Confronting Urban Challenges in Latin America

June 26, 2009

With all the recent news on the conflict with indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon and the concerns over deforestation in Brazil, we forget that Latin America is an overwhelmingly urban region. It is estimated that by 2025, over 82 percent of the region’s population will live in urban areas. With these numbers it’s clear, it is cities—and cityscapes—that most affect the quality of life, economic and social mobility, health, and politics of citizens in our hemisphere.

Many of these urban areas are being stretched to their infrastructural limits by rapid growth. To look at how to best address these issues, the Urban Age project, a joint initiative by the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, is asking the question: How do we tackle modern urban challenges and imagine the cities of the future?

Professionals from a variety of disciplines, from sociologists, architects and planners to engineers, policymakers and political scientists have come together in a series of ongoing conferences throughout cities in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. The project also has an advisory group that includes architect Enrique Norten, former mayor of Bogota Enrique Peñalosa and sociologist Saskia Sassen of Columbia University, among many others.

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Sugar: Looking Beyond Baseball

April 24, 2009

For many aspiring baseball players in the Dominican Republic, the sport is often seen as the ticket out of poverty. Young men live and breathe the successes of players such as Pedro Martínez and Sammy Sosa, seeing them as testaments to the promise that baseball holds—the chance to shape a life different from the one they’ve known.

The baseball industry is important culturally, socially and economically to the island of the Dominican Republic. As of 2005, there were 30 baseball academies in the Dominican Republic sponsored by major league organizations. Most were located in predominantly poor communities. Their existence is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provides the young men of the area with an opportunity to do something. Many of these young men, however, choose to drop out of school to be able to train seriously.

With so much at stake, the chances for exploitation of the players are high. Common in the game are buscones, “agents” who promise to oversee the player’s career in exchange for a steep commission if the player is signed. In 2001, a buscón based in Santo Domingo charged a reported $150,000 of Yankee prospect Melky Cabrera's $175,000 signing bonus.

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Fine-Tuning Health Care for Hispanic Immigrants

March 27, 2009

For Hispanic immigrants living in the United States, the obstacles to receiving adequate health care are many: lack of health insurance and language and cultural barriers in addition to immigration status are among the most important.

One example of the cultural differences is the home remedies that many immigrant groups use to treat health complications. In some communities of Colombia, it is common to use garlic to treat hypertension. In some parts of Mexico, it is a common practice to use cactus, aloe vera juice and bitter gourd to treat diabetes. Patients sometimes choose to self-medicate and self-diagnose rather than seek professional medical attention, which can lead to health complications in the future and frequent, last-minute visits to the emergency room.

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Bringing a New Generation of Latin American Writers to the Forefront

January 14, 2009

Isolation and high prices have held back new talented writers in Latin America. It is difficult for someone in Colombia to hear about a rising Venezuelan author. A work by a Peruvian author, well-known in Spain, may be hard to come across in a Costa Rican bookstore. Where books are available, they are often too expensive to be purchased by the general population. Peruvian author Diego Trelles Paz has taken a step toward addressing this disconnect with "El futuro no es nuestro" (The Future is not Ours), a two-part anthology of rising talent in Latin American literature.

Trelles, author of "El círculo de los escritores asesinos," spent a year and a half compiling the anthology and had only two requirements: the prose had to be excellent and the writer had to be of the generation born between 1970 and 1980. His aim was to capture the "generational spirit" of a group born right after the student massacre in Tlatelolco, Mexico City and the protests in Paris of 1968. It’s a generation educated by parents marked by the Latin American military dictatorships and that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the birth of the Internet, the murders of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and the September 11th attacks in New York City. For Trelles, it was important that this anthology reflect the multi-faceted generation of writers coming from the region—"the anthology seeks to set a certain distance with what’s come before," he says.

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Primera Revista Latinoamericana de Libros Targets a Niche Audience Often Overlooked in the U.S. Market

November 24, 2008

Presione aquí  para la versión en español

To get a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, I had two options: order it from Amazon.com for $50.00 plus shipping and handling or have someone from abroad bring it to me on their next trip. All this effort for an author who was just featured in Americas Quarterly, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and is the only Latin American author featured in James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Other authors with less coverage would have been even harder to come by.

Cortázar, Borges, García Marquez, Neruda, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes. Beyond this safe cannon of well-established authors and a few self-help or religious titles, little is available to the Spanish-language reader in the U.S. New titles and authors simply do not come in or trickle in slowly. 

The bi-monthly publication, La Primera Revista Latinoamericana de Libros (PRL), launched in September 2007, attempts to fill this void by providing thorough, in-depth reviews from notable authors and academics on books coming to and from Latin America. To its credit, it does not just summarize or analyze a book but places it within the context of already existing publications that deal with the issue. This high level of demand allows the reader to understand the book within the broader cultural, political, and social landscapes in which it is embedded. We can see what came before and understand what particular angle this new work or author brings.

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