Urban Latin America: Life In The Megacity
UnpublishedJanuary/February
1995
Volume:
28
Number:
4
Report
Garry Leech
Last year Sérgio Cabral, governor of Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro State, praised the Colombian government’s success in reducing violence in Bogotá. Formerly one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Bogotá has seen a dramatic decrease in violent crime rates in the last five years.
Article
Eduardo Galeano
In the name of free enterprise, freeways, and the freedom to buy, city air has been made unbreathable. The car is not the only guilty party, but it is the one that attacks city dwellers most directly.
Graciela Silvestri & Adrián Gorelik
By leaving all of Buenos Aires' projects half-finished, the current crisis has begun consolidating fragments: pieces of the future like unfulfilled promises in the north of the city, pieces of the past like tourists' souvenirs in the south, and pieces of the present like pimples everywhere. Enter Buenos Aires by the mouth of the Riachue- lo-the "little river"-like the navigators of yore.
Kim Ives
The date was October 15, 1994, 60 years after the end of the first U.S.
This guide, reprinted here by NACLA, is produced as a public service by Third World Resources. It includes information on organizations whose principal con- cerns are the nations and people of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Culture and Politics ean Franco's article [Septem- ber/October 1994] on how tele- vision and popular music have displaced the printed word as cul- tural guide seems a bit out of con- text. First, the notion that Celia Cruz has replaced Sim6n Bolivar or Jos6 Marti as the apostle of Latinity overlooks the fact that Celia Cruz' popularity-like that of another Cuban artist, Gloria Estefan-is a commercial phe- nomenon.
Rubén Martinez
Mexico City and Los Angeles should look to one another. Mexico City needs LA's technology, LA's space, LA's respect for the pursuit of the individual.
Continued Unrest in Southern Mexico CHIAPAS, DECEMBER 5, 1994 Newly elected PRI governor Eduardo Robledo is strug- gling to establish his political legitimacy in the face of demands from the Chiapan Peo- ples Electoral Tribunal (PEPCH) that the August state election be annulled because of massive fraud. The PEPCH collected almost 2,000 complaints of fraud in over half the state's polling booths.
Social Struggles and the City: The Case of Sio Paulo Edited by LOcio Kowarick, Monthly Review Press, 1994, 269 pp., $38 (cloth), $18 (paper).
Thomas Angotti
At the edge of Mexico City, east of the airport, lies Nezahualc6yotl, a sprawling shantytown of two million people located on the bed of what was once Lake Texcoco. It is one of the many self-built neighborhoods that house the majority of the metropolitan area's 20 million people-neigh- borhoods where it is hard to find decent housing, good jobs, clean water, or parks.
James Thomas Rojas
By selling, working, playing, socializing and relaxing in the space around their homes, the working-class Latinos of East LA have developed a residential vernacular that represents their struggles, triumphs and everyday habits. Latino residents bring a unique and often over- looked perspective to the U.
Jo-Marie Burt & Cesar Espejo
Though they have not yet managed to create a new democratic social order, the residents of Villa El Salvador in Lima did transform a squatter settlement in a vast and inhospitable piece of desert into a liveable community of nearly 300,000 inhabitants. On April 28, 1971, some 200 families invaded a small piece of state-owned land in Pamplona Alta, a peripheral area to the south of Lima.
"Those who know about ancient Greece," says Eduardo Galeano in his essay on the auto-centered city, "say the city was born as a meeting place for people." In their essay on Buenos Aires, Graciela Silvestri and Adridn Gorelik con- trast public-centered Greek antiquity with the modem, market-driven city governed by a seeming "absence of intentions, politics and the state.