Image 1: A hyperreal depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus at Tierra Santa. Credit: Brigid Lynch By Brigid Lynch (CLACS) 23 March 2022 marked the second anniversary of the first UK lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The lockdown and the restrictions that came with it represented a watershed moment in recent history, and its repercussions will continue to be felt for years to come, not least for those personally impacted by the virus. One of the major changes that successive recent lockdowns have brought about is in our relationship with work and leisure, and in how we use public ..read more

By Raúl Valdivia-Murgueytio (Newcastle University) I first encountered José María Arguedas’ photographs of Chimbote, a port city some 300 miles north of Lima, in an exhibition at the Casa de la Literatura Peruana in 2018. I was in Lima researching a photographic archive as part of my doctoral project on the photographic production of people living in deprived urban areas in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of these amateur photographers were second generation migrants whose parents had left their towns and villages in the Andes in search for a better life in the capital in the 1960s. Seeing Arguedas ..read more

Figure 1: Photo by José María Arguedas (courtesy of the Arguedas family)   By Raúl Valdivia-Murgueytio (Newcastle University) I first encountered José María Arguedas’ photographs of Chimbote, a port city some 300 miles north of Lima, in an exhibition at the Casa de la Literatura Peruana in 2018. I was in Lima researching a photographic archive as part of my doctoral project on the photographic production of people living in deprived urban areas in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of these amateur photographers were second generation migrants whose parents had left their towns and villages in th ..read more

By Manoela Carpenedo (University of Groningen) Delineating an accurate religious map of Latin America and the Caribbean is a challenging task (Gutiérrez, 2015). The region reflects numerous global encounters that have only intensified the diversity of its previously existing religious configurations. At the same time, one cannot understand Latin American and Caribbean history without taking religion into account. Indeed, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen Dove (2016) have  argued that it is useful to view the entire history of the region as a religious history. Motivating ..read more

Aborto legal by Eduardo Velázquez, available from https://www.flickr.com/ By Rebecca Ogden (University of Kent) and Rachell Sánchez Rivera (University of Cambridge) Latin America has become something of a battleground over reproductive rights in recent years. As certain countries have passed landmark legalisations of abortion, many other governments have instead implemented backtracks over reproductive freedoms, including rights to a safe, free and legal abortion. Activist groups are facing persistent challenges in the battle to secure reproductive rights, lobbying for access to contraceptive ..read more

Nowhere People. A project on statelessness by the photographer Greg Constantine, available from www.nowherepeople.org By Eve Hayes de Kalaf (CLACS) Over the past three decades, a silent global revolution has been taking place which will have an impact on every living person on this planet. Far-reaching and transformative, digital identification systems have grown to become an integral component of everyday life. Big tech companies, NGOs, legal specialists and governments are embracing the benefits of digital ID with considerable zeal. Their fundamental argument is that citizens, particularly t ..read more

By Anthony Pereira (King’s College London) Democracy is in trouble.  According to the Democracy Matrix, a research project based at the University of Würzburg in Germany, the number of robust (or what they call working) democracies in the world has decreased since 2017, suggesting the beginning of a potential “third reverse wave” of democracy (see Democracy Matrix Version 3 goes Online). Other researchers, such as those at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, confirm this trend (see The Global State of Democracy 2019: Addressing the Ills, Reviving the Promis ..read more

Jose Guevara, former PhD student at the Institute of Latin American Studies Colonial elites in Lima and Santa Fe de Bogotá, during 1700-1750, employed their handwriting skills to enhance their social status. The traditional view has been that elites in Spanish America improved their social position mainly through land ownership, marriage, roles in the colonial administration, and noble titles. However, the handwritten practices of the colonial elite can reveal another part of the story that has been overlooked hitherto. Studies of the form of manuscripts usually fall in the field of book studi ..read more

By Jean Stubbs, Research Fellow, Institute of Latin American Studies “Some compare what’s coming with a category 5 hurricane.” Among the many challenges Covid-19 has thrown our way has been having to adapt to online screenings followed by Q&A for our new documentary Cuba Living Between Hurricanes. Back in September 2017, category 5 Hurricane Irma made landfall in Caibarién on the north-central coast of Cuba. As news reached us, Jonathan Curry-Machado and I were planning a documentary to explore the historical and contemporary linkages between commodity frontiers and environmental change, w ..read more

Photo courtesy: Nayani Teixeira By Nadia Mosquera and Archie Davies (ILAS) Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, on May 28th 2020 the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) held an online symposium exploring the connections between space, activism and race in Latin America. The symposium brought together both activists and scholars interested in rethinking processes of racialisation and spatial organisation. We wanted to draw attention to Latin America’s longstanding racialised inequalities without losing sight of how collective action holds marginalised groups together in struggles against inequali ..read more