraín and Transnational Catholic Activism in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s

This article explores the development of inter-American Catholicism during the 1950s and 1960s. It analyses the role of the Chilean Catholic bishop Manuel Larraín (1900–1966) in his efforts to disseminate his diagnosis of underdevelopment in Latin America and to establish links with the Catholic world in the United States. Based on a review of his writings, the American press and documentation from Catholic organisations, it is suggested that the Chilean bishop advocated the implementation of social reforms and American collaboration to prevent the advance of communism and strengthen Catholicism on the continent.     

Entre la pampa del lenguaje y el alambrado de la escritura: la mancha roja como síntoma de la ambigüedad de lo real en La ocasión de Juan José Saer

La presencia recurrente del color rojo en La ocasión de Saer desempeña una función desestabilizadora en relación a la representación figurativa. En el artículo se establecen analogías entre esta función y el elemento voluble, no mimético de la pintura que el pensador e historiador de arte, Georges Didi-Huberman, denomina como “pan” en contraste con el detalle, categoría asociada con el carácter icónico de la pintura. Al igual que el “pan”, las manchas rojas en la novela apuntan a la dimensión de lo real que se resiste a la legibilidad y señala los límites de la narrativa realista. Saer se vale de contrastes cromáticos para aludir a tensiones políticas y epistemólogicas y a las paradojas de escribir una novela situada en el siglo diecinueve pero incorporando la experiencia literaria del siglo veinte.     

Mining against the State? Gold Mining and Emerging Notions of Territoriality in Southeastern Venezuela

The current economic crisis in Venezuela has drawn members of Pemón communities to the practice of informal (illegal) gold mining, as mining, undertaken alongside other ‘traditional’ economic activities, is a more effective source of income than waged jobs. The increased involvement of Pemón people in informal mining has encouraged their partial retreat from the state's frontiers, and it reveals transformations in the ways in which local people imagine and relate to the Venezuelan state. These transformations are embodied in both a reorganisation of the space, and in burgeoning notions of land ownership.     

Blessed be Discord, 1910: Ricardo Flores Magón's Manifesto Mode

This article explores how Ricardo Flores Magón used images to transpose the graphic tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican political journalism into prose by deploying montage to craft both allegorical and prismatic images: while certain images are divorced from their original context and take on a new life, others, analogically related to a single idea, appear prismatically in fragments on the page. The affinities Flores Magón's writing shared with modernismo and the historical avant garde – as intensification of the former and precursor of the latter – have been a blind spot for literary history, to which this article attempts to restore the importance of his writing.     

Las diásporas transnacionales: ¿una nueva era o un nuevo mito?

The numberless unprecedented situations attached today to the concept of transnational diaspora arise the debate of whether or not this phenomenon signals a new era. Our own contention is that it does represent a factor of new kinds of heterogenization of both the societal reality and of the diasporas themselves, as worldwide entities. It is in this dialectic perspective that we describe transnational diasporas as causes of discontinuity in our world and point out to the qualitative change in the social fabrics that they represent. Among other aspects, dual or threefold homeness that is bound to the transnational condition signifies for diasporans a slipping away from the totalistic character of the commitment and view of the nation that the nation-state requires of its citizens. When viewed in its multiplicity, the cohabitation under the same societal roof of a priori alien socio-cultural entities yields a configuration that is not uniform in every setting, but which still responds in its essentials to the new reality experienced by many a contemporary society. To illustrate this approach, this paper compares four well-known contemporary transnational diasporas namely, the Muslim, African, Hispanic and Chinese.     

El análisis comparativo: algunos aportes latinoamericanos en la segunda mitad del siglo XX

In this article the importance of comparative analysis is explored as a tool of understanding for Latin American reality, through the identification of some problem axes that dominated the Latin American socio-political thought during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, we focus on the second half of the last century, when, from a historical and sociological perspective, these axes appear reformulated in the work of authors like Sergio Bagú, Antonio Garcia, and Fernando H. Cardoso, through concepts such as “commercial capitalism”, “situations of dependency”, and “agrarian reform”