From the editor.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick
• Position: Editorial

The elements of identity, of an individual or a people, involve many things--ethnicity, race, language, culture, memory. The efforts of individuals to express their identity or of groups to protect, validate, and assert theirs is one of the continuing activities that engages and defines peoples in the Americas.

Ethnicity is the defining factor in Anna Spector's interview with the Bolivian ethnobotanist Ines Hinojosa, who investigates people's interactions with plants and then helps them create the tools for their own development, as well as in Bjorn Sletto's firsthand experience with indigenous ethnocartographers who map their villages in Venezuela's Gran Sabana. Since the identity and survival of indigenous people is grounded in their collective control of traditional lands, the process through which they map those lands, drawing on their mental pictures of geographic features and memories of land use, strengthens not only their sense of self but their position in the larger society as well.

After forty years of having her identity defined and enclosed by family, religion, and tradition, the Mexican writer Rosa Nissan achieved a new identity as a celebrated writer and independent woman, as Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez tells us. Caleb Bach draws a picture of Argentine surrealist painter Roberto Aizenberg...