Latin America

When the Kentucky-based Yum Corp. was looking for a city in Mexico in which to open a Taco Bell, it must have figured it couldn't go wrong with this ultra-modern, hyper-Americanized metropolis 125 miles from the Texas border in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. Regiomontanos, as Monterrey residents are called, wear their pro-Americanism on their sleeves and see little shame in the fact that their streets are as overrun by corporate American retailers as any suburban town north… more

Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it's 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It's as if the first decade of the 21st century didn't happen -- and almost as if history itself doesn't happen.… more

In 1519 a group of Spanish soldiers who had been sent to explore Mexico heard an extraordinary rumour. A sailor, Gonzalo Guerrero, had drifted there on a wrecked ship eight years earlier and was living among the Indians. He had married an Indian woman, with whom he had raised three children, and was tattooed and pierced. Odder still, he intended to stay put. Hernán Cortés, the leader of the expedition, was furious. "It will never do to leave him here,"… more

The influx of Mexicans into the United States will change how race is perceived in American society, says Gregory Rodriguez, [director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation]. ...

Author of a new book, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, Mr. Rodriguez said at a Washington press conference this week that Mexican-Americans have been "racially categorized" for centuries and that integration is a must for American society.

His… more

If Sunnyslope had a patron saint, her name would be the Virgin of Solitude. The black-cloaked woman is the saint of Oaxaca, Mexico, but her image drapes walls in homes and businesses throughout Sunnyslope, one of the Valley's oldest neighborhoods, nestled at the bottom of Phoenix's North Mountain. Over the past decade, so many immigrants from the southern Mexican state have moved into Sunnyslope that the working-class community in north-central Phoenix is becoming known as "Little… more

MEXICO CITY – Mexicans living abroad sent home a record $23 billion last year, raising new questions about whether the government of President Felipe Calderón can afford to slow migration.

In just one year, the amount of money migrants wired their families jumped 15 percent, according to Mexico's central bank, overtaking tourism to become the nation's second-biggest source of foreign income after oil. “This is a river of gold that flows into Latin America and Mexico.… more

History is replete with examples of great power conflict that develops when the world’s dominant powers are not willing or able to accommodate the interests of rising powers into the international order of the day. The last time the world denied two major rising industrial powers, Germany and Japan, what they considered their rightful place in the sun the result was world war. Following World War II, another hot world war was avoided only because the Western powers accepted the… more

Homogenizing the image of the "other" has always been a way for groups to marginalize undesirable minorities and foreigners. Two dozen centuries ago, Hippocrates wrote that the Scythians -- nomadic people whom the Greeks considered barbaric -- all looked alike. By contrast, the good doctor could discern that his own people came in all shapes and sizes.

To refuse to make distinctions among members of any given group is the first step to stripping them of individuality. And depriving people of… more

Rio de Janeiro -- I didn’t know which was worse, staying half a block from the beach in a hip neighborhood and staying clear of Rio’s infamous slums altogether, or paying a tour guide to take me and other looky-loos through the city’s hillside favelas. I chose the latter, and for a week I didn’t hear the end of it.

"That’s horrible," a snooty Brazilian left-wing intellectual told me. "Paying to see poor people! At least you didn’t take the tour… more

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Even as U.S. society struggles to move beyond its confining binary view of race -- white versus black with nothing in between -- Brazil, a country where the celebration of racial mixture has long been a central part of the national self-image, may be heading in the opposite direction.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, this South American nation received more African slaves than any country in the Americas. But the shortage of white women, and… more