Brazil – Fake Flamenco

Who’s the Queen of Football (Soccer)?

In Brazil, she is affectionately called A Rainha Marta (Queen Marta). Marta Vieira da Silva has won FIFAs annual best player in the world six times. She’s the top scorer in the World Cup, male or female, at 17 points in five championships. Legendary player Pelé calls her Pelé in a Skirt. Kind of him […]

bilingual, En español, Mexico, Spanish Culture and Language, The Americas

Latin America: 3 Best and 3 Worst for Income Equality

3 Most and 3 Least Unequal Incomes For Latin America, there are several red flags in the World Inequality Database report for 2022. Covid has brought financial disparities into focus, many people have lost their jobs although the wealthiest have profited during the pandemic. Nations that we think of as prosperous like Mexico, Brazil and […]

Indigenous Peoples, Nature, photography

Rocky Mesa that Rhymes with Ratatouille

The sandstone mesas of Venezuela are called tepui. You may have seen images of them in the Pixar movie, Up (2009); a widower retiree attaches balloons to his house and floats from the United States to a tepui in Venezuela, where he’s always dreamed of traveling. We saw the movie for the first time this […]

Afro-Latinos, Latinas, Life as a Woman, Sports

She’s Got Game x 7

Latin American women earned the most medals of any year this Olympics; 6 gold, 11 silver and 7 bronze, for a total of 24. I’ll present what I’ve found about 7 of these great Latin American women. Their stories are inspiring, showing talent and determination. Brazil (21) and Cuba (15) won the most medals overall […]

Indigenous Peoples, Spanish Culture and Language

Paraguay’s 2 Official Languages

Paraguay is one of three countries in the Americas that name one or more indigenous languages as official, alongside Spanish. Interestingly, it is also the country where the most non-indigenous people are bilingual in an indigenous language, in this case Guaraní. Over 5 million people in Paraguay speak it. The 2012 census determined that 64% […]

history, Immigration

Happy Japanese Immigration to Brazil Day!

The first Japanese immigrants arrived near Sao Paulo, Brazil, 112 years ago. June 18th, 1908, they disembarked from the ship named Kasato Maru in the town of Santos. 781 men came to work on the coffee plantations. That was the beginning of the wave of 200,000 migrants who made their way to Brazil by the […]