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

La investigación acerca del trabajo del trabajador social posibilita profundizar, teórica y políticamente, en los problemas de la realidad social y en sus proyecciones e incidencias en la práctica profesional. Desde la perspectiva dialéctica, contribuye a la construcción de intervenciones sociales estratégicas, dirigidas a la defensa de los derechos, y a señalar en la investigación científica nuevos caminos para la (re)construcción teórica. Este artículo es un estudio sobre el lugar que ocupa la investigación en el trabajo del trabajador social brasileño en el área de salud, a principios del siglo XXI. Como metodología, se encuadra en el método cualitativo establecido por el marxismo: la investigación exploratoria. Para ello, se recurre a la revisión bibliográfica y al trabajo de campo. Este último se lleva a cabo mediante entrevistas estructuradas, dirigidas a los trabajadores sociales, supervisores de la formación práctica en el área de Salud y al personal adscrito en una institución federal de educación superior en el estado de Río de Janeiro / Brasil. Los resultados indican, por un lado, que la investigación está contemplada en la práctica profesional en el área de Salud, y por el otro, su presencia ocasional y/o frágil está marcada por las dificultades de crear una relación crítica entre el espacio laboral y la realidad colectiva; lo que conlleva implicaciones políticas en las intervenciones profesionales que, en general, se limitan a sostener el poder institucional, articulando la responsabilidad de los sujetos con el acceso a las políticas sociales.

From 2009 to 2012, the “Cultural Revitalization and Creative Productive Development on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua” program aimed to promote and revitalize cultural expressions, including oral traditions, of Indigenous and Black communities. This paper reflects some of its achievements, contradictions, and lessons. Building from experiences on the UNESCO team, and employing an ethnographic approach, I first expose how these processes underlie the daily struggle of Indigenous and Black people against colonization and Mestizo/Western hegemony in Nicaragua. Second, I delve into how the experience challenged our understanding of international cooperation in Central America, as well as my own positionality as an external and Mestiza researching with (not about) subaltern populations. My argument is that cultural revitalization processes of oral traditions not only entail the emergence of alternative epistemologies (from the South), but also destabilize the colonialist structure of cultural cooperation programs, and the identities of the collaborators.

This article analyzes the experiences that the men from Telchac Pueblo, Yucatan, elaborate on their masculinities as a result of their incursion as agricultural workers in the Bracero Program (1942-1964), proposed between Mexico and United States. Through an ethnographic study with in-depth interviews, dialogues with key informants, and participant observation carried out at the place of origin, this article examines the narratives of the Telchac men on their experience as providers, as adventurous and daring, but also –especially during the las years of this bi-national program— as disposable, useless and worthless men. The text concludes with some reflections on the ways in which patriarchal hegemony operates in the bodies, beliefs, and forms of relationship between the Telchac men and their families; where the conventional masculinity glides between physical, social and/or symbolic borders.

This work highlights the role of the documentary video in the preservation, recovery and dissemination of individual and collective memory from the voice of community actors. The proposal is inserted within the framework of an action research project in the towns of an urban-rural area of Mexico City: Milpa Alta. From the implementation of three workshops, oral tradition, memory and participatory documentary, the axes on which the story will be developed are established: community work, forest care and preservation of the Nahuatl language. In this way, the documentary video becomes a support for the transmission and dialogue of knowledge between generations, thus strengthening the sense of belonging of the inhabitants of native peoples, where tradition and modernity coexist.

The wake ceremony is the body´s last opportunity to project itself to the community and society. This article works on a number of funeral practices that the mass media in Puerto Rico have reported since 2008, referred to as “Velorios Exóticos” (“Exotic Wakes”) or “Los Muertos Para’os” (“Standing Deaths”). In this practice, the corpse is placed outside the coffin simulating life in a frozen position. These have been observed as an echo of the narcoculture that has entered other popular sectors in the Caribbean country. The theoretical approaches of this study include sociocultural perspective on the death, the performance, and marginality. The methodologies applied include participant observation, interviews with family members and funeral home management, and archival materials. The funeral wake outside the coffin is a cultural manifestation of the urban violence in the inner city of the metropolitan area of San Juan that has penetrated other marginalized sectors of the country in order to seek fame and recognition.

