A Mexican journalist takes an introspective look at her work inside prisons.

“On the islands, leaving comes to seem like the natural thing to do.”

“I will need a grant of a million or two. / A million or more.”

"America I spent it all and now I'm nobody.”

Guest editors Raquel Salas Rivera and Ricardo Alberto Maldonado introduce three writers who “counter the loneliness and exploitation of U.S. capitalism.”

Like recovery, I sometimes can’t tell which is greater—the almost-affection I’ve cultivated for my skin, or my desire to emancipate from it.

In 2009, an environmental activist was murdered in El Salvador. What happened next challenges conventional wisdom about activism, "the poor," and where real power really lies.

He planned to write a memoir, The Life of a Migrant. Its central thesis: The American Dream is a lie.

For an Indigenous community in Mexico, dressmaking was a way to fight assimilation. Then a major fashion house offered a deal they couldn't refuse.

In a similar way, a child is like saliva: the parent’s essence is in it. The face of his parents is in the child’s, although at times one must look hard to find it.

On John Washington’s The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond

Reflections on closing borders, and the propensity of the world to change.

The Cuban revolutionary Celia Sánchez remains an enigma, despite, or because of, her place at Castro's side.

Hope sustains the migrants living in a camp in Matamoros, Mexico, but everything is tainted by despair.

How the rise of the #Chiledespertó movement has created space to discuss the country’s whitewashed constitution.

Marie Wilcox is the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, one of the roughly 130 endangered Native languages in the United States. This documentary follows her efforts to keep her mother tongue alive.

The author of the Justice Hustlers series talks about writing at the nexus of consciousness raising and commercial fiction.

After the blunt, I started trippin’, watching seagulls flyin’ on high. When I looked straight at the sun, everything glowed, way mellow, way marola.

An emerging voice in fiction discusses writing as performance, translating rhythm into narrative, and writing the “anti-research” novel.

How can I write a history of myself without remembering? And why am I compelled to?

As demographics shift, Latinos in Texas are claiming the majority and seeing themselves in the center of the national story.

It’s time to reckon with the true history of the mythologized Texas landmark—and the racism and imperialism it represents.

Before California was West, it was North and it was East: the uppermost periphery of the Mexican Empire, and the arrival point for Chinese immigrants making the perilous journey from Guangdong.

For a century, Anglos from cold corners of the country have been lured here by the promise that this was a place where they could live among their own, in communities with nary a brown person in sight.

I told her we were brought over the Rio Grande on a raft. I never called it a smuggling.

Watch the gorgeously-shot, deliriously-paced documentary that follows an Alaskan salmon on an unlikely journey on "the Mount Everest of rivers," as residents consider the costs and benefits of a mega-dam.

What a young female journalist discovers inside one of Peru’s most dangerous prisons

The man who challenged the CIA and sold weapons to the president of Guatemala

A trip to the border—and the bridge that connects Brownsville, Texas with Matamoros, Mexico—remembered in words in images.

Indigenous peoples are disproportionally burdened by climate change. Yet, their traditional knowledge is essential to securing the health of our planet.

Encounters on a bus ride through Brazil’s blockaded highways reveal deep discontent across social lines.

I look around to see who’s missing. My eyes are adjusting. Terrible for the eyes to adjust and see that it is my father who is missing, it is my oldest brother, Tobias, and the second oldest, Ricardo, who are missing.

The journalists discuss their debut books, writing about borderlands, and the people who cross over.

The community activist pushes the food justice movement beyond raised beds, food pantries, new supermarkets, and white leadership.

A history of carrot cake in America.

There was the time I found an entire horse or cow skeleton laid neatly on top of the shed roof. When I asked my brothers what it was doing there, they looked at me patiently and said, We found it in the desert.

Sexually frustrated teens in period costumes undertake a Mormon pioneer trek. The worst part isn't the heat. It's the singing.

The baby stayed in the desert. I myself stayed in darkness for a long time.

The northern Chihuahuan Desert was drowned, kneaded, jabbed, choked with ash for half a billion years of geologic tumult. Now it's being throttled for oil.

Some facts, notes, data, information, statistics, and statements on the hot spring at Lake Tecopa.

What would it take you, personally, to deny water to someone dying of thirst?

The leafy plant has long been associated with cocaine. Can an ardent new drug policy transform the plant into the world’s next miracle cure?

Sometimes what happens is the waves / fling themselves on the beach without spectators

The author on leaving the reservation, breaking silence, and embracing complicated cross-cultural love.

The painful ways the world teaches race and color.

