Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Even though for decades there have been important movements of Central American people through Mexican territory in search of reaching the United States, no such large group had been observed traveling en masse, as was the case with the so-called migrant caravans in 2018-2019. This exodus has unprecedented characteristics in terms of human mobility in the region, concerning the organization, the number and the heterogeneity of people (adolescents, single mothers with children, unaccompanied minors, handicapped, elderly and LGTBQ people). This article shows that the visibility of the caravans was the decisive factor that allowed thousands of Central Americans to reach the border and cope with the violence that has characterized human mobility in Mexico. However, the collective force was lost as migrants dispersed along the road. Once in Tijuana and other border cities, the caravaneros had to face multiple risks individually and tended to become invisible again.

In this chapter we will explore the multiple tensions that occur in the operations of the Caravans of 2018 and 2019 through the metropolis of Guadalajara. The movement exposed the capacities of governments, the media, of organized civil and religious society and of the local society to assume the arrival of so many different people: foreigners, poor, and/or evicted. We are interested in analyzing the different actions and reactions of some of the key actors. The municipal and state governments both with the former governor Aristotle Sandoval (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI), as with the current governor Enrique Alfaro (Citizen Movement) are ambiguous with simultaneous actions of humanitarianism and criminalization, of visibility and invisibility of the phenomenon. Finally, we reflect on the “disconcerting” behaviors and agency events of the Caravans members.

I present in this work some ideas on the Maya produced in Japan specifically after its defeat in the World War II. It is during the first decades of the post-war when the Japanese approached the other Maya and developed particular ideas and images about it. My interest is directed towards some voices that intend to associate Mayan past with Japan’s own past. I am mainly pointing out to two motives in these discourses: “the Mayan arts” and “the mystery of the disappeared civilization.” These two motives are, I consider, the most spread and transmitted out off various types of exhibits. By reviewing some works related to them, this article addresses the historical conditions in that time and how they influenced the rise and development of those discourses, as well as the discussion around the ideas of the Maya made in Japan.

The article presents the recent history of appearance and multiplication of collective money boxes and credit at one ejido in the municipality of Las Margaritas, in the southeast of Chiapas, Mexico. It is based essentially on ethnographic information about money management, the tensions that it generates, and its relationship with the formation of various organizations in the region. Rather than pointing to the uniqueness of the uses of money in this context, the analysis proposes paying attention to the way in which these practices drives to the participation of these populations in the sphere of money, and with it in wider processes of commodification and proletarianization.

This article analyzes the process of formation of the Choapas region in the Mexican Southeast during the 19th and 20th centuries. The socio-spatial transformations that favored such integration are examined with the theoretical-methodological proposal of social space by Pierre Bourdieu and the theory of gaps by Juan Pedro Viqueira, highlighting the contingent character of regions, the flexibility and permeability of spaces, but above all the power relations that cross the geo-historical axes of that process. From a relational perspective, some socioeconomic variables are approached that impelled the construction of communication routes and gave rise to important changes in spatial organization between the 19th and 20th centuries. The article covers various periods: the time when rivers were the main communication routes, Porfirian modernity, the exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons, settlement and colonization, the indirect impact of the “March to the Sea” program and the socio-spatial dynamics in border areas. This long journey accounts for the transformation of an “empty” space into a lived region.

Tzotzil and Tzeltal people with diabetes and their relatives were interviewed, contextual data gathered, and historical sources reviewed. The interviewees link the subject to causality, initial symptoms, diets, the resistance to diet change, they tell about their differences with medical views, their re-signification of type 2 mellitus diabetes and its emergence as a health problem in relation to local historic events. Interaction between global and sociocultural processes is also observed. Nourishment is a crucial aspect in diabetes that must be understood as a multidimensional experience, which demands the opening and deepening of medial perspectives and being able to negotiate holding an humanistic stance to deal with the prescription of patients diets.

In this essay a theory of ethnicity based on a relational approach is tested, where the ideas of centrality and decentrality are used to characterize some contemporary ethnic phenomena in Mexico. To support these ideas, I rely on comparative ethnography carried out among the Raramuri of Chihuahua and the Mixteco of Oaxaca, using the model I propose to explain the current situations of persistence in a global world.

The article aims to explain the forced displacement that mobilized more than 5000 indigenous people in November 2017 in the Highlands of Chiapas, due to border conflicts between the indigenous, tsotsil speaking, municipalities of Chenalhó and Chalchihuitán. I present its formal background using information provided by state documents and press sources, as well as characterize the situation based on what was collected in mappings and interviews conducted in collaboration with the indigenous translator of Doctors Without Borders in the conflict zone and with staff of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center in January and February 2018. The results show that borderline dialing practices display their conflict both in the formal legal field as in the materiality of the territory. In turn, interviews and mappings allow characterization of forced (im)mobility and account for how they resulted in a situation of precarious (de)territorialization and a humanitarian crisis.

The experimentations on human bodies, to produce a prophylactic post-exposure drug for syphilis, which took place in Guatemala City (1946-1948), has been widely condemned by bioethical studies. However, this practice appears more complex when it is analyzed, for instance, as a “pharmacopower” device of corporeal production. In order to examine this complexity, this study combines epistemological perspectives to explore how the use of “anomalous” bodies, by this device, demonstrates a paradox in the production of the “complete human”. And, to disrupt this production, this study proposes a micropolitical alliance with those considered “anomalous.” Finally, the purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the complexity of body production devices in Guatemala. The conclusions demonstrate the relevance of deepening and extending our understanding of the problem by drawing on diverse archival sources.

The purpose of this article is to discuss some consequences of extractivist practices carried out on the doll made by the Otomi people of southern Querétaro. We analyze as a central point the use that researchers, entrepreneurs and government agencies have made of this artifact. At the end, it will be seen how this type of extractivism is strictly linked to broader policies that have converted “the indigenous theme” into a profitable field, susceptible to be commercialized, in which the native knowledge is trivialized.