Set in the 1970s, Roma (2018) by Alfonso Cuarón is an ambitious cinematic attempt to portray an upper-class family, facing a crisis due to the abandonment of the main provider of the household, by focusing on the family’s maid, whose name is Cleo. Yalitzia Aparicio makes her acting debut as the Mixtec maid in the film, who prior to Roma hadn’t had any acting experience. Even though Aparicio’s father is Mixtec and her mother Trique, she is not fluent in Mixtec. However, in the film viewers can listen to her speaking in Mixtec. Her character’s ethnicity allows her to display on-screen a vital trajectory and a double consciousness that embodies one of the main migratory patterns that Mixtecs have endeavored in recent decades.. Read more...

After an exchange of ideas with professor and activist Cynthia Enloe, a renowned field researcher, honorary member of the Gender Justice Legacy Wall of the International Court of Crimes in The Hague, and author of several books about the militarization of the women's lives, without hiding her excitement she allowed me, with the permission of her University of California Press editor, to translate to Spanish the preface of her book "Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives" (one of my favorite ones in terms of methodology and academic writing style). Read more...

In an attempt to express his gratitude, President Fernandez declared, supposedly quoting Mexican Nobel Prize Laureate Octavio Paz, ‘The Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came from the jungle, but we Argentines came from ships. And they were ships that came from Europe’. The statement, according to Fernandez, was aimed at strengthening and emphasizing the cultural ties between Spain and Argentina. Read more...

The Sowing Life Program could potentially become a regional endeavor to contain immigration flows towards the North and improve people’s lives in Central America. Therefore, a fundamental question is how do we prevent a welfare policy such as this from becoming a tool of political skirmish, as opposed to a tool of improving people’s lives? Read more...

Notwithstanding these sociocultural and biopolitical factors, Mexico’s present seems to be a mise en abyme representation of an octopus falling to pieces inside a labyrinthine and never-reaching future, as if time was also a hoax created to irreversibly set the possible and the impossible apart from each other. Read more...

The conclusion of this text, crafted for children, signals towards, on the one hand, the progressive acquisition of consciousness of the virtual social sphere/s where our life is happening, and, on the other, that without this consciousness we run the risk of being mobilized within a virtual social system that might, without our consent, play a negative effect within ourselves. Read more...

Children across the United States are suffering of anxiety and depression due to the lack of social interaction that the quarantine has brought to their household. Lisa Miller points at the fact that the state of mind of parents who are financially struggling on regular basis gets a strong hold on their kids. While these aren’t news taking into consideration systemic inequalities, the kind of anxiety and mental health issues that the Coronavirus pandemic has triggered among families will have long –lasting effects and in most cases experts anticipate that individuals– including children – will experience various forms of mental health issues for the rest of their life. Read more...

Young people are approaching an uncertain globalized future with plenty of possible outcomes, both dystopian and utopian. Nothing is simple: the technology that Walsh decries, the kind that the Illustrated Man fears, is even today becoming an effective tool for social mobilizations (let’s think about the protests, from Hong Kong to Chile, organized through social media). Meanwhile, today, we know more than ever that any fight for the future will require the work and sacrifice of the whole world. Read more...