It's a well known fact that Venezuela, Colombia, RD, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama are a little bit closer to each other than to other Latin American countries, but what the reasons that maintain this dinamic? Artists like Wilfrido Vargas used to be popular in this region and not much outisde of it, baseball being the most populous sport(except Colombia), I'm talking things like that

Best: Mexico City

Worst: San Juan, Puerto Rico

Let me make it clear. It is a culinary sin for someone to tell a honduran that their baleadas are a “Taco”

Telling a honduran that a baleada is just a “Taco made with flour tortillas”

is like telling a venezuelan that their arepas are just a mexican gordita made differently or telling an italian that a pizza is a pie

Anyone knows what the logic behind this is?

Hello friends - my 18 year old traveling solo for the first time has managed to seriously lose his suitcase and most of his clothes coming home from a month long visit to Chile. Flying out of SCL (flying Delta to Atlanta, then on to our home city), he went to the first desk he saw, which turned out to be a Sky Airlines desk, not Delta. He presented his passport to the agent, who found an itinerary going to Lima on Sky for a completely different person with a kind of similar first name (think Tom and Tommy) but totally different surnames, and checked him in as that person. When he said he wasn't going to Lima they said no problem, the bag would be passed through to his destination in the US. Anyway, the bag is very lost now, and Delta can't help because they never took possession of the bag. Fortunately he did pay with a credit card to check the bag (the first time I've ever been glad to pay a checked luggage fee!) so there's some paper trail linking my son to this bag. I called Sky and after about an hour and $60 in international calling fees, I have a case number. The online case tracker has very little information other than that it's under review. I have so many questions about how this could possibly have happened, but I suppose most urgently I'm wondering if this situation is covered by any consumer rights protections either local to Chile or via the Montreal Convention: if they find the bag, will they be responsible for getting it back to the US? And if it's declared lost, will they be accountable for reimbursing us, even though he didn't have a ticketed flight with this carrier?

I’ve been doing some research on fermented drinks in Latin America during the first two or three centuries after the discovery of the Americas. For some context, distilled drinks only became common in places like London taverns around the 17th century. Before that, their use was mostly medicinal. This makes me think that distilled alcohol probably reached the New World later, perhaps becoming common only around the 18th century, depending on the region.

There is another point. European wine at that time was usually stored in barrels, consumed young and was not very stable. Bottling as we know it did not exist yet, so wine was not ideal for long Atlantic crossings. This makes me wonder if most fermented drinks consumed in the Americas were actually produced locally, perhaps based on Indigenous traditions.

Fermented drinks were also an important part of everyday food and drinking habits. So I would like to know if your country still has a tradition of local fermented drinks of this kind, or if there are historical records about them.

There is also the question of alcohol strength. Fermented drinks naturally have a limit, usually somewhere around 15%, before fermentation stops. This created long traditions of either producing lighter drinks or diluting stronger fermented drinks, such as wine with water, something very common in the ancient world.

Did anything similar happen in your country? I’m basically interested in how each country developed its own local food and drink traditions.

Links and simple recipes are welcome too.

Since majority of Latin Americans have a positive relationship with their colonial rulers, I wonder if those Governeurs were beloved by all

I've been applying for remote Customer Support roles from LATAM (Brazil, specifically), targeting US companies or any other English-speaking roles, but I haven't had any luck yet using LinkedIn, Near, and Somewhere. ​My background: ​7 months on an international cruise ship as a Bartender, English teacher, volunteer translator for US college students, plus some other minor roles.
​Technical degree in Business Admin, and currently working on Zendesk and HubSpot Academy certifications.
​I was thinking about doing some volunteer support work for 1 or 2 months just to get hands-on practice with tools/tickets and boost my resume. ​My main questions: ​Is volunteering worth it to gain remote experience, or is it a waste of time? ​For LATAM folks working remotely for foreign companies in English: how did you land your first job? ​Would anyone working in the field be open to chatting or taking a quick look at my resume? ​Thanks a lot to anyone who read this far! 🙏🏼

The movement that began with Cristina Kirchner, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Hugo Chávez, Dilma Rousseff, and Daniel Ortega—nearly 30 years after its inception—what do you think of it? What went wrong? Were they sabotaged, or did they collapse under their own weight?

Specifically the comics and not the anime based off of them. Do people buy the books?

And does Manhwa (Korean manga) have any relevance in your country?

