Histories, Volume 5, Issue 3 (September 2025) – 2 articles

This article examines the struggles for water justice led by women in the Aconcagua River Basin (Valparaíso, Chile) through a hydrofeminist perspective. Chile’s water crisis, rooted in a colonial extractivist model and exacerbated by neoliberal policies of water privatization, reflects a deeper crisis of socio-environmental injustice. Rather than understanding water merely as a resource, this research adopts a relational epistemology that conceives water as a living entity shaped by and shaping social, cultural, and ecological relations. Drawing on life-history interviews and the construction of a hydrofeminist cartography with women river defenders, this article explores how gendered and racialized bodies experience the crisis, resist extractive practices, and articulate alternative modes of co-existence with water. The hydrofeminist framework offers critical insights into the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and environmental degradation, emphasizing how women’s embodied experiences are central to envisioning new water governance paradigms. This study reveals how women’s affective, spiritual, and territorial ties to water foster strategies of resilience, recovery, and re-existence that challenge the dominant extractivist logics. By centering these hydrofeminist life histories, this article contributes to broader debates on environmental justice, decolonial feminisms, and the urgent need to rethink human–water relationships within the current climate crisis. Full article

President John F Kennedy faced an impending crisis upon taking office in January 1961. The revolutionary threat of Cuba held the potential to spread to several neighboring countries. This crisis was the product of decades of neglect from successive US presidents, that ultimately invited the USSR into the region and fell to Kennedy during his first year as President. Kennedy sought to recast the image of the US in the hemisphere to inoculate against the example of Cuba. The cornerstone of this plan was the Alliance for Progress, a substantial program of economic assistance from the US to Latin America. However, that program has widely been criticized as a failure. Rather than reflect on the economic and social limitations of the Alliance for Progress, this paper will evaluate the diplomatic impact of Kennedy’s approach in forming the anti-Cuban coalition in the first year of his presidency. Kennedy successfully changed the Latin American attitude towards the US prior to the releasing of any substantial economic aid. Therefore, this paper will argue that “The Kennedy Plan” was a diplomatic success that reduced the threat of Castro’s Cuba in the context of the Cold War. Full article