El Día 2 de los Conversatorios que sostendremos en forma virtual toda la semana es tan atractivo como el primero. El jueves iniciamos el día conversando sobre color de piel. El trabajo de Marcelo Paixão, junto con sus colaboradores en el proyecto PERLA, ha transformado radicalmente el estudio de los temas de raza y racismo en América Latina, por lo menos en el ámbito de aproximaciones de corte cuantitativo, como la sociología, la ciencia política y la economía. Medir el fenotipo del color de piel ha permitido entender mejor la manera como los Latinoamericanos o Caribeños perciben al otro, y…

Quería comentarles un poco sobre los invitados e invitadas que tenemos para el programa de los Conversatorios que sostendremos en forma virtual toda la semana. Este es un programa co-auspiciado con CIESAS, producto de colaboración con la sección ERIP de la Asociación de Estudios Latinoamericanos (LASA). El programa fue curado por un grupo de colegas de quienes he aprendido tanto en estos meses: Asad Asad, Lina Rosa Berrio Palomo, Mirna Carranza, Sara Clemente Vásquez, Emiliana Cruz, Rosalva Aida Hernández Castillo, Elaine Rocha, Elizabeth Sáenz Ackermann e Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj. …

Exactly five hundred years ago, on August 13, 1521 the magnificent City of Tenochtitlan fell to the siege of a powerful army composed by a handful Spanish invaders combined with thousands, perhaps more than a hundred thousand, indigenous allies. Conventional accounts of this critical moment in the history of Mexico are usually based on self-serving narratives of the European participants, starting with the letters of Hernán Cortés to the King of Spain. Those chronicles captured the imagination of people in the old world, who imagined “rivers of gold” and a fancied European superiority assisted by “guns, germs and steel”.

Conquistadores…

Many of us have spent hours following the events in Washington DC, trying to make sense of the violence unleashed by a sitting President unwilling to accept his electoral defeat. This kind of behavior has not been uncommon in the Western Hemisphere. In both Latin America and the Caribbean, we have had our fair share of personalist dictators, military juntas, hegemonic parties and autogolpes from democratically elected leaders. But I am troubled by facile comparisons and frankly offensive comments that have emerged in the press and social media discussing whether the U.S. is a “banana republic” or talking about the…

Loss

So much personal loss, empty chairs at dinner tables, and so much waste and material squander in this terrible year of the pestilence, 2020. Lives cut short by a disease that should not have caught us by surprise. Preventable deaths, not because medical knowledge had an available cure for patients becoming critically ill — we still do not have it-, but because non-medical-interventions could have stopped the outbreak, and were readily available. Initially those measures were perhaps not well understood, but after a few weeks it became pretty obvious. Nations that adopted timely controls on personal movement, universal mask wearing…

“Lamentable”. “Que merece compasión o lástima.” El sentido original de la palabra deporable viene de la raíz proto-indoeuropea ploro que significa llorar. Con esta frase lapidaria Hillary Clinton se refirió a los seguidores de Donald Trump en su fallida campaña electoral de hace cuatro años. No sólo estaba diciendo que quien apoyara a su contrincante era una persona lamentable, pero también que muchos de los votantes que apoyaron a quien todavía es Presidente en los Estados Unidos eran víctimas, que merecían nuestra simpatía por la condición humana que los llevó a simpatizar con alguien como Trump. En la polarización que…

Managing or mitigating risk often depends on asking relevant questions and on having timely and reliable information that can measure the relative frequency of catastrophic events one is seeking to avoid. Whether Mexico can contain the SAR-CoV-2 virus infection and the tragedies of countless deaths associated with it remains a highly controversial question. From the very beginning the strategy followed by the health authorities in Mexico was unusual, due to the mixed messages by the President regarding the severity of the epidemic; a generalized perception that the federal government was overconfident in its reliance on its sentinel epidemiological surveillance model…

Mexico has chosen an ambitious strategy for the containment of COVID-19. After seeking to delay the closing down of economic activity and social contact for as long as possible, it is now preparing for the surge of cases that is to be expected, once community transmission has taken hold. The approach has been criticized as too much of a gamble. It has also been dismissed as a horrendous mistake from a president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who seems less keen on following advise from science than following his gut feelings, continuing to give hugs, kiss babies and attend rallies. However…