The purpose of this article is to go deeper into artistic creation as a human right and as a means of encounter and interaction in fragmented societies. It also analyzes the body as a place of epistemic construction. The study was conducted between 2013 and 2016 in the municipalities of Tactic and San Cristóbal, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, and complementary research took place in the regions of Coto, Abrojo de Moctezuma, and Rey Curré in Costa Rica. The methodology used in this study was participatory research with young people through a creative-artistic action in four areas: dance, theater, poetry, and music. The information collected during this stage was deepened in focus groups, life stories, and in-depth interviews. The findings demonstrate that it is possible to strengthen the bonds of solidarity, cohesion, and reconstruction of the communities from the creation of artistic works based on the complex realities lived by youth, and also to develop self-esteem, deepen aspects of individual and collective identity, generate actions of social transformation, build historical memory, and foster alliances between different sections of the community.

The issue of racialism, racism and racial emancipation around the Afro-descendant population in Cuba has been addressed by several disciplines, especially, history and anthropology. Studies that make it possible to enrich the diversity of views on the subject from a regional perspective are not enough. This article constitutes an approximation to the topic in Las Tunas, a region of eastern Cuba, with the aim of showing its particularities during three major stages: colonial, neocolonial Republic and the so-called Revolution in power. The study is carried out from the review of documentary sources, interviews with key informants, the local press of the time and historical documents. The analysis from the triangulation of sources made it possible to determine the nuances and the magnitude of racism in these historical stages, and the most relevant result consists of revealing specificities of discriminatory codes around black in a regional context.

This essay is the outcome of years of personal exploration as a feminist researcher and a result of a collective challenge among peers, to generate knowledge that contributes to processes of emancipation of the most vulnerable sectors of the system and to glimpse that the deepest transformations we have not achieved. Impotence gave way to frustration and later to the revelation that no change is possible without first transforming one's own oppressive paradigms and lifestyles. By means of this writing, I intend to reflect on my own processes of epistemic surveillance and collective bets for transforming reality, the structural conditioning that produces fatigue and depression that respond to an essentially productivist capitalist order. I also want to discuss theories and methodologies we use to generate emancipatory knowledge and then to address the final reflection, where I attempt, from a decolonial feminist approach, to define love both as affection and as a lasting link with the people we consider alterities, so far as they are those who can save us from the uncritical reproduction of knowledge and isolation to which the capitalist cishetero-patriarchal society subjects us.

The article examines the possibilities of poetic discourse to resignify a historical fact, in this case, the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990). Our main objective is to analyze two books written during the Pinochet government, Canto a su amor desaparecido by Raúl Zurita and Huellas de Siglo by Carmen Berenguer, in order to show that the poetic discourse served as a space of resistance and criticism against the military regime. To fulfill this purpose, we review in a general way the different poetic dictions that existed in the 1980s, while reviewing the complex social context faced by the artists of the time. Subsequently, and based on sources of the time and specialized literature, we delve into the literary strategies that each of the works follows to name the horror lived during the dictatorship.

This article problematizes the notion of sociability in the context of late modernity and analyzes how the selection criteria operate in adult cisheterosexual men and women of middle sectors, resident in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (Argentina), when they seek erotic and / or affective encounters in spaces of virtual sociability. This second objective focuses on social class and lifestyle. The methodology of the article is qualitative: 150 profiles of websites and dating applications (Match, Badoo, Tinder, and Happn) were studied and 30 in-depth interviews were conducted with cis women and men, who use those websites and applications. Among the results it is highlighted that, in the design of the profiles, the images used are those on leisure and comfort (scenarios of paradisiacal beaches or European landscapes, sparkling drinks, and nautical activities) and also those related to work and education.