It is a little-known fact that two women, Victoria Ocampo and Lola Álvarez Bravo, brought the celebrated avant-garde film Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929) to Argentina and Mexico for the first time. Acting as cultural mediators, they successfully organized the film’s premieres in 1929 and 1938, respectively, at the Cine Club de Buenos Aires, where Ocampo was a key player, and the 16mm Cinema film society, which Álvarez Bravo ran. Álvarez Bravo and Ocampo’s intervention...

© 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press In 1961, the Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko (1925–94) completed Sin título (Untitled; fig. 1). In the work, cratered sheets of corroded metal are caught in a permanent stasis of decomposition. Ochre and burnt sienna spread from the tarnished and oxidized surfaces of the irregularly shaped pieces of metal, creating a chromatic palette both earthen and industrial. Facture engenders form, as each metal piece assumes its character from the haptic quality...

Julia de Burgos (1914–53), one of Puerto Rico’s greatest poets, haunts the American literary imagination from the borders of the modern. [1] Her ghostly presence, desperate and furious, searches for interlocutors on the bridge to Welfare Island, historically a warehouse for the poor, the criminalized and sick just east of the United Nations. Julia’s barefoot figure wandering across that bridge in her bata, just as she describes in letters to her sister Consuelo in 1953, positions her to catch...