Mexico has been a cultural dynamo, welcoming and nurturing artists from the Latin world and beyond, drawn to its ever-expanding and always-experimenting cultural sphere. The names are exhaustive: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tina Modotti, Chavela Vargas, Luis Buñuel, Roberto... Read Article
Few artists have been as responsible for elevating the folk music of Colombia’s Caribbean coast – and in particular cumbia – to the world stage as Totó La Momposina. Born in 1940 to a musical family, Totó loved singing and... Read Article
“We were in a dazzling and secret world of nature which at the same time was a growing menace of cold, snow and persecution.” Pablo Neruda, Nobel Lecture 1971. Few poets have captured the imagination of a continent like... Read Article
In a shady billiards joint in La Candelaria, central Bogotá, Antonio Yammara, a young law professor frequently spends his evening. There, the professor – who wrote his dissertation on how Hamlet’s insanity exempts him from responsibility – often... Read Article
I can still vividly remember the weeks preceding my first excursion alone in Latin America, to Nicaragua and Honduras, in which I was completely engulfed in the poems of Ruben Dario, the biography of Augusto Sandino, and paperback... Read Article
“Gabo was a superior being… With Gabo’s books you just want to keep reading and reading… His charm, his special way of seeing life.” Gabriel García Márquez, known as Gabo in the countries of Latin America, was the... Read Article
The exhibition “Realidades Increíbles”, a collection of watercolor paintings by the Colombian artist Andrés Arango, was on display at the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Cultural Center in Bogotá between May 21st and July 5th. The title alone gave a... Read Article
The New York Colombian Film Festival is all set to kick off later this month, and it will feature loads of good films. Among them are a documentary about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a comedy featuring John Leguizamo, a... Read Article
For almost three years now, the Gypsy Kumbia Orchestra, a colourful, festive and nomadic big band fusing Afro-Colombian percussion with the brass melodies of Eastern Europe, has carved a place for itself in Montreal, Canada. With its 18... Read Article
In his short essay Kafka and his Precursors, Borges writes of the Czech author that “at first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise.” This quote could easily be applied to... Read Article
The annual CASA Latin American theatre festival returns to London today. The brainchild of theatre director Daniel Goldman, the festival began as a small event in a church basement in Holborn, and over seven years has flowered into... Read Article
1. When relatives visited my home city of Cali during the ’80s and ’90s, my father would take them on the Magical Tour. These were the peak years of the city’s infamous drug cartel, an organization that came... Read Article
