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

Review of the book "The substantive representation of women in subnational legislatures in Mexico: from the descriptive to the substantive" published in 2024 by Lorena Vázquez Correa that examines the evolution of women's political representation in Mexico's subnational legislatures during this period. This time span includes important reforms and changes in gender policies in Mexico, such as the implementation of gender quotas and the promotion of parity in political representation.

The violence and denial exerted from the western humanist culture towards non-human animals have been recurrently taken as reference points to design modes of oppression within the human species itself. And, from this arrangement of otherness and animal alterity, biopolitical systems have segmented politically recognized human lives (bíos) and lives exposed to vulnerability (zoé). This article questions that thesis and is committed to thinking of the animal as a force that is not opposed to the human, but rather empowers it. For this, the thought of classical authors on the subject is critically reviewed, as well as some concepts immersed in the problem: biopower, bare life, sovereign, homo sacer, among others. The work finally derives in certain approaches aimed at considering the different forms of life in terms of heterogeneities, assemblages and becomings, as well as accepting the unsustainability of all binarism in the face of the powerful presence of a micrology of the multiple.

The coordinators of the work, Tiziana Bertaccini from the University of Turin and Carlos Illiades from the Metropolitan Autonomous University, together with the co-authors of the chapters are organized in the Association of European Latin American Historians (AHILA), that is, an academic bridge between both continents that seeks to disseminate Latin American Studies in Europe. The comparative and case analyzes start from a discussion that is both conceptual and historiographic and also with a touch of nostalgia and disappointment, remembering the optimism of those first studies for the democratic transition. In the introduction, both coordinators of the work recount the historical phases that Latin America has gone through, ranging from progressivism and economic growth to the dissatisfaction of citizens reflected in Latinobarómetro and to the current crisis of violence and demonstrations of the right. The study includes two chapters of reflection on the region, one chapter on Chile, two works on Peru, one on Uruguay, three on Mexico and one on Argentina.  

In this article, the importance of Latin America for the success story of Europe and the liberal scripts will be shown in two steps. First, I will explain the relevance of material interdependencies for the development of liberal scripts in Europe. The liberal success story is based on the global material interweaving of Europe with other regions of the world and with the promise of progress. The benefit for the Western World is based on the externalization of costs to other regions (here Latin America)and the risk for future generations is excluded. In a second step, I will look at relationships of cultural resonance between Latin America and Europe, focusing on freedom as a core idea inherent in any liberal script. I will show that the idee of freedom has different connotations in different contexts and that these contexts are entangled.

In this text we reflect, based on ethnographic data, on the practices of corporal and affective recomposition carried out by the group Amigos del Tren México, a civil association formed by people from different countries and members of a Pentecostal Christian church. This group provides food, personal belongings such as toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, socks and underwear and heals the wounds of the Central American migrant population passing through the city of Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, through the ritual of foot washing. Our interest is focused on analyzing how these practices are embedded in and/or reinforce acts of care for those who are in continuous movement. We found that these practices mitigate part of the consequences that restrictive and security migration policies have left on the bodies and emotions of migrants by exposing them to dangerous and violent transit. We find that learning from these practices strengthens our ethnographic work, as we can integrate part of them into the network of care during ethnographic fieldwork.

Este trabajo analiza el desarrollo de las políticas familiares y de cuidado en México, destacando dos ciclos: el neoliberal (1997-2018) y el del gobierno de la “Cuarta Transformación” (2019-2024). En el primer ciclo, las políticas se centraron en programas neoliberales, mientras que en el segundo se adoptó un enfoque más universalista y de derechos sociales. El trabajo analiza, con un enfoque teórico en el “cuidado social”,  hasta que punto estas políticas han contribuido a la igualdad de género, la desfamiliarización y desfeminización del cuidado. Además, se revisan iniciativas como el Sistema Nacional de Cuidados y el reconocimiento del derecho al cuidado digno en 2020.

Based on the conceptualization of social places and gender mandates, autobiographical fragments are analyzed, obtained through semi-structured interviews, which claim positions in heterosexual and urban couple relationships. These claims show that the expectations and norms about being a man and a woman with a partner become more complex in everyday life and are manifested in situations of discussion or conflict. Couples face multiple tensions and resistances around the duty of each of their members, encouraged by couple ideals that maintain male privileges in the control of commitment and sexuality, condemn extramaritality, favor joint provisioning, but not co-responsibility in the home and in the care of children.

Family Constellation Therapy is a therapeutic approach that has gained great popularity in Mexico in recent years. This approach is set in the field of health and emotional well-being as well as in expressions of contemporary spirituality. Its practice allows the body and emotions to be key to perceive a symbolic and emotional effectiveness; in this way, it fosters in the subjectivity of practitioners a belief in it. The population studied in 2021 consisted of a group of women who regularly attend family constellation therapy sessions facilitated by a practitioner in Guadalajara. The aim of this study is to analize how, through the lived and somatized experiences of the participants, belief in the symbolic and emotional efficacy of the processes that occur during these therapies is legitimized. To understand this dynamic, we start with methodologies such as the incarnate field journal and somatic pedagogy, to attendthe affected in the field and to situate epistemologically somatic events, even those lived by the researcher in the field, and analyzed from a body anthropology, emotions and religion perspective, where therapeutic culture can be observed.

This article explores the practice of shifting as a therapeutic method popularized by adolescent women in Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerged as a ritual on TikTok and drawed from popular media culture (Possamai, 2010), shifting quickly formed a solid virtual community among young people seeking an escape from pandemic uncertainty. A hypothesis, derived from two years of virtual fieldwork, suggests that youth, in their search for emotional support on digital social networks, found a space for self-expression, containment , and belonging within shifting and its community. For the analysis, digital netnography was employed. This involved constructing a stakeholder map to identify key community actors, followed by 15 semi-structured interviews and 5 in-depth interviews. The research classifies shifting as a cathartic ritual aimed at alleviating emotional tensions in the face of the Social Drama (Turner, 1975) caused by the pandemic.    [MA1]¿Esto se refiere a apoyo emocional?