Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

Since 1993 over four hundred women have been abducted and murdered in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua (both are in in the state of Chihuahua, north Mexico). Many of the women are brutally beaten and raped before being killed and their bodies dumped in the desert or on a secluded street. Others simply disappear without trace.

When Argentina suffered financial collapse in 2001, demonstrators took to the streets and there were violent confrontations followed by a police crackdown. This is the turbulent backdrop to Matías Néspolo’s debut novel, first published in Spanish in 2009 and fluidly translated by Frank Wynne. It proves particularly topical given the recent global protests.

The idea that vision is superior to the other senses would explain the commonly held assumption that humans learn better through images, and that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. When a new technology that reproduced what the eyes see started to be developed in the nineteenth century, its impact was felt in distinct areas such as art, the social sciences and psychology.

This year the London Latin American Film Festival celebrates twenty-five years of Havana’s International TV and Film School, presenting the highlights from the past quarter century of one of the most influential of Cuban cultural institutions, alongside the best of this year's films, which reflect the changing priorities of Cuba's young filmmakers.

The Catholic Church has had a bad press of late with a series of damaging child-abuse scandals and shameful cover-ups. Its opposition to contraception and abortion, its subjugation of women and its homophobia have also come under fire. EvelioRosero, prize-winning author of The Armies, offers a unique take on the Catholic Church’s institutional failings in this surreal portrait of one of its Colombian outposts.

It is an opinion widely held that mass-consumerism is eradicating difference across the globe in the interests of big business. This is a gross simplification—a closer look at one of the most visible global brands reveals how consumerism brings homogeneity, but also propagates difference in inequality.

Miss Bala    
Mexico/2011
Dir: Gerardo Naranjo
Running time 113 minutes

The violence of Mexico’s drug cartels is impinging daily on the lives of ordinary people. Since 2006, decapitations, corpses left hanging from bridges and body parts found on the beach are just some of the reported atrocities.

Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has done a great deal of market research and published travel stories, and literary and film criticism. He has researched such diverse topics as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations.

Capoeira, an art form practiced in Brazil, is a form of martial arts that incorporates dance and music.  Characterised by rapid, complex movements, Capoeira originated when the Africans who had been brought to Brazil as slaves combined elements of both cultures to form an original fighting style.  

How do we give a voice to those on the margins? We must, first, find their voice – for every human has a voice. We can wander into their world, into shops or up into high-rise flats, to listen out for conversation. Yet, what if we are talking of the furthest margins - those who are so isolated and harried as to barely have conversation?

CARLA GUELFENBEIN was born in Santiago, Chile, and lived in England for 11 years, where she took degrees at the University of Essex and Central St Martin's. Returning to Chile, she worked as Art  and Fashion Director for the magazine Elle, until she decided to become a full-time novelist.

For 22 years, the Colombian capital city has hosted the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogota, a celebration of the dramatic arts. The festival takes place every two years and, until her death in 2008, was produced and directed by Fanny Mikey, an Argentine actress of international renown who first created the festival in 1988.

Xochimilco was originally a lake, an offshoot of Lago de Texcoco, upon which Mexico City is so precariously situated today. It was home to some of the most fertile gardens in the region, known as chinampas – these were islands artificially constructed out of piles of silt and rotten vegetable matter.