In Latin America, filmmakers have found a political conscience, and with it, touched a nerve at the box office. Films that deal with government and police corruption, corporate irresponsibility and economic inequality are hitting theaters, as well as bubbling up internationally at festivals

“Everyone is wondering how the transition will affect the authenticity of Cuban heritage, tradition, music, values,” they said. “Will it be transformed, will it melt or mix? There are many ways to think about those pieces in relation to the larger state of the world.”

“El Güegüense o el Macho Ratón” is one of the oldest of the handful of literary works from popular indigenous culture that have survived from Latin America's European dominated colonial era. Essentially a piece of street theater conceived in the indigenous Nahualt language, it combines music, dance, dialogue and masquerade portraying the interaction of an indigenous merchant with a Spanish colonial official.

the works of Colombian novelist and short-story writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez are quintessential examples of “magic realism”: fiction that integrates elements of fantasy into otherwise realistic settings.

The Eternaut is a particularly compelling work, and it occupies an interesting point in Latin American literature. While Latin American literature is mostly associated with magical realism—Borges, Márquez, that sort of thing—Oesterheld’s writing is less fantastical and more pulp-inflected.

Now, nearly 20 years after Pablo Escobar was shot dead following a long manhunt by Colombian and American agents, the flamboyant chief of the Medellin cocaine cartel is being resurrected by Colombian television.

Hoyos argues that literature from Latin America shows remarkable diversity and reveals trends in how people read and write in today's globalized era.

Spain will return 74 colonial and 49 pre-Columbian works of art to Ecuador on Wednesday, 22 years after the former were handed to a museum for restoration and 12 years after Madrid police found the latter during a raid undertaken as part of a money laundering and drug trafficking case.

Similar to the art renaissance that encompassed southern neighbor Brazil 10 years ago — which was bolstered by a blossoming economy and growing middle class, Colombia’s artistically fertile environment has art dealers, curators, academics and the artists themselves fostering a creative conscience.Within Colombia's boom, street art has emerged as a popular medium.

These historic details resonated with the late President Nestor Kirchner, for whom the cultural center is now named, and for his widow, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who succeeded him as president. They're from the Peronist party, and like Juan and Eva Peron, who founded that party, as well as such cultural institutions as the Argentine National Symphony, the arts are baked into their worldview, says Culture Minister Teresa Parodi.

Pop was an ethos more than a movement, and it morphed as it migrated across borders and oceans. But nowhere was it more engaged than in Brazil, where artists opposed both American hegemony and their own country’s military regime.

She was one of the few remaining legends of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when a new crop of writers from Latin America announced themselves to the world, with her help, and changed Spanish-language publishing forever.

Of course, the story of fruit in Latin America is also the story of exploitation. To many Brazilians of the time, Carmen Miranda's empty lyrics and her massive fruit headdress was an offensive symbol of the way foreigners perceived Latin American women: as objects to be consumed and discarded like a piece of fruit.