Archive
Browse all 36 articles across governance, urban systems, ecologies, and latitudes.
Medellín's Miracle? Urban Design, Politics, and the Limits of Transformation
Once suffering extraordinarily high violence rates, Medellín remade itself through transit, public libraries, and public-space investments. This essay traces the politics, innovations, ambivalences, and lessons for U.S. cities seeking equitable urban transformation.
After the Guns, the Gravity: Where Gaza Talks Stand—and How Trump Rewrote the Leverage
As of October 14, 2025, an American-brokered ceasefire is in effect. Phase 1 is happening; final status is not. The ceasefire is a door ajar, not a house built. This analysis examines what Trump delivered, what he left out, and what a reality-based settlement must do next.
The Politics of a Name: What Trump's Columbus Day Proclamation Actually Teaches
A presidential proclamation does not rename a federal holiday; it performs it. Trump's 2025 Columbus Day proclamation rejects the dual-recognition posture of 2021–2024. Let's be precise about what changed, what didn't, and what a grown-up republic should do instead.
When Courts Erase the Spanish Map
In recent years, the Supreme Court has asked judges to test certain rights and regulations against 'history and tradition.' The words feel neutral, even comforting—like walking the family farm before making a will. But methods make worlds. A jurisprudence that privileges a particular.
America's Other Founding: The Spanish Story
The most American thing about the United States is that we keep mistaking prologue for plot. We nod at Spain and Mexico in the opening credits, then hit fast-forward to railroads and robber barons. But the decisive drama—the social inventions, the legal improvisations, the urban.
Why the U.S. Treats Latin America Differently
Walk into any American newsroom on a slow afternoon and point to a globe. Paris elicits sighs; Prague, a study-abroad anecdote; Berlin, a memory of train schedules that ran to the minute. Say Tegucigalpa, and the room tilts. Not hostility—just air pockets of unknowing.
Why America Can't Build Anymore
Every empire tells time with its roads. Rome had milestones; we have press releases. In 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—a vault of money large enough to make accountants need a hammock. The numbers are real; the cranes are not imaginary.
The Hidden Hemisphere: How Spanish America Built the United States—and Why We Forgot
Every nation is a story told about land. The United States has preferred the tidy novella: thirteen British colonies, a heroic revolution, then Manifest Destiny. But walk any city with your ears on—Los Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe—and the place names remind you that the harmony was written in.
The Bench of Mirrors: Conservative Judicial Activism and the Roberts Court
In American law, 'activist' is the powdered sugar we throw on the bench when we want to make someone else's footprints more visible than our own. Since the 1980s, the conservative legal movement has acted with strategic purpose—first under 'New Federalism,' then through the Roberts Court's project.
Neighbors at Arm's Length: The Anti-Woke Turn and the Architecture of Democratic Distance
From Florida's classrooms to Hungary's parliament halls, the 'anti-woke' movement reveals itself as more than culture war—it's a systematic attempt to redesign the distance between citizen and state, neighbor and neighbor, in ways that fundamentally alter democratic participation across the.
Pan‑American Solidarity: Shared Futures Across Hemispheres
Climate, migration, trade — the Americas are entwined. This essay argues that effective responses to shared crises require institutional designs that match hemispheric interdependence: joint infrastructure, finance, and democratic cooperation.
The Forgotten Republics of Light: Reading America Through the Ghost of New Spain
Beneath every American highway lies the dust of empires that spoke in another grammar. The Spanish colonial past offers an alternative genealogy where identity was not binary but layered—a continental experiment from Florida to California that still defines our moral noon.
How 'Originalism' Became a Power Grab
Call it the constitutionalist's promise: decide by text, history, and structure rather than by vibe or partisan appetite. In principle, that's healthy. In practice, on the current Supreme Court, the methods deliver outcomes that lean the same direction over and over—and create a new vision of the.
The Constitutional Shell Game
When the Court abandoned tiered scrutiny in Bruen and demanded that gun regulations match the Nation's historical tradition, it turned constitutional litigation into an antiquarian contest. This detailed analysis examines how specific doctrinal moves reshape the balance of constitutional power.
The Double-Standard Doctrine
How Washington treats Europe like a roommate and Latin America like a distant cousin—and what it would take to change the house rules. An empire doesn't have to call itself an empire. Sometimes it just keeps two sets of house rules. When Europe coughs, the U.S. shows up with casseroles and cash.
The De-Risked Hemisphere
Why Latin America's next boom is North America's best insurance policy. For two decades the world's factory pointed east by reflex. Then pandemics and geopolitics broke muscle memory. 'De-risking' entered the catechism, and procurement teams began measuring distance again—how far the ship must.
Neighbors at Arm's Length
The double standard that warps U.S. policy toward Latin America—and how to fix it. Europe gets the Rules for Allies; Latin America gets the Rules for Neighbors. Here's a field guide to ending the whiplash.
