Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this text, professor Gilda Mello e Souza discusses the contribution that the work of Jean Maugüé, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roger Bastide—three French academics—made to the early stages of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) founded in 1934 [...]

Silvano Santiago begins this essay with the famous statement by Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, “We are not Europeans nor North Americans, our original culture has been eliminated: nothing is foreign to us as everything here is foreign. Our own [...]

In this text, literary critic Silvano Santiago delves into questions of identity politics and of globalization in modern Brazilian culture. He discusses four crucial moments: the end of the nineteenth century, the decade of the twenties, the decade [...]

In this text [dated November 14, 1964], the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre states that European culture has to some extent been influenced by tropical culture. In his opinion, “England today is showing the impact of the tropical arts within [...]

In this text, Juan Acha poses the question, “Does present-day Latin American art exist as a distinct expression?”, that is, as a way of examining the broader and more fundamental question of what constitutes an original aesthetic expression. He [...]

In this text, Gerardo Mosquera introduces the exhibition Ante América [Facing the Americas] with an essay describing the common social, political and economic framework that has fostered the art of what he calls “el Sur” or “Nuestra América [...]