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

The Costa Rican writer Carmen Naranjo Coto (1928-2012) makes, in her early novels, published in the 1960s, a profound reflection related to the city of San José and its residents, who face processes of coexistence in the context of a Central American capital that begins its entry into globalization. To demonstrate this, the next novels are analyzed Los perros no ladraron (1966); Camino al mediodía (1968) and Memorias de un hombre palabra (1968), whose characters are subjects with their own concerns about the transition from modernity to postmodernity, since what is in crisis is the very construction of subjectivity and the questioning of the absolute truths. As thematic axes of the analysis, indifference as a generator of anguish in the subject and the invisibility of the subject-citizen are proposed. Also, a dialogue is established between Naranjo's novels and some of the conceptual proposals of authors such as the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse, and the literary critic Rafael Valenzuela.

This article analyzes the implementation of the community conservation paradigm in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Shelter (RVS-GM ) between 1984-2007 from a political ecology framework, in order to establish the ties between this process, State territorialization and the neoliberalization of nature in the already mentioned territory. Along with semi-structured interviews to local and institutional actors, an analysis of institutional and organizations’ documents and newspapers was carried out. It is argued that more than reducing conflict between conservation and society, the community conservation policies in the RVS-GM represent State historical efforts to reaffirm sovereignty and insert the capitalist production mode in a historically isolated territory, in which dwellers are characterized for relatively autonomous lifestyles. Community conservation policies tried to reduce political and economic costs derived from controlling and transforming the shelter through co-opting conflict with promises of conservation and development, decision-making decentralization and the disguised anti-political State intervention without facing social and power inequality ended up reproducing the historical trajectory of exclusion and marginalization.

This paper aims to present a state of art on research about Judicial Branch and Justice Administration in Costa Rica. It compares the sources and methods used by the various authors who have worked on this subject. It is concluded that the lack of systematic and continuous studies on Judicial Branch are especially notorious for the Costa Rican 19th century, likewise, research on justice administration as instrument for social control have been a predominant issue. However, research on institutional development, understood as the normative progression, bureaucratic consolidation process and political legitimation discourses conformation; has been scarce. From these institutionalization components, studies on legal norms with regulates Judicial Branch have been predominant, but, in general, these ones had suffered for the lack of contextualization of the social phenomena that explain the existence of such legal norms.

With the National Household Survey (2010-2017) it is determined that there were significant gaps between the socioeconomic regions of Costa Rica. The Central Region was mostly urban and concentrated the most dynamic activities of the “new economy”. The other regions presented a higher proportion of poor population, mainly employed in agricultural work. The poor were characterized by having incomplete basic education, low income, participation in low-skilled jobs and higher levels of labor informality and non-compliance with labor rights. It was more difficult for the population in extreme poverty to get out of their condition, since their income (considerably lower than that of the rest of the poor) hardly increased, despite the implementation of some targeted social policies.

This article research the travel experience linked to the religious experience. To do this, he takes the case of the Protestant missionary, Emilio Olsson, who adopted colportage as a missionary strategy, which led to the installation of new Protestant projects in South America. We will reflect on the religious travel, seen from the discovery and evangelization, even in the nineteenth century. Our hypothesis holds that the introspective way of living and practicing their faith had an impact on the way of recognizing the Latin American territory at the same time that it had an impact on the way of exposing the strategic role of the increase in Protestant missionary practice in this same space.

This work is a critical reading of the Costa Rican text:  Racismo y antirracismo en literatura (2017) by Silvia Solano Rivera and Jorge Ramírez Caro. In the first instance, the biographies of the authors are exposed, followed by a brief description of the object of study and, finally, the analysis of their theoretical-methodological proposal.

The objective of this article is to characterize the extreme event of the coastal Mega-Niño of 1925-1926 in Southern Central America from a series of geophysical anomalies calculated from meteorological records of stations located in Costa Rica and Panama. In addition, to study its repercussions on Costa Rican society during the second administration of Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno (1924-1928) through documentary analysis of primary official and newspaper sources. The findings of this article allow to affirm that this Mega-Niño manifested itself in Costa Rica through an increase in the magnitude of the trade wind, warmer than usual surface temperatures of the air and ocean, and a decrease in rainfall compared to its average value. Likewise, this phenomenon had several social impacts linked to drought condition scenarios; expressed in locust plagues, shortages of drinking water, decreases in crop yields and extensions in summer activities. Also, there was an affection of stronger winds and higher waves to the small boat operations on the Pacific coast, as well as damage to coastal and urban infrastructures. It is concluded that these social repercussions were concentrated on a local scale in the country, and were moderate in the different affected sites.

  The article analyzes how care was developed for various poor sectors in Costa Rica. Through the review of laws, decrees and official circulars, it is shown that the State practiced different protection measures through the early institutionalization of charity, the partial or total exoneration of certain charges, the distribution of land and the promotion of public health through medicine and hospitals. Various actors were key in its development, such as citizens, the Catholic Church and some members of the elites. Its purposes were also the strengthening of capitalism, the promotion of the agricultural production and the fight against vagrancy. It is concluded that the State was institutionalizing charity and public health towards poor populations through the financing and supervision of various actors. 

During the Popular Unity (UP) in Chile, a global transformation of society was conceived, which included cultural action as a means to overcome "underdevelopment" and dependency. In this context, a series of exhibitions, exchanges and networks between Latin American artists, as well as important debates on the condition of art and the artist's attitude within the society of the time took place. Thus, a culture of transition to socialism develops, influenced by the political conditions in which the UP was created. This text makes a panoramic tour of the different critical and artistic topics and debates that were part of the cultural development of the UP. The aim is to offer both a diagnosis and a critical map of the work of the artists in a revolutionary context of transition to socialism, thus intending to contribute to the rescue of our artistic and cultural history.

The article analyzes the role that men adopt to tackle violence against women that prevails in Ecatepec, Estado de México. Thus, the work explores pedagogies that use performance as a tool against femicide. These pedagogies have carried out among male and female students from Francisco Villa 128 high school, located in Ecatepec. Under theoretical category, “intercorporeality”, this work approach to some of these male students’ testimonies, in order to investigate the articulation between body, knowledge and masculinity. In this regard, the article aims to understand how these male students, through the interactions that they have with their female classmates within the performance, acknowledge violence against women within their communities and, at the same time, start to think their male identities. I conclude that these pedagogies represent an aesthetic/political strategy where these students, through the production of embodied knowledges, imagine alternative ways to understand gender relations in the urban periphery.