Hemispheric relations, Hispanic heritage, and the geopolitics of the Americas. We investigate USMCA renegotiations, nearshoring, Pan-American diplomacy, bilingual governance, Spanish colonial law, Latin American urbanism, and U.S. double standards. Half of America lives in former Mexican territory—this geography shapes everything.
19 articles
Why Hispaniola Kept Changing Flags: Spain, France, and the Road to Haiti
The island we now call Haiti and the Dominican Republic did not change hands because monarchs were whimsical. It moved with the tides of European war, sugar profits, and administrative exhaustion. This essay untangles the geography, the names, and the power ledger behind Hispaniola's shifting flags.
November 7, 2025
The Spanish Echo in the Non-Spanish Caribbean
Spanish heritage did not disappear from the English-, French-, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean; it migrated into other rooms of the house. This essay maps the living echo through Trinidad's parang, Jamaica's Spanish Town, Belize's bilingual markets, and the ABC islands' Papiamento—arguing that these traces are not antiquarian curiosities but working infrastructures of cooperation.
November 5, 2025
Ten Interventions That Bent a Hemisphere
Across the 20th century, U.S. covert and overt actions in Latin America traded short-term "stability" for long-term democratic fragility. From Guatemala's 1954 coup to Plan Colombia, the pattern is visible in declassified files: regime change at the top, mass graves at the bottom.
November 5, 2025
The Long Reverberation: How the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Years Shaped Latin America
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) did not end on the Jarama or the Ebro; it spilled across the Atlantic and took up residence in classrooms, publishing houses, barracks, parishes, ports, and party headquarters from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego. The Franco regime that followed became, at once, a source of exiles who rebuilt Latin American culture and a distant mirror admired by certain strongmen. Out of that contradiction—a defeated republic fertilizing democratic life abroad, and a surviving dictatorship flattering authoritarian imaginations—Latin America inherited institutions, habits, and cautions that still matter. What follows is a map of those legacies: intellectual, diplomatic, cultural, migratory, and political.
November 2, 2025
The Accidental Foundry: How Napoleon Broke Spanish America and Forged Latin America
Napoleon did not set out to invent Latin America. He wanted Europe, and the way to Europe ran through Madrid. Yet in toppling the Spanish monarchy, seizing Louisiana and flipping it to the United States, wrecking Spain's fleet, and turning sovereignty into a traveling mask with no face behind it, he shattered the imperial grammar that had ordered the New World for three centuries. From the shards came juntas, constitutions, caudillos, republics—an atlas of new futures. If Spain's empire died under French boots, Latin America learned to walk in the noise.
November 1, 2025
The Labyrinth of Three Clocks: Venezuela 1998–2025
María Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize arrives as Venezuela navigates 27 years measured by three clocks: output, distribution, and rights. A data-driven narrative tracking boom, crash, and the quietest clock—democracy—that decides repair.
October 25, 2025
Medellín''s Miracle? Urban Design, Politics, and the Limits of Transformation
Once suffering extraordinarily high violence rates, Medellín remade itself through transit, public libraries, and public-space investments. This essay traces the politics, innovations, ambivalences, and lessons for U.S. cities seeking equitable urban transformation.
October 13, 2025
America''s Other Founding: The Spanish Story
The most American thing about the United States is that we keep mistaking prologue for plot. We nod at Spain and Mexico in the opening credits, then hit fast-forward to railroads and robber barons. But the decisive drama—the social inventions, the legal improvisations, the urban.
September 29, 2025
Why the U.S. Treats Latin America Differently
Walk into any American newsroom on a slow afternoon and point to a globe. Paris elicits sighs; Prague, a study-abroad anecdote; Berlin, a memory of train schedules that ran to the minute. Say Tegucigalpa, and the room tilts. Not hostility—just air pockets of unknowing.
September 25, 2025
The Hidden Hemisphere: How Spanish America Built the United States—and Why We Forgot
Every nation is a story told about land. The United States has preferred the tidy novella: thirteen British colonies, a heroic revolution, then Manifest Destiny. But walk any city with your ears on—Los Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe—and the place names remind you that the harmony was written in.
September 18, 2025