From the editor.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick

Memory is a curious thing. There are shared memories that serve to define us as a nation or as a people. There are common and sometimes not so positive experiences that we collectively suppress from our memories. And memories, vivid pictures, fond remembrances, and a multitude of cherished images that can be brought to mind by a single stimulus, a smell, or sound.

Thirty-five years ago I worked in a cooperative of modest fishermen in a small coastal Brazilian town. Victor Englebert's article about Machalilla, Ecuador, captures so much of the reality of a community whose entire focus on life is intimately entwined with gathering fish from the sea. It awakened in me warm memories of people and experiences that had long laid haft forgotten.

In Catherine Rendon's article about how the Guatemalan dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera utilized an overlay of pseudo-classical Greek culture to bolster his rule and manipulate society, the events seem to have been erased from collective memory. Yet anyone from the generation that had lived in Guatemala during the first third of the twentieth century, when asked, has vivid personal memories of this ersatz civic experience.

Mike Ceaser explains that Paraguay, long a country of bilingual Guarani and Spanish speakers, is experiencing a boom in Guarani literature. One of the tenets of nationalism, especially held in...