Arts & Culture Archives - Page 18 of 28

Book Review: El Mall

The structures that inhabit our daily lives — our homes, businesses, churches — are often markers of the invisible forces that shape and crystallize them. But it takes a lucid and thoughtful eye to see the tangible as something also drenched in the revealing, subtle nuances of social and cultural life. Arlene Dávila, the author of El Mall: The … Read more

Book Review: Albina and the Dog-Men

Like Alejandro Jodorowsky himself, Albina and the Dog-Men seems to be all imaginable things at once: a fable and a folktale, a Western, a tragedy, a lewd comedy. A love story. The short novel’s titular character is an albino giant with no memory of her past. By moonlight, Albina unwittingly transforms the men of a … Read more

AQ Top 5 Young Chefs: Xavier Pacheco

Leer en español See the rest of the AQ Top 5 When Chef Xavier Pacheco returned to his native Puerto Rico from Barcelona, he knew opening a restaurant that served dishes with fresh, local ingredients, would be an uphill struggle. Puerto Rico, once home to a thriving agricultural sector, now imports 85 percent of its … Read more

AQ Top 5 Young Chefs: Elena Reygadas

Breaking culinary rules has led to widespread acclaim for the head chef and owner of Rosetta.

AQ Top 5 Young Chefs: Israel Laura

Leer en español See the rest of the AQ Top 5 At age 22, Israel Laura was working in an electric cable factory outside of Barcelona, where he had emigrated from Peru as a teenager. Faced with the uninspiring prospect of a life of factory work, and tired of bouncing from job to job, Laura … Read more

AQ Top 5 Young Chefs: Silvana Villegas

Leer en español See the rest of the AQ Top 5 You won’t find much on the menu at Masa (“dough” in Spanish) that isn’t completely, passionately, traditional. That’s how Silvana Villegas intends it. The 31-year-old chef and co-owner of one of Bogotá’s most popular bakeries and lunch spots has made it her mission to … Read more

AQ Top 5 Young Chefs: Rodrigo Oliveira

Leer en español See the rest of the AQ Top 5 As ridiculous as it may sound, São Paulo’s moneyed elite historically shunned “Brazilian” restaurants. Fine dining meant French, Portuguese, Japanese, or anything else foreign — reflecting both the city’s immigrant-heavy background and its prized self-image as distinct from the rest of Brazil. That finally began to … Read more

Top 10 Plays in U.S.-Cuba Baseball Diplomacy

Cuba and the U.S. have not always seen eye-to-eye. But the two countries have long shared a love for baseball, which each claims as its national pastime. Similar to how Ping-Pong diplomacy broke the ice between the U.S. and China in the 1970s, baseball helped thaw relations with Cuba ahead of President Barack Obama’s historic … Read more

How a Film About a Bear Got Chile to Reckon With Its Past

When Chile won its first-ever Academy Award on February 28 for the animated short film “Bear Story” (Historia de un Oso), the nation got more than a gold-plated statuette. It was also jolted into confronting the still-taboo subject of forced exiles and political disappearances under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. An estimated 200,000 Chileans fled … Read more

‘Embrace of the Serpent’ Is a Haunting Tale of Colombia’s Amazon

In Colombia’s first Oscar-nominated feature film, director Ciro Guerra offers both an ode to humanity’s capacity to hope and a eulogy for the loss of Latin America’s indigenous culture and knowledge. “Embrace of the Serpent” takes place during Latin America’s rubber boom in the early 20th century. The film’s message is delivered through Karamakate, a … Read more

Easter Island’s Tapati Rapa Nui

Most visitors to Easter Island are lured by the Moai — the mysterious stone heads scattered around this remote speck in the southeastern Pacific. But for two weeks every February, the monoliths take second billing to a festival honoring the culture of those who erected them. Easter Islanders, many of whom can trace their ancestry … Read more

Health Education in the Amazon? Go to the Movies

In a scene from Parente, a documentary short about sexually transmitted diseases in the Amazon, indigenous Yanomami woman giggle during a sex education class as they pass around and examine an unwrapped condom. For all the sensitivities and complexity behind the foreignness with which they approach the idea of safe sex, the portrait of the … Read more

Rediscovering the Chile – California Connection

Paperback, 336 pages Californians are breezily indifferent to their own history. The narrative of the future, not the past, fuels the state’s fixation with the ephemeral — with youth, beauty, fortune, fame. California is thus a place where origins are lost or discarded, and often reinvented. It’s no coincidence that we know screen actors by … Read more

The Perverse Justice of São Paulo’s Slums

Paperback, 192 pages Graham Denyer Willis doesn’t go as far as calling Brazil a failed state in his book The Killing Consensus, but anyone looking to support such a claim would find plenty of evidence in this examination of a São Paulo crime syndicate and the underpaid and often corrupt homicide investigation unit tasked with … Read more

A Colombian Recipe for Peace and Reconciliation

This article is adapted from the Fall 2015 print edition of Americas Quarterly. To subscribe, please click here Elcielo, in Medellín, stands out for more than the quality of its food. One of Latin America’s top 50 restaurants, it has also become a symbol of Colombia’s efforts to return to normalcy after more than five … Read more