NAFTA's Second Act
A blueprint for a clean, fast, bilingual North American economy ahead of the 2026 USMCA review. Trade is a sentence written in verbs: make, certify, clear, deliver. For three decades, North America conjugated those verbs under NAFTA; in 2020 we swapped the grammar for USMCA and kept moving.
The Republic of Water
Post-2026 Colorado River rules, a bilingual law of the ditch, and the cities that already know how to share. Every politics is water politics in disguise. Draw the United States by rivers and you get a biography of arguments: the Colorado's improbable slingshot through seven states and two nations;.
The Desert That Builds the Future
Ecological development for the Sonoran century—north and south of the line. Stand on a clear night above the borderlands and you will see two kinds of constellations: the old ones in the sky and the new ones on the ground—towns, farms, batteries, irrigation pumps.
The Shade Treaty
A solarpunk blueprint for America's hottest century—rights, rules, and the civic art of lowering the temperature. Here is the short version of the century: heat is no longer a season; it is a governance problem. In 2023, the U.S. recorded 2,325 heat-related deaths—the highest in the 1999–2023.
The Right to Shade
How a Spanish-American heat commons can save lives, redesign streets, and teach the republic courtesy. The map of summer is a moral document. It shows where trees stand, where pavements glare, where bus shelters exist because someone cared enough to draw a roof.
How to Fix a Broken Country, One Bridge at a Time
What America's infrastructure actually looks like in 2025—three places, four programs, one honest ledger. We like to pretend infrastructure is a sequence of ribbon cuttings—the pure joy of scissors through satin. In reality, it's a ledger written in three inks: authorizations (Congress),.
The Other Official Language Is Reality
Why a bilingual republic is good law, good engineering, and the cheapest reform we haven't finished. Walk the United States with your ears open and you'll hear what the Census writes in ledgers: nearly one in five people speaks a language other than English at home—Spanish by far the most.
The Lost Commons, Found
Land grants, acequias, and the quiet path to Spanish-American co-stewardship. Every country carries an official fiction about who first drew the lines. In the American Southwest, the neatest fiction says the United States arrived to find a blank ledger, then wrote order into wilderness.
The Law Beneath the Law
How Spain and France still shape American rights—if you know where to look. Every legal system keeps a diary and a dream. Ours files the diary under 'common law' and the dream under 'the Constitution.' But across the South and West there is a third ledger—stamped in Spanish and French—that still.
The Court That Rewrote America
The Roberts Court before and after 2020—how a jurisprudence of 'tradition' remapped power, rights, and the administrative state. Historians will draw a clean fold in the timeline of the Roberts Court. On one side (2005–2019): incrementalism with sharp elbows.
The Colony of Kilowatts
Puerto Rico's democracy, bankruptcy, and the grid that could teach the mainland how to heal. If you want to see the United States without makeup, fly to San Juan and wait for the lights to flicker. In that twitch you can read the whole civics lesson: a people who are citizens without a presidential.
The Case That Wants to Erase the Map
Louisiana v. Callais and the quiet attempt to end Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Some revolutions arrive as fireworks. Others arrive as docket numbers. Louisiana v. Callais is the latter—a case that began as a fight over one congressional map and swelled into a vehicle that could cripple or.
The Bilingual Switch
How to run elections, permits, and emergencies in two languages—and why it makes a republic smarter. Every morning, millions of Americans begin their day in Spanish and end it in English (or vice versa). The republic is bilingual in fact, yet too many of our most consequential interactions with.
The Art of Calling Someone Else an Activist
Conservative judging since the 1980s—and the paradox of a movement that won by denouncing its own reflection. The term 'judicial activism' is the judiciary's favorite insult and our public square's dullest knife. Everyone uses it to describe the decisions they don't like; few define it before.
The Activists Who Said They Weren't
How a conservative legal movement rewrote American law from the 1980s to today. For forty years, the conservative legal movement has sold a deceptively simple ethic: judges should interpret, not make, the law. The method was restraint; the result was revolution.
El Archivo
Building the bilingual memory infrastructure the United States forgot it needed. A country that cannot search its past will mis-govern its future. Ours keeps half its memory in another language—acequia minutes, merced deeds, mission ledgers, notarial protocols, diseños, parish censuses—a.
New Orleans and the Cities That Could Have Been
Cities are usually born of stubbornness or luck; New Orleans was born of geometry. A kink in the Mississippi offered a natural levee and a commanding bend—close enough to the Gulf to smell salt, far enough upriver to dodge the worst of the waves. That curve made the city a hinge between the.
The Atlantic Speaks Two Languages
The future likes to hide in plain geography. One shore is Spain: reforming, digitizing, and growing faster than its neighbors, with a power grid now majority-renewable. The other shore is Latin America: a continent of copper and code, lithium and logistics.
Madrid After Miami: How Spain Can Become the Hemisphere''s Other Capital
For a generation, Miami has styled itself the 'capital of Latin America'—a boast stitched from air routes, private-banking ledgers, and the glow of Spanish-language studios on the Palmetto. The proposition of this essay is not to deny that reality but to widen the map: Spain can shoulder a.