Este artículo propone un recorrido por las narrativas de identidad y territorialización de nueve jóvenes habitantes del Conglomerado Oriente de la ciudad de Cali, Colombia. La investigación buscó comprender la experiencia de la marginalidad urbana y los elementos que la componen. Como resultado se encontraron cuatro núcleos de significado en los relatos: el movimiento permanente, la maleabilidad del territorio, la domesticación de la incertidumbre y el silenciamiento de lo étnico. Se plantea, además, la riqueza y vigencia del concepto de marginalidad, así como la necesidad de profundizar en los estudios sobre este fenómeno desde la experiencia vivida.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in la Central de Abasto, Mexico City’s main wholesale food market, this article analyzes the effects of violence on the configuration of the Mexican food system. It argues that in contexts of violence, relations of intermediation expand and transform. That is, the number and type of actors involved in distribution increases and new types of intermediaries arise in the system who help mitigate the sense of insecurity felt by market actors. This study contributes to current anthropological discussions about (inter)mediation, and reveals the importance of studying violence in the context of markets and economic relations.

Shortly after the end of El Salvador’s civil war (1980- 1992), Salvadorans began to experience a new kind of insecurity—an affective state of not knowing when to feel anxiety. Their war-era survival repertoire could not account for the new postwar context. Slowly, and then suddenly, gangs converted into the new principal danger in the Central American country. Today they have become figures of intimacy in El Salvador’s political and community life. As the thirtieth anniversary of the Peace Accords nears, in this article, based on a combined 30 years of ethnographic fieldwork, we consider transformations in senses of insecurity, from not knowing to knowing and back again, as well as continuing forms of unknowing, that perpetuate unequal distributions of power in urban San Salvador.

Based on an ethnographic review of professional experiences in “democratic security” policies in Mexico (2011-2017), this paper analyzes the appropriation of community policing schemes by certain local authorities. As illustrated by the neighborhood police service in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, this process involves diverse actors such as social scientists and members of civil society organizations, whose co-production of security and citizen participation programs can be aligned with illiberal and, in fact, characteristically state projects –i.e., introducing police intermediation in the clientelist management of services and demands, as well as making the population socially and spatially legible in terms of planned intervention.

The objective of this article is to analyze the changes that have occurred in ethnographic fieldwork as a result of the multiple forms of violence that have increased and expanded in Mexico in the last twenty years. With the use of diverse documentary and theoretical sources, the author combines his experience as a graduate thesis director to trace an autoethnographic reflection that leads him to question the role of ethnographers in the face of the whole situation. The article offers, in this sense, a balance of the affectations to ethnographic fieldwork in the context of violence as well as the strategies elaborated to face it. Given that it is not possible to cancel fieldwork and that it is fundamental to document what is happening, the article ends by proposing to strengthen collective work and collaboration in the field, promoting creativity and self-care.

Familias, iglesias y Estado laico. Enfoques antropológicos, es un libro coordinado por Carlos Garma, Rosario Ramírez y Ariel Corpus, editado por la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa. En él se compilan once trabajos de investigadores que han centrado su estudio en el fenómeno religioso en México. La discusión gira en torno a las posturas de diversas iglesias sobre el matrimonio igualitario, el aborto y los derechos sexuales y reproductivos, en el marco del movimiento del Frente Nacional por la Familia que en 2016 salió a las calles a manifestarse en contra de la iniciativa de reconocimiento constitucional sobre los matrimonios igualitarios.

This work is a study of the radio phenomenon that utilizes the conceptual tool of power field. It starts from a documentary review that takes up Bourdieu and Latour to analyze radio as a network of power relations historically constituted and in constant struggle. Consequently, this critical approach reveals the inequitable conditions of the radio field in Mexico and in its subfields. Technology as a reconfiguration factor of the radio field is a line to follow in future studies and reveals how important it is to generate more current anthropological studies on radio diversity in Mexico, which implies closing the gap between doing radio and thinking about radio.

This article aims to show that the purchase of fayuca, or contraband, in the tianguis, or street markets, happens because it serves to sustain social ties and, particularly, the social practice of the family. The text uses the literature on social practices and consumption to make such a demonstration. The information comes from observations, dialogues, interviews and focus groups, conducted mainly with women who regularly attend the tianguis in Monterrey. The results show that people buy items to use in the elaboration and reproduction of social practices they consider important, and that for this the fayuca is highly functional because it is cheap, very accessible and abundant. The article is original because, unlike most of the literature on the informal economy, it focuses on consumption, although it does not cover the diversity of consumers who come to the market.

This article aims to give an account of the challenges and perspectives of Uruguayan cultural policies in the face of two recent factors of change in Latin America:changes in the political sign of governments and the covid-19 pandemic. In this text there is an analysis through the approach to theoretical concepts of policies and cultural rights, the inaugural speeches of the Uruguayan presidents Vázquez (progressive) and Lacalle Pou (liberal), their programs, and the current budgetary project; as well as an additional analysis of the regional situation and the pandemic through press articles. Considering the current moment of Latin American, from the Uruguayan case we could point out that the government’s new orientation would seem to face a paradigm shift in the conception of cultural policies and rights. In that sense, in the institutional changes proposed by the government, its cultural conception seems to be weighed against the consolidation of tools that – in this context of uncertainty and pandemic – strengthen the sector.

The objective of this paper is to argue that the territorial conflicts that affect the Q’eqchi’ Mayan people of Sierra de las Minas, Guatemala, represent ontological conflicts which defend not only a set of natural resources, but a radical ontological difference that reflects particular ways of living. This analysis is crystallized mainly through the q’eqchi ‘notion of Tzuultaq’a. The work was built based on qualitative methodology, ethnographic work, and interviews conducted throughout 2017 in different Q’eqchi’ and Poqomchi’ Maya communities of the Ribacó micro-region, municipality of Purulhá, Baja Verapaz, in Sierra de las Minas, Guatemala. In this text, there is an analysis of the data from the perspective proposed by existential hermeneutics and, consequently, the conclusion is that the territorial disputes that take place in this region are not limited to the geographic and cultural scope, but that they are rooted in a radical ontological difference.