El propósito de este libro es analizar los factores que han llevado a un éxodo masivo de colombianos y las implicaciones para la sociedad. Se trata de ver si los colombianos logran insertarse en el país de acogida y el tipo de vínculos que desarrollan con su patria. Además, pretende mostrar que pocas veces se cumplen las promesas suscitadas por un nuevo El Dorado, bien sea que este se busque en América del Norte, en Europa o en otras partes del mundo: después de las ilusiones viene el tiempo de las dudas y las decepciones. Por supuesto, historias de éxito también existen. Los cerebros fugados encuentran oportunidades que no tenían en Colombia; los trabajadores clandestinos saben que sus sacrificios significan mejor futuro para sus hijos; los asilados políticos hallan la paz y la libertad de expresión negadas en su tierra natal. Sin embargo ¿contribuye la diáspora al desarrollo socioeconómico? ¿O la emigración sólo constituye una válvula de escape que le permite al gobierno librarse de sus responsabilidades en materia de desempleo y pobreza? Para responder a estas preguntas, el libro está organizado en diez capítulos escritos por especialistas en el tema. Las problemáticas abordadas corresponden a diferentes disciplinas de las ciencias sociales: economía, sociología, antropología, derecho, entre otras. Pero todas apuntan a un solo objetivo: aportar elementos de comprensión al fenómeno migratorio colombiano.

Few, if any, U.S. writers are as important to the history of world literature as Edgar Allan Poe, and few, if any, U.S. authors owe so much of their current reputations to the process of translation. Translated Poe brings together 31 essays from 19 different national/literary traditions to demonstrate Poe’s extensive influence on world literature and thought while revealing the importance of the vehicle that delivers Poe to the world—translation. Translated Poe is not preoccupied with judging the “quality” of any given Poe translation nor with assessing what a specific translation of Poe must or should have done. Rather, the volume demonstrates how Poe’s translations constitute multiple contextual interpretations, testifying to how this prolific author continues to help us read ourselves and the world(s) we live in. The examples of how Poe’s works were spread abroad remind us that literature depends as much on authorial creation and timely readership as on the languages and worlds through which a piece of literature circulates after its initial publication in its first language. This recasting of signs and symbols that intervene in other cultures when a text is translated is one of the principal subjects of the humanistic discipline of Translation Studies, dealing with the the products, functions, and processes of translation as both a cognitive and socially regulated activity. Both literary history and the history of translation benefit from this book’s focus on Poe, whose translated fortune has helped to shape literary modernity, in many cases importantly redefining the target literary systems. Furthermore, we envision this book as a fountain of resources for future Poe scholars from various global sites, including the United States, since the cases of Poe’s translations—both exceptional and paradigmatic—prove that they are also levers that force the reassessment of the source text in its native literature.

In a primary commodities boom spurred on by the rise of China, countries the world over are turning to the extraction of natural resources and the export of primary commodities as an antidote to the global recession. The New Extractivism addresses a fundamental dilemma faced by these governments: to pursue, or not, a development strategy based on resource extraction in the face of immense social and environmental costs, not to mention mass resistance from the people negatively affected by it. With fresh insight and analysis from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, this book looks at the political dynamics of capitalist development in a region where the neoliberal model is collapsing under the weight of a resistance movement lead by peasant farmers and indigenous communities. It calls for us to understand the new extractivism not as a viable development model for the post-neoliberal world, but as the dangerous emergence of a new form of imperialism.

The search for gold and for the mythical El Dorado gripped the imagination of the conquistadors from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Crossing over the Andes, they explored the unknown eastern forests and jungles, launching expeditions that were often disastrous and always disappointing. As the range of exploration expanded, El Dorado retreated, always just beyond the horizon. The last goal of these explorations was the land of the Mojos, a land located in the upper Amazon basin and which lies many months of the year submerged under water. It is a mysterious land and, as legend had it, inhabited by a people rich in gold and precious stones. Yet all the Spaniards found – as narrated in these compelling pages – was a limitless swamp, sparsely inhabited by a small number of people and so ill suited to usual system of productive forced labor. It was the Jesuits instead who established here a network of missions second in size and population only to that or Paraguay and so went in search of souls rather than gold.

En el corazón de Aztlán es una antología poética que trasciende las fronteras de la imaginación. Es la búsqueda y el reencuentro con un pasado histórico eternizado y un presente hostil que limitan y obstruyen el máximo desarrollo físico, mental y espiritual del ser humano. Además, es un reto a la inercia y a las distracciones de la vida diaria, es un llamado a la reafi rmación de la identidad del chicano y el mexicano. El poeta nos lleva desde las aulas a las calles; del encierro a la intemperie; de las ciudades superpobladas a la soledad de los desiertos; de la bondad a la malicia; de la sumisión a la rebeldía; de la inactividad a la movilización; de la soledad a la solidaridad y trata la constante migración del mexicano en búsqueda de sus orígenes y la tierra prometida.

This collective volume explores the ways merchants managed to connect different spaces all over the globe in the early modern period by organizing the movement of goods, capital, information and cultural objects between different commercial maritime systems in the Mediterranean and Atlantic basin. Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550-1800 consists of four thematic blocs: theoretical considerations, the social composition of networks, connected spaces, networks between formal and informal exchange, as well as possible failures of ties. This edited volume features eleven contributions who deal with theoretical concepts such as social network analysis, globalization, social capital and trust. In addition, several chapters analyze the coexistence of mono-cultural and transnational networks, deal with network failure and shifting network geographies, and assess the impact of kinship for building up international networks between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This work evaluates the use of specific network types for building up connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Basin stretching out to Central Europe, the Northern Sea and the Pacific. This book is of interest to those who study history of economics and maritime economics, as well as historians and scholars from other disciplines working on maritime shipping, port studies, migration, foreign mercantile communities, trade policies and mercantilism.