The Americanistas

The Americanistas

At the turn of the 15th Century, a Florentine explorer named Amerigo Vespucci made several voyages to present-day South America, and his reports from the still mysterious New World became widely known in Europe. A half-dozen years later, a German cartographer produced a world map that included the new landmass, and named it after Vespucci. That’s how the name “America” was born. 

Though often appropriated as the name for the Western Hemisphere’s most  powerful country, the United States, we think of America as referring to the ethos of the whole New World. It’s increasingly clear that the fate of the United States is interlinked with the destiny of its southern neighbors, collectively referred to as Latin America. Immigration, politics, business, and culture increasingly tie the hemisphere together. Though focusing primarily on Latin America, it’s in the spirit of documenting an interlinked New World that we offer The Americanistas blog. 

But it’s impossible to understand Latin America in today’s globalized, multipolar world without also exploring the influence of other countries in the hemisphere. China, for example, depends on Latin America’s commodities to fuel its manufacturing, and Spain’s bet on Latin American development is huge. The Americanistas will explore politics, economics and culture without the provincial biases of most English-language media or country-specific Latin America media. We know there’s a diasporic audience out there for sophisticated, fine-grained coverage of the hemisphere, and hope you’ll join The Americanistas in drawing a new map of America. 

Who Are We?

Marcelo and Teo Ballvé were born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and grew up in the United States, Mexico, and Venezuela. Yes, we’re brothers. 

Marcelo Ballvé lives in New York. He’s a contributing editor at New America Media, where he covers immigration and Latin America. He’s also a regular contributor to the New York Daily News and  World Politics Review. His articles and essays have also appeared in Mother Jones magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and NPR.  In 2007, he co-founded community newspaper El Sol de San Telmo in the Buenos Aires historic district.

Teo Ballvé began working as a writer and editor specializing in Latin American affairs in 2001. He joined the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), publisher of the award-winning NACLA Report on the Americas, in 2003 as an editor. This work has taken him to 17 countries in the hemisphere. Since 2006, he’s been living in Bogotá, Colombia, working as a freelance journalist primarily covering various aspects of the country’s armed conflict as well as Latin America more broadly for US publications. His work has appeared in The Nation (forthcoming), The Progressive, AlterNet (forthcoming), NACLA, New America Media, Z Magazine, and over a dozen local newspapers. He’s co-editor of the book, Dispatches From Latin America: On the Frontlines Against Neoliberalism.