The Virginia Quarterly Does South America

by Nate Martin

Latin America is arguably the most overlooked region in terms of coverage by English-language international mainstream media. While Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East find themselves in international headlines daily, rarely do media outlets focus the gaze of news consumers on our little plot of land, positioned north-to-south between the United States behemoth and the frozen Antarctic slab.

Daily scours of AP and Reuters news wires from the international desk at the Buenos Aires Herald frequently leave the paper’s Latin America page scraping up some minor plot twist or another from the drug wars of Mexico or Brazil. And more than a few journalist friends in South America have complained about lack of interest from publications about English-language content from the region. Sure, all the big outlets love a good Chavez tirade, and the whole news world was there when FARC marched Clara Rojas out of the jungle (a story that also had a Chavez spin). But when was the last time you saw a travel piece on Chile or an update on Uruguayan parliament scuffles?

Fortunately, the Internet provides plenty of information on South America that is unavailable to those who consume only traditional news media. Blogs, fact sites, and independent news sites keep Web surfers up to date well enough, and the interactive nature of most sites creates forums in which people can combine their collective knowledge.

However, the inspiration for this post was a publication that one might consider the diametric opposite of most Internet media, which old-school journalists and scholars alike often shun as amateurish and unreliable — a respected quarterly journal.

The Virginia Quarterly Review’s Fall 2007 issue is titled, “South America in the 21st Century.” Each of its reports, essays, and fiction pieces focuses on how different people and places in South America find themselves among the dizzying swirl into modernity. The issue features two pieces (that are available online, at least) that relate to Argentina. One is an in-depth look at cartoneros in Buenos Aires and the plight of their White Train, which, according to Pagina 12, was shut down by the city in the final days of 2007 until a federal judge recently ordered a resumption of service. The other is a series of cartoons by Buenos Aires native Liniers about his recent La Nación-sponsored trip to Antarctica.

The format of VQR’s website is worth noting. The overlay of different stories onto a Google Map, according to each story’s setting, is representative of a shift in online journalism away from traditional storytelling formats, even if the stories themselves originally appear in traditional media. To present an array of different stories all about a single place on a map of that place gives readers (viewers?) both a sense of distance and interrelatedness that a table of contents could never achieve. One of my favorite concepts that is similar to this is the map-based Wiki, which could provide an encyclopedic info cache of towns and cities arranged in a way that relates to the physicality of the subject in its actual context. A website called Wikimapia uses Google Earth maps to attempt something similar, but the layout is pretty clumsy. The idea, however, is something we are sure to see more of as people figure out new ways of presenting information online.

Nate Martin also blogs at www.gratingspace.com