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In 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) took up arms in Mexico against the daily oppressions and injustices faced by Indigenous Mexicans in neo-colonial political systems and juridical orders tailored to their discrimination and economic exploitation. The EZLN soon broadened its demands from local Indigenous Mexicans to encompass other socials groups oppressed by global neoliberalism. The mestizo spokesperson of the EZLN, Subcomandante Marcos, accordingly employed a comprehensive communication strategy fundamentally involving storytelling and myth-making. This paper will outline a revolutionary utopian method capable of informing anti-colonial practices emerging from Marcos' stories, which ultimately envisage a world capable of holding other worlds by reinvigorating democracy and enriching our current conceptions of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the beginning of the twentieth century, after its rapid insertion into the vortex of oil and mineral extraction, Venezuela was forced to re-think its relationship with nature. This process of rethink, characterised by an eagerness for modernisation, resulted in a series of discourses focused on Venezuela's Amazonia as a repository of possibilities. This paper analyses how these possibilities were channelled through the metaphor of el secreto de la tierra, tracing an early reading of the ideological configuration of Venezuela and its Amazonia as a land of inexhaustible material and poetic richness. This metaphor was voiced by a set of socio-ecological discourses written about the Venezuelan Amazon, including the essay on Venezuelan geography and culture by Enrique Bernardo Núñez Una ojeada al mapa de Venezuela (1939). The paper focuses on the representation of this region as a set of discursive constructions entangled with the naturalisation of the modernising ideal that has fuelled the imaginaries of material growth and rentier capitalism in Venezuela. The concluding remarks will point to how such a reading can help us to understand a discursive and poetic radicalisation embedded in conflicting approaches to the nature-culture confluence in the Venezuelan Amazon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Hispanic Research Journal is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Stakeholders worldwide commit to the goal of sustainable development and transport, and to the promotion of public transport (PT) as one backbone of sustainable transport. Evaluation frameworks have been developed to aid municipalities and operators in purposefully shaping their PT systems. These frameworks differ greatly in their scope and consideration of the different sustainability dimensions, and in addition, they focus on industrialized countries. The goal of this study is to provide a systematic overview of existing frameworks for evaluating the sustainability of PT systems with a particular focus on Latin America for the first time, to identify possible gaps that result from the specific characteristics of Latin American PT systems and finally to derive research needs and recommendations for this region. The analysis includes three types of articles: scientific papers, international guidelines published by NGOs, and local as well as national Latin American guidelines for PT evaluation. The 69 identified relevant references reveal that Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM), followed by Assessment Indicator Models (AIM) are the preferred evaluation frameworks. Among the MCDM methods, the Analytical Hierarchy Process was the most frequently approach. We found a high prevalence of studies taking society and municipalities' perspective (both 46%), followed by combinations (users, operators, municipalities − 37%), and the users' perspective (14%). The review further shows that the Latin American context is not sufficiently considered in the existing frameworks and that further research is needed to develop frameworks that comprehensively and systematically consider all sustainability dimensions for this specific spatial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the short stories by the Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon, a third-generation Holocaust > writer; these stories are analyzed as a particular case of "world literature" as defined by David Damrosch. Halfon's travel writings to Poland are thus interpreted according to the host (Polish) culture's values and needs. First, the study concentrates on how Halfon's travel accounts to Warsaw question and interact with the changing historical narratives about the Poles as "implicated subjects", witnesses and accomplices in the Shoah. Secondly, the analysis deals with the Halfon's narrative experiences in the provincial city of Lodz, his grandfather's birthplace, where the crystalized discourses about the past are altered by inverting roles of victims and perpetrators and introducing other possible interpretative approaches (based on cultural implication of emotions and theories of the gaze). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the narrative of simulation in De sobremesa [After-Dinner Conversation] (1925) by José Asunción Silva (1865-1896). Since its publication, De sobremesa has been read as an autobiographical novel, leading to an interpretation of the protagonist's life as Silva's own. This article expands on such critical approaches and sees the impetus behind the novel as Silva's desire to obliterate his real-life circumstances. Through an analysis of the central element of simulation as the articulation between life and oeuvre, I interweave the novel's characteristic narrative of excess and Silva's life of loss and economic scarcity. By examining the accounts of Silva's contemporaries and reading his correspondence, I explore the way he disfigures and reconfigures his real condition and financial bankruptcy in De sobremesa to project a world defined by wealth and luxury. In so doing, he rewrites his loss and constructs himself as an artifice, a literary sign, that has its fictitious counterpart in the character of José Fernández. The article proposes a reading of De sobremesa that reveals an intricate