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In Becoming the Tupamaros, Lindsey Churchill explores an alternative narrative of US-Latin American relations by challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of revolutionary movements like the Uruguayan Tupamaros group. A violent and innovative organization, the Tupamaros demonstrated that Latin American guerrilla groups during the Cold War did more than take sides in a battle of Soviet and US ideologies. Rather, they digested information and techniques without discrimination, creating a homegrown and unique form of revolution.

Churchill examines the relationship between state repression and revolutionary resistance, the transnational connections between the Uruguayan Tupamaro revolutionaries and leftist groups in the US, and issues of gender and sexuality within these movements. Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver, for example, became symbols of resistance in both the United States and Uruguay. and while much of the Uruguayan left and many other revolutionary groups in Latin America focused on motherhood as inspiring women's politics, the Tupamaros disdained traditional constructions of femininity for female combatants. Ultimately, Becoming the Tupamaros revises our understanding of what makes a Movement truly revolutionary.

Like a rain-swollen river sweeping everything into its current, Pablo Neruda channeled all his life experiences into impassioned poetry that ultimately brought him the 1971 Nobel Prize for literature. His close friend and fellow writer-activist Volodia Teitelboim shared that exciting process for forty years, uniquely qualifying him to offer this intimate portrait of the poet. Originally published in Spain in 1984, Neruda is a biography that reads like a novel.

Teitelboim captures the whole sweep of Neruda's eventful life (1904-1973), from his motherless childhood in Chile's rainy southern forest to his unquiet death just twelve days after the violent overthrow of the Allende government he had served. He follows him through his bohemian youth as an impoverished university student in Santiago, his lonely existence in Southeast Asia consular outposts, his joyous discovery of Spain, and his lifelong devotion to poetry, love, Chile, and politics.

Unlock the stories of Pablo Neruda’s rare nineteenth-century carved-wood ship figurehead collection in Chile, why they mattered in his tumultuous life, and how we benefit from them now.

Poet Pablo Neruda’s nineteenth-century ship figurehead collection in Chile is one of the most significant in the world. Containing carved wood images of dramatically postured men and women, these figures are now better understood due to years of research, a willingness to challenge Neruda’s ever-changing stories about them, and a realization that the names Neruda chose for his figureheads perhaps had more to do with his life than theirs. The rhythm and beauty of Neruda’s worn wood figures is counterpoint to his own tumultuous life as an author, politician, and communist dissident.

Collecting ship figureheads was central to Neruda’s passion for owning things made of wood, a material he said was his best friend, and for standing out among others as he gradually built the public persona that helped move him toward winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. With his choir of immobilized figureheads stationed upright in his living room and facing the Pacific Ocean, Neruda was surrounded by dramatic images from the sea that ignited his most powerful feelings. 

The nineteenth century saw figureheads on the bows of ships of sail and steam, yet when a figurehead was lost or removed, its history soon disappeared. The significant ship figureheads that Neruda avidly collected preserve that history and reveal new dimensions concerning his life and work. Each year, his collection is viewed by thousands of visitors to the Pablo Neruda Foundation’s house museum at Isla Negra.