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

The Guatemalan writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1837-1921), a renowned traveler and diplomat, produced an important body of work, which brought together news chronicles about the Parisian life, the intellectual world of the Belle Époque and his journeys to the East. However, we also encounter an important production of war chronicles published in Spanish and French from the beginning of World War I. As a matter of fact, the writer went to the war front along with a group of journalists from different neutral countries. His goal was to inform of the atrocities, the devastation and to report war victims’ testimonies. In this article, we propose to analyze the narrative strategies that were used by the columnist, so as to study in what way it brought a particular and personal perspective on the armed conflict that was setting Europe ablaze. We will thus examine the strategies specific to the travel stories that were used in the chronicles and that carried his narration beyond the status of reporting in order to give an intimate vision of the disaster and the horror.

This article proposes an approach to a series of texts compiled in Marginales de la Vida (1963), a book published by Salvadorian writer Arturo Ambrogi in 1912, from the existing links on them between the modernist influence and the journalistic career developed by its author. The main objectives are to explore Arturo Ambrogi`s literary production through an analysis of the tensions generated when locating part of his writing in the Salvadorian, Central American and Latin American literature from the early XX century, and to postulate the possible presence of a literary hybrid that escaped from the visions followed by other contemporary writers of the region during the studied period.

El Festival Flores de la Diáspora Africana surge en 1999 en Costa Rica, organizado por la Fundación Arte y Cultura para el Desarrollo, con el propósito de promover las manifestaciones artísticas y culturales de la población afrocostarricense en particular, y de los pueblos afrodescendientes y africanos, de manera general. A lo largo de diecinueve ediciones, se ha colocado la cultura de matriz africana en el más alto nivel, con la presencia de grupos de ballet folclórico como el Kilandukilu de Angola, el Ballet Garífuna de Honduras, la bailarina Bethania Nascimento, perteneciente al Alvin Hailey Ballet, y el Opus Dance Theater de New York. En el bel canto, la soprano Sarah Carrere, dio fe de su gran talento franco-senegalés, así como en gospel el coro de la iglesia St. Agustine de Washington, y grupos como Master Key, Charleene Stuart y Sasha Campbell, de Costa Rica, conquistaron la audiencia con ritmos como gospel, spiritual, R&B y Soul, sin olvidar las agrupaciones nacionales de Calipso, que han dejado su huella en el Festival.En esa pasión por mostrar los mejores representantes de las diferentes manifestaciones del arte y la cultura de la Diáspora Africana, en 2012 la Fundación invitó a Costa Rica al Premio Nobel de Literatura de 1984, Derek Walcott. Para dar continuidad a este trabajo con los artífices de la palabra, también en 2013 se realizó el 1er Encuentro de Escritores y Poetas Afrodescendientes, Indígenas y Sinodescendientes, cuyo resultado fue la antología: Tenemos la Palabra, en la cual se muestra el trabajo de casi cincuenta creadores. Las escritoras Eintou Pearl Springer (Trinidad y Tobago), Melanie Taylor (Panamá), Myrna Manzanares (Belice) y Nancy Morejón (Cuba), fueron publicadas en dicha antología. Hoy nos llena de satisfacción publicar en la Revista Ístmica una parte de su obra poética, así como su respectiva traducción al español, buscando exaltar su trabajo artístico y visibilizar la literatura escrita por mujeres afrodescendientes en el Caribe. 

Pedro Álvarez (Cuba) and Rafael Trelles (Puerto Rico) are two important exponents of contemporary art in the Hispanic-speaking Caribbean who found in two artistic milestones of the nineteenth century a way to question the formulas established by History and Art. Both, from the reappropriation of the work of Víctor Patricio Landaluze and Francisco Oller, respectively, reflect on the complex circumstances of their islands. Through the study of the past, both are committed to the sense of their homeland history, to the (re)updating of their artistic tradition or to the functions of the intellectual in the configuration of their national contexts. Fragmentation and collage are effective constructive methods used by both artists to decontextualize the multiple cultural signs of their starting referents and to readjust their multiple meanings in the new work and in the new context. Nevertheless, in spite of the similarities, differences of intention are also noticed, according to the respective national realities: while the Puerto Rican has the clear purpose of paying homage to Oller, the Cuban intends to claim the figure of Landaluze, in whom he finds inspiration for depicting the present.

The main obstacle to the study of the early periodical press has been access to the materials, due in part to their volume, but even more to their minor status as a scriptural practice. More particularly in Hispanic America, this prevented several newspaper series from being preserved intact and what survived was not always kept in optimal conditions. Even if we will have to wait until relevant libraries or archives provide digitized version of their full collections, the operations that have already taken place offer unprecedented access to materials with potential implications still difficult to foresee. This article aims initially to provide a brief and practical survey of the present situation. It will then move on to examine, from this perspective, the third series of the Gazeta de Guatemala (1797-1807), the most important newspaper at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries in Hispanic America

One of postwar Guatemalan literary movements is the so called Generation X, positioned critically as an alternative to sanctioned culture. These young artists and writers, in constant mobility, refused the structures that emarginated them. Positioned in a peripheral postmodernity, their point of reference was globalization, as a radical change of culture. They disregarded historical memory, authorized canon, conventional moral codes, the great narratives and dived deeply -and sometimes dangerously- into their private sphere, without utopian horizons. As a reaction to big or small editorials that overlooked them, they generated their own means of marketing their editorial products.

In the last years of his life, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío returned to the fantastic short story because the genre offered the best narrative expression of the confusion and doubt in which he was living. In September 1910 Darío made his only visit to Mexico, which at the time was just at the beginning of the great Revolution that would overthrow the thirty-four-year-old dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. The experience of being in the midst of a great social upheaval, as an invited guest of honor that, nevertheless, was not permitted to visit the capital, was probably an inspiration for his penultimate short story, “Huitzilopoxtli: Mexican Legend” (1977a).

Presentación del número

In the present article, Stephen Mamber presents purposes, types and examples of narrative mapping, a tool that helps to understand complex narratives in space and time, either films, news, novels or schedules in a train station. Narrative mappings can be as complex and theme-centered, like a territorial map, so they become the true interface to access the text. Since narrative is everywhere, Mamber asks if there is a limit to the possibilities of mapping our surroundings.