Whis essay examines photomontage practices in rural contexts of Michoacán, Mexico, in order to ask how social uses of photography are intimately linked to collective subjectivities and affects of loss, between histories of migration and recurrent cycles of violence. These visual practices cannot be understood without paying attention to intrinsic aspects of photographic technology-such as its indexical character, its materiality, its artificiality, and its temporal anchoring. Here a careful reading of the concept of "the obtuse" proposed by Roland Barthes reveals how photomontage techniques, in the hands of local photographers, generate visual effects and dislocations through the manipulation of subtle details that contribute to recreate, but also to subvert, the "ways of looking" among the inhabitants of the region.

Jorge Durand is the guest in this interview section of Encartes magazine. Anthropologist and researcher at the University of Guadalajara, where he holds the Chair of Migration, Jorge Durand is a specialist in the United States-Mexico migration dynamics. On this occasion, he describes his incursion into the northern countries of Central America and the new protagonist figure in the region: the uprooted.

BAsado in the documentary Over the Wall / Sobre el muro (El Colef, 2019), this text discusses some social effects from the transformations of the barriers and divisions that have demarcated the border of the states of California, the United States and Baja California, Mexico, until the construction of fences and border walls promoted by the last four US federal administrations. Based on interviews with specialists in migration and borders, residents, and an investigation of archives and documents around the wall and its effects on the Tijuana-San Diego border, this documentary captures periods of change and border reinforcement by States. States, as well as the recent situation with the arrival of new migratory flows such as the caravans of Central American migrants to Tijuana and the challenges for this border.

The crises that we are seeing in the Mediterranean, on the northern and southern border of Mexico or in South America, derived from the massive mobilizations of people fleeing their countries, force us to reflect on the role that the States in the face of the arrival and / or transit of displaced persons and refugees, in the face of what appears to be a regressive global policy, based on the externalization of borders, restriction and selectivity.

The social question in Latin America has been depoliticized, since the 1980s, from the conception of deprivation imposed by the prevailing approaches to poverty. Although later, due to the importance acquired by the problem of inequality, the question of power could not be ignored, a perspective was imposed that has limited the understanding of conflict. In the present text and from an alternative proposal to address inequalities, where power and conflict gain prominence, we seek to re-politicize the social. In this regard, two sets of problems are addressed. The first has to do with the dynamics of deep disempowerment that the new model of globalized accumulation has generated, sustaining the (neo) liberal order, and that has led to a not inconsiderable part of the subaltern sectors being cornered in a situation of marginalization. Social. The second is that, despite this, there are responses from these sectors to resist this disempowerment and even partially reverse it. Among these responses, the following stand out: violence, migration, religiosity and collective action. It concludes with reflections on the relevance of thinking about inequalities from this perspective to see how the social, with the (neo) liberal order, has been re-politicized in a broad and profound way.

The objective of the article is to describe and understand the current clothing of the women of a Zapotec community in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca who have been expropriated of their traditional clothes and tastes in favor of senses and aesthetics that serve as markers of social distinction for other groups. social. Although this has happened in many indigenous communities, we know little about the ways in which producers and users have coped with this process. The example of San Bartolomé Quialana gives an account of the way in which the women of that community, when expropriated of their traditional outfits, have appropriated garments, materials, textures and industrial colors that have allowed them to reinvent their clothing according to their senses, aesthetics and resources. It is a community where male migration to the United States has been associated and, to some extent, facilitated the female transition to new clothing.