Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

This article examines Venezuelan irregularized transits in South America, focusing on the dynamics of mobility and control that shape the southern corridor—a transnational space linking the Andean Region (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia) to the Southern Cone, particularly Chile. We explore how this mode of migrant mobility unfolds spatially, while simultaneously being shaped by—and resisting—the reinforcement of regional control mechanisms. Challenging the dominant narrative that frames irregularized transit migration as either a temporary stay or an “illegal” journey between two countries, we argue that it constitutes a heterogeneous, multitemporal, and multidimensional social force that redefines cross-border spatial struggles. Drawing on ethnographic material collected between 2019 and 2021, we analyze three interwoven dimensions of Venezuelan transit migration: political-economic, sociocultural, and subjective. As the article demonstrates, these dimensions generate multi-scalar spatial reverberations across the studied corridor.

Este artículo explora el papel del sonido durante la performance de la ceremonia mapuche llellipun en Santiago. Sostiene que los sonidos ceremoniales crean una experiencia inmersiva que facilita la intercomunicación entre humanos, espíritus y el ecosistema en un espacio eco-espiritualmente precario, haciendo audible una forma distintivamente urbana de pensamiento y existencia mapuche. Al establecer y hacer perceptibles relaciones humanas, no-humanas y más-que-humanas, la producción y sensación del sonido reafirman la presencia, a menudo negada, de fuerzas y entidades eco-espirituales en la ciudad —componentes centrales del mundo vivo mapuche. Sin embargo, este entrelazamiento de los órdenes antropológicos, ecológicos y cosmológicos facilitado por el llellipun difiere de contextos rurales mapuche. De hecho, la precariedad ecológica y urbana de Santiago, que dificulta la comunicación con la naturaleza y los espíritus, convierte al llellipun en un medio esencial de existencia mapuche, permitiéndoles reactivar una relacionalidad eco-espiritual que la urbanidad ciertamente ha obstaculizado, pero aún no ha destruido.

Data from archaeology, ethnography, and ethnohistory document entanglements of dogs among South American Indigenous societies during pre-Columbian and colonial times. The prolific presence and uses of dogs in the Central Andes and in parts of the Paraná Basin, Patagonia, and Circum-Caribbean regions contrast with the conspicuous lack of records in pre-Columbian lowland Neotropics. The ontological perspective cannot explain this pattern. The dog arrived in the Americas domesticated; there are shared fundamentals of Amazonian and Andean ontologies. The Arawak expansion into the Caribbean records examples of dogs. Populations of endemic, pre-Columbian canids may have been tamed. There is a widespread use of dogs for hunting in current Amazonia, but the lack of other uses is noticeable. An exchange of dogs between Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Caribbean is hypothesized based on skeletal and iconographic evidence. When adopting the European dog, Amazonian Amerindians applied a native category, the jaguar, to the exotic species.

This article contributes to understanding contemporary processes of racialization in the Central American migration landscape by looking at the residential reception of increasingly diverse groups of people on the move. Based on research in southern Honduras, it argues that we need to disentangle the racialized and religious politics involved with informal spaces of assistance or acompañamiento in contexts where migrants tend to stay temporarily. Engaging with the notion of acompañamiento through the hosting practices of ordinary citizens shows how racialization gets produced and reinforced in tandem with religious teachings, entrepreneurial considerations, and local migration anxieties. The article concludes that racialization is shaped through the histories and inequalities of place and confirms the intersectional nature of racialization, which incorporates religious identities and hierarchies. Highlighting how the challenges of acompañamiento help attend to shared experiences of injustice and persistent inequalities of human mobility, the article also contributes to broadening migrant trajectory research to the communities that surround migration routes.

This collection explores how contemporary racialization processes shape and are shaped by migration dynamics in the Central American and Mexican context. Marked by histories of migration and displacement, the region has become a critical crossroads for increasingly diverse populations on the move, from journeys of African, Asian, and Caribbean migrants through the region en route North, to dramatic increases in forced migration within Latin America. Drawing on ethnographic research from Costa Rica, southern Honduras, the Mexico-Guatemala border, and Tijuana, Mexico, the contributions examine encounters between migrants and local communities in spaces defined by histories of marginalization, displacement, and nation-building. This introduction underscores racialization as a central lens for understanding the experiences of people on the move, emphasizing how global migration regimes intersect with local inequalities to shape reception, exclusion, and belonging. By historicizing migration discourse and practice, the collection contributes to broader debates on mobility and belonging in the Americas.