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Technology: Artificial Intelligence and Beyond
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Recent Articles
Puerto Rico’s Act 60: More Than Economics, a Human Rights Issue
For my senior research analysis project, I chose to examine Puerto Rico’s Act 60 policy. To gain a personal perspective on its impact, I interviewed Nyia Chusan, a Puerto Rican graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, who shared her experiences of how gentrification has changed her island:
Financial Institutions: Strengthening the Rule of Law in Latin America
Latin American countries continue to accumulate laws, regulations and rules. These legal instruments need to be implemented and then enforced.
A Review of Las Luchas por la Memoria: Contra las Violencias en México
Over the past two decades, human rights activists have created multiple sites to mark the death and disappearance of thousands in Mexico’s ongoing “war on drugs.” On January 11, 2014, I observed the creation of a major one in my hometown of Monterrey, Mexico. The date marked the third anniversary of the forced disappearance of college student Roy Rivera Hidalgo. His mother, Leticia Hidalgo, stood alongside other families of the disappeared organized as FUNDENL in a plaza close to the governor’s office. At dusk, she firmly read a collective letter that would become engraved in a plaque on site. “We have decided to take this plaza to remind the government of the urgency with which it should act.”
From Our Current Issue
Water Stewardship Is Strategy, Not Philanthropy: A Field Note from Latin America
The first time I sat across from a farmer in rural Latin America, water sat with us too—silent, almost taken for granted.
The AI-Era Digital Divide: Listening to Mexican Youth Voices
One Mexican teenager admitted in an on-line survey, “To summarize information or conduct research, honestly, it makes my work much faster, but it does worsen my research skills.” She was referring to AI as an educational tool.
Technology and Collective Memory: Commemorating the Unidad Popular
The one thousand days of Salvador Allende’s presidency, from 1970–1973, marked a period of political innovation in Chile.
Spotlight
Perspectives in Times of Change
Check out these reflections on social, economic, cultural and political transformations in Latin America, the Caribbean and Latinx communities in the United States.
Extractivism and Colonialism in Argentina: A View from the Patagonia
It was snowing the day in early August when I arrived at Lof Pillan Mahuiza, a Mapuche-Tehuelche community around 60 miles from Esquel, the provincial capital of Chubut, Argentina.
A Chair in the Room: The Semiotics of Sitting
In Latin America, the chair occupies a central and often overlooked place in everyday life. It is present in rural homes and public plazas, inside crowded city schools and at the edges of municipal offices.
Afro-Latinidades and World Diasporas: Community-Building through Public Programs and Curricular Development
Blackness has reshaped the fabric of the Americas. From the Middle Passage to contemporary diasporas, Blackness has constituted a transhemispheric demographic, cultural and historical reality.
StudEnt Views
Beyond Presence: Building Kichwa Community at Harvard
I recently had the pleasure of reuniting with Américo Mendoza-Mori, current assistant professor at St Olaf’s College, at my current institution and alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Mendoza-Mori, who was invited to Madison by the university’s Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program, shared how Indigenous languages and knowledges can reshape the ways universities teach, research and engage with communities, both local and abroad.
Of Salamanders and Spirits
I probably could’ve chosen a better day to visit the CIIDIR-IPN for the first time. It was the last week of September and the city had come to a full stop. Citizens barricaded the streets with tarps and plastic chairs, and protest banners covered the walls of the Edificio de Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, all demanding fair wages for the state’s educators. It was my first (but certainly not my last) encounter with the fierce political activism that Oaxaca is known for.
Public Universities in Peru
Visits to two public universities in Peru over the last two summers helped deepen my understanding of the system and explore some ideas for my own research. The first summer, I began visiting the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM) to learn about historical admissions processes and search for lists of applicants and admitted students. I wanted to identify those students and follow their educational, professional and political trajectories at one of the country’s most important universities. In the summer of 2025, I once again visited UNMSM in Lima and traveled to Cusco to visit the National University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC). This time, I conducted interviews with professors and student representatives to learn about their experiences and perspectives on higher-education policies such as faculty salary reforms and the processes for the hiring and promotion of professors.
Book ReviewS
A Review of A Promising Past: Remodeling Fictions in Parque Central, Caracas
A beacon of modern urban transformation and a laboratory of social reproduction, Parque Central in Caracas is a monumental enclave of 20th-century Venezuelan oil-fueled progress. The monumental urban structure also symbolizes the enduring architectural struggle against entropy, acute in a country where the state routinely neglects its role in providing sustained infrastructural maintenance and social care. Like other ambitious modernizing projects of the Venezuelan petrostate, Parque Central’s modernity was doomed due to the state’s dependence on the global oil economy’s cycles of boom and bust.
A Review of Bodies Found in Various Places
This bilingual anthology of Elvira Hernández, translated by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher and published by Cardboard House Press, offers a comprehensive entry point into the work of the Chilean poet. The translators’ preface offers a valuable introduction that provides important context to her work and explains aspects of her poetry present in the volume, such as Hernández’s self-effacing “ethics of invisibility,” an ars poetica in which the poems stand in front while the poet hangs back, in a call to observe rather than to be observed. In this sense, Hernández has long written from the edges of Chile’s public life, partly by choice, partly by necessity: her birth name is Rosa María Teresa Adriasola Olave, but she adopted the pseudonym of Elvira Hernández under the Pinochet dictatorship.
A Review of An Ordinary Landscape of Violence
When first reading the title, An Ordinary Landscape of Violence, I asked myself if there is really anything “ordinary” about a landscape of violence? Preity R. Kumar argues that violence is endemic to Guyana’s colonial history and is something that women loving women (WLW) contend with and resist in their personal and public lives.
DRCLAS Podcast: Faculty Voices
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