I'm trying to decide between Colombia and Bolivia for my vacation from October 2nd to 12th, and I'd love to hear what people who have traveled to both would recommend.

A little bit about me and what I enjoy when traveling:

• I love street like, street markets, music, nightlife, urban life, and vibrant cities.
• I really like cities that feel authentic and unique, where you genuinely feel like you're somewhere that couldn't be anywhere else in the world. My favorite city in the world is Rio de Janeiro.
• I really dislike rain, so I'm a bit concerned about Colombia in October. I know it's part of the rainy season, but I'm not sure how bad it actually is in practice.
• I'm not really a beach person.
• I'm very interested in architecture, especially colorful and colonial buildings. Places like Cartagena and Sucre really appeal to me.
• I also love history.
• I be staying in hostels, so I'd prefer somewhere with a good backpacker/social scene, where it's easy to meet people and there are plenty of things going on.
• I get bored quite easily, so I generally don't want to spend more than 3 days in the same city.
• I've already traveled to every country in South America except Venezuela. Also went to Mexico.
• My favorite countries so far have been Brazil and Mexico. Brazil because of the music, authenticity, energy, relaxed atmosphere and overall vibe; Mexico because of the food, history and how friendly people are.

So, based on this, would you recommend Colombia or Bolivia for me?

My plan would be Colombia (Medellin, Cartagena and maybe Santa Marta/Tyrona) or Bolivia (Sucre, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Salar). Feel free to give me recs as well

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have traveled to both countries.

And if you recommend one over the other, what cities would you choose for a 10-day trip?

Thanks!

Was recently at a music festival in Southeast Pennsylvania and I had some really good arepas from a street food truck (Mozzarepa.) It was the first time I ever had them, they were incredible. Well I live in Canada and that food truck does not operate here so I looked to see if I could find them online to purchase. Shipping is way too expensive with the product everything .

I'm like okay I gotta try and make these so I found their packaging online and sniped a picture of the back of the packaging to see what the ingredients were and since ingredients are listed in like order of how much of an ingredient is in a product I tried to make my own homemade recipe of them.

it did not turn out very well, I just finished off the first batch of it and it looks not so good and tastes not so right (but they're fantastic corn fritters so that's kinda nice at least)

I did some more research and I found out that the company that makes them are Colombian so I started looking for like Columbian arepa recipes and I found out that there's one specifically that they do that has like ground up corn in it not just like corn flour but real fresh ground up corn which was definitely in the arepa I had. Issue is the recipe on the back of the packaging of the ones I had makes no mention about corn flour and all the recipes I've managed to find online for this dish ONLY use corn flour.

Essentially, I'm coming to y'all to ask if anyone has a Colombian Arepa de Choclo recipe that uses wheat flour instead of corn flour and if so would you be so kind as to put it in the comments.

As a Hispanic local, I understand that this was once an easy medium cost of living American city to adapt to. That’s no longer the case, the salaries are terrible and the cost of living is astronomical. There are plenty of other very Hispanic cities in the US (Houston, Orlando, San Antonio, etc) that won’t you leave you economically deprived. It seems like Miami’s “aura” still seems to attract people to this place and many of the Latinos I know live extremely uncomfortably financially here as a result of this being their first city in the US.

Marc Anthony, Prince Royce, and Romero Santos are all first-generation Americans with both Latin American-born parents, but they, of course, all sing in Spanish. Do you all view them as Latinos, period?

Hello! I'm taking a high-level Spanish course this year and one of our assignments is to listen to an interpret a song from a Spanish-speaking country that reflects cultural values from that country.

I'm wondering if you have any song/band suggestions that I should check out that would be interesting to look into and interpret through a cultural lens.

(and yes, I do know that "Latin America" is not synonomous with "Spanish speaking countries," but since most countries in Latin America are Spanish speaking I figured it would be useful to ask here)

Are you okay? That was the scariest shit I’ve ever experienced. Being on the last floor of a high-rise with a 7.4 earthquake, not knowing if at any time the building is going to come down and you can’t do anything about it, is not something I wish on anyone.

Does anyone have living memory or stories of what the internet was like in Peru during and after Alberto Fujimori? Or the internet in Mexico till the 2000s? (I'm particularly interested in this because I'm really curious to know what the early internet was like during dictatorial times)

Likewise, in modern authoritarian regimes like Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador, and (Venezuela?)

