Tag Archive: Latin America

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Trump and the Habits of White Utopia (or How Mexican Philosophers Help Get me Through Election Day)

mexicans-keep-going

  By Joseph Orosco (November 10, 2016)   In the late 1980s, Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla published his book Mexico Profundo, or Deep Mexico. In it, he argued that the lives and experiences of ordinary Mexicans living in rural areas and poor urban neighborhoods in Mexico continue to be rooted in Mesoamerican civilizations. Their understandings of work, community obligation,…
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Is it Ethical to Colonize Mars?

  By Joseph Orosco (November 4, 2015) Adam Frank, thinking about the success of Matt Damon’s new film The Martian, asks whether it would be moral to explore and colonize Mars. One of his concerns has to do with how we will treat any possible life forms that we encounter there, even at the microbial level.

Interview: Heather Wolford

  Heather Wolford has been involved in Latin American solidarity, human rights accompaniment, and immigrants’ rights work for several years. She holds masters degrees in International Studies and Public Administration from the University of Oregon, where her academic work focused on political economy, public policy, and social movements in Latin America.

“Mexico is Not a White Man’s Country”–Jack Johnson, Mexico, and Race

  By Mark Naison  (July 13, 2015) One of my favorite new historical monographs, Theresa Runstedtler’s book about Jack Johnson “Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line” contains a memorable passage regarding differences in the way that the US and Mexico lived race in the early 20th Century.

Interview: Susana Almanza

Susana Almanza is a founding member and Director of PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources), a grassroots environmental, economic and social justice organization.  Susana has overcome poverty, prejudice, and segregated schools to face down some of the world’s most powerful transnational corporations.

Why US Americans Ought to Celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month

  By Joseph Orosco We are currently halfway into National Hispanic Heritage Month (NHHM). I asked my students in two classes if they knew anything about it and most had no notion of when it started or when it ended in the calendar. They got the general idea that it was about honoring the contribution of Latin@s to US American…
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Fiddling While Rome Burns

  By Maite Pepper Yesterday, after the triumph of Argentina over the Netherlands, the horns for celebration rang out throughout Buenos Aires.  How ironic: the people of a certain place in the Middle East were hearing a similar noise.

Interview: Laurie Childers

Laurie Childers is an artist, ceramics instructor, and singer/songwriter in Corvallis, Oregon. In the 1980s, she worked around the world with artisans building fuel-efficient cookstoves and learned much about the effect of foreign and domestic economic policies upon the lives of real people as well as the land.   

Interview: Tom Motko

Tom Motko joined the U.S. Army in 1968 within a month of graduating from high school, was trained as a Vietnamese linguist/ voice intercept operator at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA and Goodfellow ABF, TX, and worked in a command subordinate to the National Security Agency. His duty stations included Japan, Taiwan, and Viet Nam.