A teacher chronicles his month in a Colorado facility, where charmers and conmen offer advice and trauma is tallied by number.

Jeremiah Moss's blog-turned-book stands as an impassioned work of advocacy on behalf of a city that’s slipping away.

Before his arrest, my father was a local hero for putting bad guys behind bars.

The one time Lobo had gone to the pictures he saw a movie with a man like this: strong, sumptuous, dominating the things in the world. He was a King, and around him everything became meaningful.

Oral histories on life, death, and survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

"When people feel our passion, they offer theirs.”

In Mexico, watching cinema on wheels.

His daughter and wife had left the island because they said it was shrinking.

Under threat of deportation, a Mexican man who has made his life, and a family, in Arizona for more than twenty-five years takes indefinite refuge in a Phoenix church.

The author on authenticity, ancestry, and multiple selves.

A Personal Note From the Director of I Am Not Your Negro.

Evo Morales, Casimiro Huanca, and the human grid beneath Bolivia’s power.

When Ernest Hemingway agreed to his famous Paris Review interview, he had no idea he’d be helping the CIA.

The boy was killed in Nogales, where the border fence curves over hilly desert like a weird spine.

A photographic portrait of war, peace, and life in the countryside.

The poet, novelist, and playwright on the preverbal world, Catholic training for the novel, and storytelling as a vice.

In Colombia, a female fighter on life after FARC.

A photographer crosses state lines and ideological borders to talk to voters on the eve of America's presidential election.

The writer on the lives of cosmopolitan migrants, Latin American fiction, and the therapeutic limitations of testimony.

On Music: Hitching a Ride with the Guatemalan Chicken Bus Gypsy Caravan.

Jose Orduna on asserting personhood as resistance, the connection between activism and essays, and being 'aggressively bilingual'

PEN/Guernica Flash Fiction Series: A couple at a restaurant is different from all the other diners.

The Festival Videobrasil founder discusses Brazil’s political history with video art and her vision for the nonprofit’s pioneering new art space.

The Future of Cities: The city planner on what Rio’s favelas can teach global cities, when communities become brands, and the value of informality.

When I go back to Bogotá, I like to share my knowledge of the car bombs that went off in the city in the ’80s and ’90s. I helpfully point out the gory details to cab drivers and friends. I press my finger on the window and point at corners, “That’s the spot where an ATM blew up, seven dead.”

The hyper-diversification of narco-capitalism will produce fantastic dealers, who, for interested parties, will offer tanks of oxygen, water for human consumption, and substandard drugs, the kind whose memory lives on for days in the form of jaw pain and bloodshot eyes.

An Interview with João Gilberto Noll’s Translator, Adam Morris

The most loved and hated Brazilian judge and why he matters to Brazil's future.

The fight to extradite El Chapo.

Whenever the latest woe is me commercial came on hawking the newest painkiller, Mami commanded our attention: “That’s me!”

“My brave little Marxist,” she will coo, knowing that her own, modest attempts at domestic revolution will as usual come to nothing, and softening in spite of it.

The genre-bending writer on queering history and restoring lost voices to American fiction.

Both Brazil and the United States teeter on the brink of uncertain democratic futures.

It wasn’t like we hadn’t grown accustomed to male wooers after Pa danced his way out of the picture, but something about Casero, that old bag, pissed me off.

A conversation between Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York, Soffiyah Elijah, and filmmaker Hyatt Bass.

The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value.

“You’re delicious,” he says, meaning it, remembering the taste of mango.

Boundaries of Nations: With time, I learned to love and master my scenes.

A family whose heritage spans borders, but separate experiences continues to divide them in their own home.

This Columbus Day, a Caribbean carnival arts collective invokes the deeper principles behind Carnival masquerades to create social change.

Good fences make good neighbors, graveyards, and mariachi bands.

Retracing Von Humboldt's footsteps, two centuries later, in a van.

Why a once forgotten scientist’s steps across South America are so tempting to retrace.

America’s racist and rapacious War on Drugs travels abroad.

When the escape of bird watching along the Mexican border offers a glimpse of harsher realities.

The politics of Christianity in Guatemala.

A sneak peak of Maria Elena Gonzalez’s solo show at the 31st Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts.

A transwoman in exile.

Part II, The Free Men of the Forest: The consequences of oil, development, and state intervention in an indigenous community.

Part I, Ordinary Justice: After a spate of killings in 2013, an indigenous community threatened by oil operations struggles to come to terms with their new reality.

The acclaimed Mexican author confronts the normalization of violence.

How the Ayotzinapa case is sparking a movement in the South.