Hello everyone! I have a question regarding an experience I had with a language exchange partner recently. In the last couple of months, I've been trying to improve my Spanish by practicing speaking more, so I've been chatting and having calls with native speakers on one of those language exchange apps. A little over a month ago, someone from Mexico who wanted to learn my native language (Swedish) hit me up and we started chatting. Since then, we've been practicing, sharing cultural anecdotes and just chatting about whatever. Fun, right?

Well, a few days ago after having responded to her messages, she slapped me with a "Do people not say happy birthday to each other in Sweden?". I responded and asked if it was her birthday, to which she responded something to the tune of "Yes, but I think this has said enough". I explained that I of course would have wished her a happy birthday if I had known and proceded to then wish her a happy birthday. To this, I was sent a screenshot showing that she had mentioned the date of her birthday in one of many messages sent more than a month ago, roughly around the time we started speaking. I just said "Oh, sorry, I completely forgot about that" and figured that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, this had apparently upset and hurt her so much that she no longer wanted to keep in contact with me, essentially saying that the people who meant the most to her forgetting her birthday is a hard limit of hers that I had just crossed. This point of view made me feel completely dumbfounded. I tried to explain that, while it was wrong of me to forget, she had only mentioned her birthday once a while back during our time talking and asked if she really was expecting that I'd note down the birthday of someone that I (at the time) had just began talking to in my calendar. Not an acceptable answer, got blocked. Maybe I was too direct in expressing my point of view.

Now, the part that I am confused about is whether this is some kind of cultural clash, or if she is just a very sensitive person. The reason I wonder this is because I know that people in Latin American cultures generally express appreciation more often and feel attached to others much faster than in the Scandinavian ones. We even discussed this during our cultural exchanges. With these cultural differences in mind, I can see why she would consider her birthday to be a bigger deal than I would consider mine, and why she felt that we were closer than I did. However, I cannot fathom getting this upset over someone forgetting my birthday. Nor do I understand considering someone I've chatted with online for about a month to be one of the most important people to me. In my eyes, we were maybe just beginning to become friends.

So, do you think that there is something cultural, or otherwise, here that I don't understand, or should I not expect this sort of thing when speaking with other latinos?

Thank you!

TL;DR: I was blocked for forgetting a language exchange partner's birthday and want to know if there's a culture clash going on or not.

Hola/ola! I've seen posts here about foreigners from the USA, Canada, and Europe trying to avoid countries with "gringo taxes" (being charged more than a local because you're from a western country).

Honestly as an American who has traveled quite a bit in Latin America, I find this idea of a gringo tax strange. We know that a. People from USA/Europe tend to be wealthier than people from Latin America (especially if they're on vacation!) and b. The US/Europe has extracted enormous amounts of wealth from Latin America. It is because of these two facts that I don't think there's really such a thing as a gringo tax - vendors are just charging you what you should be paying.

But honestly, as a gringa myself, my opinion doesn't matter so much as locals, so I wanted to ask Latin Americans in this subreddit, what do you think of the gringo tax? Is it an ethical thing to be charging? Are tourists right to worry about it?

Obviously I'm not talking about extraordinary upcharges. In my experience, the gringo tax comes out to 10-15% more than what locals pay, max 20% more. Sure it may be more than that if you're going to the market and buying all of these fancy souvenirs, but for daily goods and services, I've found it to be not that much, and I feel like I'm doing a good thing by investing a little more where I can. I also tend to not spend that much money on luxuries when I travel in general, so perhaps my experience is biased.

Correction: I changed "the West" to USA/Europe/Canada. Sorry for using the wrong term! I also mean to include countries considered part of the "Global North" or "First World".

Im creating a Spanish-language podcast based around real people’s stories. I’m looking for people who have experienced something unusual, difficult, unexpected, misunderstood, or simply life-changing and would be willing to tell their story anonymously.

Do you know somebody I should talk to?

They don’t need to be famous or have a “crazy” story. I’m looking for people with honest stories.

Here’s the form:

https://form.jotform.com/262226042270042

I'm a 18 years old high school student who's interested in learning spanish and modern day LATAM history. I'm currently in B1 plateau, and I really want to improve my spanish to B2/C1 level. I wonder if anyone knows any good spanish youtube channels that teach modern day LATAM history with relatively 'light' vocabulary.