A 1970 Buenos Aires LP of Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto leads back to a 1954 Vienna recording session, a Hannover-born conductor Alma Mahler had trusted, and a New Year’s Eve ritual in a Greenwich Village townhouse where two record producers poured molten lead into cold water and read the shapes.

A documentary portrait of Romanian Jewish settlers on the Saskatchewan prairie — told through the reflections of Rabbi Tuffs — tracing the flight from persecution, the hardship of sod dwellings, the tragedy of a woman buried near the fence, and the Talmudic warning that no amount of land is worth separating yourself from the community.

On my desk sits a first edition of Domingos en Hyde Park, published by Ediciones Sur, Buenos Aires, 1936. On the flyleaf, in a confident cursive hand: "A R. E. Montes Bradley, con toda simpatía — Victoria Ocampo." The essay it introduces — La Historia Viva — is one of the most remarkable political documents written by a Latin American intellectual in the twentieth century. It is remarkable not because Ocampo admired Mussolini. Many did. Between 1921 and 1935, Franklin D. Roos

A visit to Valencia’s Mercado Central reveals how traditional market exchanges are being reshaped by tourism and photography. As fish become objects of display and images, the space shifts from commerce to spectacle, raising questions about what is gained and lost in the process.

A filmmaker's meditation on the African diaspora across Brazil, Cuba, and the United States — beginning in a restaurant in California in the early 1980s and arriving, decades later, at the Bay of Guanabara, where historian Haroldo Costa offered the sentence that changed everything: We did not cut the umbilical cord. The first in a series of essays exploring Black History not as a month but as a living, continuous thread.

There is a painting in the Art Institute of Chicago that almost no one stops to look at. Thomas Birch painted it sometime between 1806 and 1812, and he called it Capture of the Tripoli by the Enterprise. It commemorates a war that has been almost entirely forgotten — which is a pity, because that war contains the most important argument the United States ever made about the freedom of the seas. And that argument is more urgently relevant today than it has been in two centurie

Aged beef. Kimchi. Gnocchi with chitterlings. The menu at Urondo Bar does not court trends, nor does it apologize for its stubbornness. It simply is — rooted, specific, unapologetically itself. And that, it turns out, is a political act.

The Lakota Music Project — a collaboration between the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and Lakota and Dakota musicians that is unlike anything else in American cultural life. This is not a guest-spot model, where an indigenous artist appears on stage for a movement and then disappears.

Douglas Shadle’s recent essay in the New York Times, “It Wasn’t Easy Being a Founding Father of the American Symphony,” presents itself as an act of historical recovery. But the logic of the argument does not hold. And once you begin to trace where it fails, a different picture emerges — one in which the desire to find American origins has led to a fundamental misreading of who Bristow was and what his work actually represents.

There is a room in the Hispanic Society of America, a museum so quietly extraordinary that even most New Yorkers have never set foot in it — where the walls tell a different story of Spain. Fourteen monumental canvases, each between twelve and fourteen feet tall, wrapping around you for nearly two hundred and thirty feet of painted Spain.

Of Thee I Sing traces the country's musical identity through the instruments that shaped it — from Native American traditions and the colonial period through the waves of immigrant innovation that defined the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A partir de una carta escrita por Ana María Shua en 2002 en apoyo al proyecto Perfiles, este ensayo recorre el origen de una iniciativa que, con el tiempo, se expandió hasta convertirse en un cuerpo de obra documental de alcance continental. Desde Argentina hacia las Américas, el Heritage Film Project explora la memoria cultural a través de artistas, escritores y creadores cuyas historias revelan los vínculos profundos entre identidad, migración y creación.

This research provides the first comprehensive documentation of systematic homophobic erasure in early 20th-century Latin American letters. Using diplomatic archives, the study reveals how Carlos María Ocantos (1860-1949), despite publishing 37 volumes and earning Royal Spanish Academy recognition, was deliberately excluded from Argentine literary canon due to his sexuality."

That stroke Paul Mescal cuts through the water with in Hamnet has a remarkable history. It traces back to Buenos Aires, where a young English boy first watched local children swim with an overarm technique in the 1860s — knowledge that would eventually cross the Pacific and become the modern freestyle. One of the most quietly powerful moments in an Oscar-worthy performance, carrying centuries of borrowed, forgotten expertise.

The global success of Buena Vista Social Club revealed the extraordinary power of Cuban music to captivate audiences around the world. Yet Cuba's cultural identity extends far beyond its musical traditions. CUBA: Through the Looking Glass seeks to expand that conversation by exploring the island's contributions to the visual and decorative arts, where architecture, craftsmanship, and color play an equally compelling role.

More than twenty years after it was made, the work Alberto Laiseca and I created together is receiving a new moment of recognition. My documentary Deliciosas Perversiones Polimorfas will be screened at the Auditorio Jorge Luis Borges of the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno in Buenos Aires, as part of the exhibition “Laiseca, el iniciado.”

Astor Piazzolla changed the way we felt about Buenos Aires, not just tango, but the city itself.

In Tango After Midnight: Music, Vice, and Memory in Buenos Aires and New York, I reflect on growing up near the legendary tango club Caño 14 and draw unexpected parallels with nineteenth-century New York. From smoky tango dives in Buenos Aires to the saloons and dance halls of the Lower East Side, music after midnight shaped cultural identity in both cities. Classically trained musicians moved between elite institutions and shadowy nightlife, blurring the boundaries between h

A 19th-century Henry Erben pipe organ, believed to have been played by George Frederick Bristow, still stands in Manhattan’s Chinatown at the Sea and Land Church. Though silent and in need of repair, the instrument reveals a layered history connecting American sacred music, missionary networks in China, and the evolution of immigrant congregations in New York.

Life and Music in the Age of George Frederick Bristow (2026) is a documentary exploring 19th-century American music and New York’s search for cultural identity. Through the life of composer George Frederick Bristow, the film examines opera, symphonic ambition, immigration, and canon formation, situating New York within a broader dialogue across the Americas. Available in feature and classroom editions.