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.

Iosi Havilio was born in Buenos Aires in 1974. Open Door is his first novel. His second novel is Estocolmo (Stockholm, 2010), and he is currently working on a sequel to Open Door. He has become a cult author in Argentina after Open Door was highly praised by the outspoken and influential writer Rodolfo Fogwill and by the most influential Argentine critic, Beatriz Sarlo.

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.

Mexico’s El Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) dates back to indigenous times. However, many of the celebrations associated with the festival, which takes place from 31 – 2 November, have evolved over time.

In the 1890s, Jose Guadalupe Posada began the tradition of depicting satirical images of politicians and celebrities as skeletons. 

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.

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in Honduras and raised in El Salvador. Throughout his career as a journalist and author, he has lived in Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Germany and Japan, among others.

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.

MARCELO FIGUERAS, born in Buenos Aires in 1962, is a writer and screenwriter. He currently lives in Barcelona. His novel Kamchatka (Atlantic Books, 2010) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

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.

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.

Near the colonial city of Puebla, and just 2 hours outside Mexico City, this sleepy town claims the largest pyramid in the world in total volume (it’s squat but with a base of 450x450m). Founded in 500 BC, the local guide also claims that it is “the oldest living city in America”.