From the editor.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick
• Position: Editorial

Destiny is a curious concept. Individuals, institutions, or societies are described as having been predetermined, perhaps even fated, to reach some particular level of success, achievement, even failure. However, it is only by looking back and reconstructing the past that the factors Chat led to that achievement can be identified. The search is always selective. That is the way the course of destiny is mapped.

In this issue, Kevin Carrel Footer talks to Hermenegildo Sabat, commenting that during a period when the famed newspaper cartoonist put aside drawing, he drifted away from his destiny. However, it is clear that Sabat's is a genius of characterization, humor and social conscience, leading him to produce many decades of pithy political cartoons. Caleb Bach explains how the U.S. painter Frank Mechau, determinedly rejecting the academic instruction of art, devised from his particular experience and perception striking visions of the American West, Paula Durbin recounts how Alicia Alonso, Cuba's prima ballerina, who was through much of her career virtually blind, rejected her fate and because of her great love of dance, continued to perform until she was seventy-three.

We also consider how the future can hardly be imagined. When a group of Jesuits established the aldeia of Sao Paulo on the banks of the Tiete River 450 years ago, could they have known that they had founded what was to become the largest cosmopolitan center in South America? When the Puebloan Indians abandoned their cliff-side cities around Mesa Verde some eight hundred years ago, could they have possibly imagined the...