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

The purpose of this essay is to examine the artistic development of Viveca Vázquez; specifically, to present the historical background of the event Rompeforma (1989-1996) or BReaking Forms -a marathon of new dance forms, performance, and visuals (pioneered within the contemporary experimental scene in Puerto Rico). Departing from her experience as co-director and co-producer of this event, the Viveca Vázquez analyzes the manner in which art, in effect, migrates through different "terrains" or "territories" to make political, interdisciplinary, and multicultural exchanges between the United States, the Caribbean, and the rest of Latin America.

This article explores the historical relationships between Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. This nontraditional and understudy migration offers a different cartography to understand Puerto Rican Studies in relationship with the Eastern Caribbean. Through the music tradition of calypso, the author presents historic traces among these islands that result from cultural exchanges. Carnival, as a common scenario, and the municipalities of Vieques and Culebra offer a possibility to imagine Puerto Rico as part of the Caribbean.

The paper examines political meanings and practices in the music of the Puerto Rican New Song Movement, in the context of the crisis of the modernizing project of the 1970‘s. It argues that the New Song practices could have signaled the beginnings of a process of reappropriating music making as a creative process and as creator of social relations of solidarity, against the current of the continuous cooptation of emergent musics by the recording industry. It also examines political meanings and practices of music by the new generations, which emerge in the midst of an increasing corporative control of the sonic landscape by the music industry.

Cities continously grow with o without planning. This problem is of utmost importance because the cities consume rural land which could be used for other purposes such as agriculture. Under the sustainable development principle, repopulating the inner city districs is an alternative to the cities constant development. This alternative will foster a more balanced inner-city and peripheral growth. A survey administered in Mexico City evaluates the problem in the context of urban renovation policies and programs applied to the inner-city, from the perspective of an SPSS analysis. Through a series of linear correlations of satisfaction / importance with housing and services, this research confirms Mexico as a city with potentially good renovation programs and statistical indicators. By using space more efficiently and repopulating the inner city, the abandoned central areas as well as peripheral expansion which happened in Mexico mainly from 1970-2005, will eventually be reduced. This fact has been the reason for studying that time period.

This paper examines the complex relationship between social order, epistemology and musical creation. Checks the concomitance of (1) the social division into classes, (2) the social organization of knowledge that is immanent to class societies and (3) the populist-substantialist and elitist-formalist trends in contemporary musical creativity and musical research. Discusses the link between capitalism, epistemology and contemporary musical aesthetics and explores plausible epistemic aesthetic possibilities in a classless society.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the life experience of elderly women with a chronic degenerative disease, specifically diabetes mellitus, hypertension and/or hypercholesterolemia, and who live in urban poverty contexts. The methodology was a qualitative and phenomenological analysis focused on eight women ranging in age between 60 and 75 years, who suffered from diabetes mellitus, hypertension and/or hypercholesterolemia for over five years, and who attend, on a monthly basis, a public health care clinic in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, Nuevo León, that is, in the Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez and Monte Kristal colonies (both colonies declared with urban poverty by SEDESOL). In-depth interviews were conducted from August 2011 to June 2014 and the categories for their analysis were their perception of health and illness, attention and care, chronic degenerative disease and poverty, health history, and health care habits (diet, exercise and rest). Main results indicate a relationship between health and a physical condition, a relationship between the disease with an emotional state; and poverty as a control limiting factor resulting from these women‘s lack of access to a personalized treatment. In conclusion, for the women interviewed income limitations, education level, marital status, and place of birth are important factors in the development of their own disease because such conditions and/or circumstances coupled with an unbalanced diet and lack of physical activity complicated their health state in old age.

Through this writing I attempt to empty some of the accumulation my soul has gathered inside along this path I have been forced to go through for 17 years, 3 months and 3 days. The purpose of this essay is to strip the prison system of the mask that has allowed it to disguise itself as a benevolent entity that seeking and promote the well-being of those trapped inside. I try to unmask at least some of its real face, remove its holiness and sanctity, and expose their wickedness and their reluctance to follow through with their own philosophy of rehabilitating the individual. I attempt to walk the reader down the thorny path that leads to the institution‘s mishandling of innumerable lives. The prison system is supposed to work to rehabilitate the person who commits an offense and work to help the society that he will one day be reentering. My voice rises in the silence of these written words to denounce that prisons are not the healing entities that they claim to be, they are a sewer of diseases, diseases that choke the spirit and strangle the soul until there is nobody left to dwell in. Yes, prisons are not the remedy, they have never been. They are only a means to get rid of an immediate problem, send brainwashing propaganda to the citizens and exalt the government. The success of our country‘s leaders is not measured by the achievements of generation growth, but with the apparent decline in crime, arrests, and lengthy prison sentences. Here I show you that their apparent success is the failure of our society, and more than that, it is the failure of our humanity. The individual who commits an offense doesn't need to be condemned, but educated, does not need correction, but education. While still early in a prisoner‘s confinement, at risk individuals need help tearing down the walls in which they have been held captive. They need to be shown the universe of possibilities and alternatives that have been deliberately kept from them. This writing has the firm and sole purpose of calling out to the free world; to those who have ears to hear and knowledge to understand, to those who have the power to generate change, that the individual who commits an offense, the prisoner, the culprit, the convict, the confined, but above all, the person behind all those names, does not need any more jails or prisons, but more opportunity for a genuinely thoughtful and compassionate education.

The experiments made in 1944 by Avery, MacLeod and McCarty, of DNA as the biological active principle in bacterial (pneumococcal) transformation was received with skepticism and controversy. The skeptical and disregarding response by prominent members of the scientific community to the 1944 results, represents a case of paradigmatic resistance (i.e., findings are rejected because they contradict core and/or critical elements of the prevalent theory) born from the historical dominant paradigm of the protein nature of the gene, rather than a premature discovery (i.e., implications cannot be logically connected to canonical knowledge).