Listening to Latin America: Exploring Cultural Complexes in Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela

Listening to Latin America explores the theory and embodied reality that cultural complexes are powerful determinants in the attitudes, behavior, and emotional life of individuals and groups. The contributing authors are from several Latin American countries and present compelling historical, anthropological, sociological, mythological, psychological, and personal perspectives on a part of the world that is full of promise and despair.

Latin America is a region marked with psychic "fault lines" that cause disturbances in its populations on issues of social class, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and even geography. Many of these "fault lines" appear to have their origins in the "basic fault" that occurred with the conquest and colonization of the region, primarily by the Spanish and Portuguese. This "basic fault" and its subsequent "fault lines" reside not just in various groups that compete for status, power, wealth, and meaning but in the psyche of every Latin American individual who carries the emotional memories and scars of conflicts that have coursed through their mixed blood for generations.