relationship between author and character, being and appearing, writing and consuming, and writing and simulating in late nineteenth-century Latin American modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean Franco was a pioneering scholar in the field of Latin American cultural studies. She was the first professor of Latin American literature in the UK and the first to incorporate counter-hegemonic discourses, such as oral and popular cultures, into the study of Latin American literature. Her landmark book, Plotting Women, expanded the scope of literary analysis by exploring the experiences of women in Mexican society through various cultural forms. Franco's work also addressed the social and political dimensions of culture, emphasizing the importance of gender, sexuality, and race. Her scholarship challenged traditional culturalist Marxism and highlighted the politics of resistance and the diverse perspectives within dominant discourses. Additionally, Franco's book Cruel Modernity examined acts of mass cruelty in modern Latin America, exposing the historical violence and marginalization of women and Indigenous peoples. Despite the difficult subject matter, Franco's work aimed to rehumanize the victims and provoke emotional responses from readers. Her contributions to the field of Latin American cultural studies have had a lasting impact and continue to shape academic research in the field. [Extracted from the article]

A central issue in the scholarly literature on the Latin American Pink Tide is the renewal of state-led development, or neo-developmentalism, and dependence on primary resources or the so-called resource curse. In this article, we consider the question of neo-developmentalism during the Pink Tide and state capacity, analyzing whether the three 'radical' Pink Tide governments in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia were able to achieve their respective neo-developmental political objectives. We employ a comparative approach building on the theory of 'broadened embedded autonomy' as conceptualized by Peter Evans. We argue that while reliance on resource extraction posed a challenge for the construction of state capacity for Pink Tide governments, national-level differences help explain why some governments were relatively more successful than others at inducing neo-developmentalism. A comparative approach focused on the politics of state-society thus provides a promising analytical framework for interpreting variations across cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Hispanic Research Journal is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that between 2000 and 2019 Latin American migration to Australia increased by 262%. This percentage does not consider migrants on temporary visas. This article presents a critical review of 59 single publications. The findings suggest, firstly, that while the literature shows qualitative analysis of Latin American cultural practices, communities and gender, the study of migration flows is dominated by quantitative approaches that are focused mainly on permanent settlement. Secondly, while there have been several studies attempting to understand and problematize a homogenous Latin American identity in Australia, there is still little research exploring the heterogeneous cultural, social and economic experiences of migrants from these diverse regions. Finally, this review highlights the need to conduct quantitative and qualitative studies to explore Latin American temporary migration in Australia, examining how the increase of temporary visas is intersecting with the everyday life of these migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we will discuss the preservation of works of Latin American digital literature and the construction of digital archives. Starting from a discussion of the concept of digital literature, we will broach the implications and challenges of digital preservation and archiving, concerning the works we collected for the project "Cartography of Latin American Digital Literature". Finally, we will present ideas and questions which arise from this work related to innovation, digital aesthetics, and the experience of creating an archive of Latin American digital literature in times of impermanence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One older white male committee member paternalistically states: '"[r]emaining at Rawlings [...] is the fastest way we can see you overcoming these deficiencies"'.[44] Lizet is skeptical of the committee's racialised elitism, pondering that her sister's appearance on television during a protest could count as being part of a "culture of success" in a very different value scheme.[45] The Rawlings administrators would likely consider Lizet's sister, a working-class single mother, as an obstacle in Lizet's pathway to success. A cadre of ' I retention specialist[s] i ' warns attendees that college will be more daunting for them than for their white counterparts, especially if they are from low-income families like Lizet's.[61] The students are informed about campus resources like writing and tutoring centers, which are presented as stigmatised spaces but later help Lizet pass classes she is on the verge of failing. The Super Bowl is arguably America's quintessential national event, attracting over a hundred million viewers from across demographic backgrounds.[1] 2014's Big Game, however, is remembered less for action on the field than for a multilingual Coca-Cola commercial coupling "America the Beautiful" lyrics with a montage of Americans from diverse backgrounds.[2] Former Republican Congressman Allen West afterward blogged: 'If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing "American [sic] the Beautiful" in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come - doggone we are on the road to perdition'.[3] Commentators responded by condemning nativism and hailing their immigrant families' cultural and linguistic enrichment of the nation.[4] The Super Bowl controversy epitomises the endurance of language politics in the U.S., and Benedict Anderson would have been unsurprised by the commercial's inspiring such impassioned sentiment. [Extracted from the article]