"For the past six years, Jean-Marie Simon has been photographing people and reporting events from this hauntingly beautiful and remote land. Her text and pictures tell the story of a people imprisoned, particularly the Mayan Indians, whose lives have been so torn apart by political strife. This is a beautiful book; yet at the same time it is incredibly disturbing in its portrayal of a civilization violated by the army, police, and paramilitary government forces."
Discusses highlights of the workshop organized by the Latin American and Caribbean Women's Health Network in Guatemala in October 2010 which focused on positioning and promoting in the region the agenda of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) adopted 15 years ago in 1994 in Cairo, Egypt.
Considers the characteristic features of Garífuna music, which are intrinsically related to the history of slavery, warfare, miscegenation, and resistance of this people of African and Caribbean ancestry, living today mainly on the Atlantic Coast of Central America and in the U.S. Based on his analysis of the Wanaragua or Yancunú rhythm, performed in Livingston, Guatemala, by dancers wearing shell rattles (illacu) tied to their ankles, and a musical ensemble consisting of two drums (garaón) and gourd rattles (sisira), the author examines the metric ambiguity of its basic “time line” or 'clave' of 3:3:2 as well as the rhythmic flexibility and unpredictability with which the dancers and musicians relate to it, as a musical expression of the social and cultural conditions created by that history, especially by the processes of miscegenation.
