Quarantine Art & Community

By Gaby Barrios

Quarantine has shown me all the ways a story can be told. A good story can live in the pages of a book, in the words of a social media post, or among the lines of a drawing. At the start of quarantine, I promised myself that I would produce a work of art every day. Though this started as a way to cope with the long stretches of working from home and worrying, it has become a self care ritual that brings me closer to others. I draw the everyday habits that make up my life. Things like painting my nails or doing laundry become the main highlights of my days. By placing them on social media, I like to think these images speak to my friends and family, telling them that the minutia of their lives deserves recognition and celebration. Nowadays I wash the dishes, clean my bathroom, and fold laundry just to have a sense of normalcy. When I draw these daily tasks, I try to show the ways in which they can be beautiful and the way they have always been interesting.

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Bolivian Elections: No Morales Spells Uncertainty

By Alexia Rauen and Alexandra Snodgrass

Bolivia will hold presidential elections on October 18, 2020, after numerous delays and an interim unelected presidency after the October 2019 elections. The nation’s former president, Evo Morales, who ruled land-locked Bolivia from 2006 to 2019, will not be running after a dramatic resignation. Instead, the election pits Luis Arce, the candidate of Morales’s party, against the ex-president Carlos Mesa.

Bolivia had previously limited presidents to two consecutive terms. However, in 2013, Morales was able to run for a third term after it was found that the introduction of a new constitution in 2009 made his first term moot for counting purposes. In 2016, a referendum on whether or not to change the constitution to allow Morales to run again failed to yield results in his favor. This was reversed by Bolivia’s Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal, who ruled that term limits no longer existed for any elected official. Morales announced his candidacy for the 2019 Bolivian presidential elections in May of 2019. Luis Almagro, head of the Organization of American States (OAS), stated that given the tribunal’s ruling, Morales should be allowed to run. The election was held in October of 2019, and Morales needed a 10-point lead in order to prevent a runoff election. When Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal released results with 83% of the vote counted, Morales was in the lead – but not enough to prevent a runoff. Then, the website went dark, and when it returned, Morales had won by just over 10 points. The OAS released a report on November 10, 2019 that found the election’s “process was contrary to best practices and failed to abide by security standards … Given the irregularities observed, it is impossible to guarantee the integrity of the data and certify the accuracy of the results.” The post-election public outrage led to weeks of protests and Morales’s resignation.

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Hidden in Plain Sight: How Stories of Central American Climate Displacement Were Buried Under a Border Crisis

By Elizabeth Courtney

For InterAction

This piece was originally published on InterAction.org.

“I’m doing this for my children.”

That’s what Martha from Colón, Honduras, said to a reporter in November 2018. If you turned on any U.S. news channel in the Fall of 2018, you likely saw a lot of people like Martha—people who left their homes in the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador in search of a better life in the United States.

When large numbers of people arrive en masse to seek asylum at the U.S. border, it’s a newsworthy story. But what kind of story is it? Who decides how to tell it?

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Book Review: Christina Lamb’s Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

By Alexia Rauen

Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence

In fact, they realised, women had been speaking up about this from the very start – it was just that no one was listening. ‘In the Juntas Trial in 1985 in which nine commanders were tried, there was a victim who said I was raped, and the prosecutor just ignored this. He literally said, “Don’t lose the wood for the trees. We need to focus on the torture and murder.”’ ¹

In her work Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, Christina Lamb explores the phenomenon of sexual violence in armed conflict. Her travels take her from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (nothing democratic about it) to Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. She also goes to Argentina, where she explores the violence against women that occurred during the military regime from 1976 to 1983.

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Tomasa Tito Condemayta: Entrevista con la escritora e ilustradora Erika Quinteros

Traducido por Pilar Espitia

La siguiente entrevista se llevó a cabo en julio de 2020 con Erika Quinteros, escritora e ilustradora de TOMASA TITO CONDEMAYTA: Una histora de valor y coraje. Erika Quinteros es ingeniera industrial con una maestría en Comunicación Política y Gobernanza de la Universidad George Washington. Ha trabajado como asesora en el diseño y evaluación de proyectos de desarrollo comunitario. Tiene un particular interés por temas de género, los derechos de las personas indígenas y la protección medioambiental.

¿Qué te inspiró a escribir la historia de Tomasa Tito Condemayta?

Fue la misma Tomasa y su poderosa historia. Fue una mujer indígena que lideró un batallón de mujeres para luchar contra los españoles. Esto sucedió en un periodo cuando muchos peruanos creían que la mujer no tenía un papel militar o político.

Creo que, al haber crecido leyendo tantos libros diferentes y siendo inspirada por personas extranjeras, no podía creer que nadie me hubiera contado la historia de Tomasa. Era peruana, como yo. Era una mujer, como yo. Y aunque yo no soy indígena, mi abuela era indígena, así que una parte de mí es indígena. En Perú nuestros héroes nacionales son sobre todo hombres blancos y pudientes. Creo que todo niño/a debería poder aprender sobre héroes con los que él o ella se pueda identificar, y estoy segura que muchos estarán fascinados e inspirados por Tomasa y su valentía.

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Prejuicio racial en el sistema educativo estadounidense: Efectos del racismo en las vidas de estudiantes negros y en su éxito académico

Escrito por Shreyansh Budhia

Traducido por Pilar Espitia

Mientras que los embates entre grupos de supremacistas blancos y opositores en Charlottesville, Virginia, en agosto 12 y 13 de 2017 demuestran que el racismo en Estados Unidos es un fenómeno generalizado que persigue a las minorías raciales, se vuelve más y más evidente que nuestra tarea como sociedad para eliminar este mal y liberar a las minorías de sus garras no está completa. A decir verdad, el racismo en ambas formas, tanto extrínseco como intrínseco, afecta a las minorías de todas las etnicidades y colores en Estados Unidos. Hoy en día, las instituciones educativas en todo Estados Unidos usan el racismo para impactar de manera desfavorable el desempeño educativo de los estudiantes negros. Las cortes y organismos policiales son liderados por reconocidos supremacistas blancos que fallan a favor de los suyos. Los hombres negros se vuelven injustamente sospechosos en encuentros con la policía, y los reclusos negros superan en números de proporciones incomprensibles a los blancos. Los profesionales negros en el gobierno y el mundo corporativo se encuentran con casos sutiles de comportamientos prejuiciosos debido al color de su piel y herencia. Todos estos ejemplos sugieren que el racismo es un problema social que actúa como un obstáculo para el desarrollo socioeconómico de la comunidad afroamericana.

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