No. Especial (2023)

Dear readers of Revista Estudios, we are proud to present a new special issue. The investigations that this publication brings together address various topics of great interest and contribution to the fields of action and research of the humanities.

Sonia Angulo Brenes presents a historiographical balance on the working class and the labor movement in Costa Rica, a theme treated by historians since the late 1970s, whose origin was to determine the emergence of the working class in Costa Rica. The author identifies the need to continue with these studies in the present, given the advance of neoliberalism to relate sources, methodologies, themes and times, and consider the Costa Rican case within regional and global dynamics. Perhaps then the knowledge gap about the post-1950 era will be addressed.

Next, there is the work of Mainor Cruz and Emilio Montero, who carry out a historical review of the Business Informatics career to then write down a proposal to update the career that allows to deepen the analysis of the student population and the learning acquired. With this race, the Golfito Humid Neotropical City Campus is inaugurated, origin of the current South Campus of the University of Costa Rica. As of 2006, access to public higher education from a technological perspective has been possible for the inhabitants of the Brunca Region, a region that has been characterized by presenting very low development indicators, a high unemployment rate and for being one of the most impoverished regions of Costa Rica.

Art and geographic and social research have much to contribute to future construction projects and local identities. From the concept of landscape, Anthony Mario Sibaja and Aaron Blanco remind us that the landscape is built in everyday life, with values ​​and meanings from the past that are reinterpreted from the present, to give shape and meaning to the different spaces we inhabit. Some of these spaces become invisible due to political and economic processes. This is the case of Peralta de Turrialba, a "ghost town" that, due to the insistence of its community to remember its past, has built a living memory in its landscape, through art and the historical remains of the Atlantic railway.

In a temporary jump, at the beginning of this year 2023 an unexpected archaeological discovery occurred in the Spanish municipality of Jimena de la Frontera, in the province of Cádiz. A team of documentary filmmakers who were going to film Laja Alta had to deviate due to the rains to a mountainous part where they distinguished and photographed paintings or alterations in the rocks. David Mendoza carries out a preliminary study in which through photographs he documents and describes remains of cave paintings with representations of boats, as well as fossilized human and animal footprints. These finds from a coastal habitat could date back to the Upper Paleolithic, although the presence of Neanderthals could not be proven.

The methodological question on the historical investigation of female Freemasonry is an insufficiently worked subject, especially in the Hispanic context and particularly in the Latin American one. Sylvia Hottinger carries out a historiographical tour that explains the methods and historical sources that have been used to identify the activities and characteristics of the women who participated in different lodges. The invisibility of Freemason women occurred according to the type of Freemasonry and the rites to which their respective lodges were attached, hence their little participation in Freemasonry has been assumed. The author reveals that the key to finding Freemason women is to look for women participating in social, political and philanthropic activities.

In line with the participation of women in public life, the following article in this number is proposed. The condition of women in ancient times was subject to male authority. From a reading of Aristotelian rhetoric, Jenny Salas analyzes the discourse of the Roman poet Gaius Valerio Catullus, in the 1st century BC, towards women with sexual behaviors that transgressed modesty and the given word; two values ​​of sexual virtue that Roman women had to abide by. The analysis from persuasion reveals censorship and offenses on the part of this Latin poet towards these women considered lacking in modesty and chastity.

The temptation to liken the affairs of love to the affairs of war has accompanied human beings for centuries. It is no coincidence that the word 'conquer' refers to both war and love. Roberto Morales analyzes the Akkadian love poetry, the Latin love elegy and the Sanskrit love lyric in order to determine the variants of the theme of love as a war. The author suggests a possible indirect influence of Akkadian poetry in the Latin and Sanskrit versions, in the metaphors of sex as a battle and the triumph of love or the lover.

Rap music and hip-hop culture are part of the vernacular culture, they belong to what is said, but they are not considered a text that is on the same level as written culture and literary criticism. Juan Carlos Saravia, José Roberto Saravia and Daniel Delgado transgress academic conventions to compare four poems by renowned writer T.S. Eliot with a work by Rafael Lechowski, a Spanish musician and writer of Polish descent. In both works, the authors discover that the subject of emotional pain is treated from the beginnings of Zen Buddhism and that both Eliot and Lechowski propose a path to spiritual awakening that differs from the treatment of pain in the West.

The contributions of this publication do not have a particular theme, but meeting points between the work of History and the humanities. This issue is special because the authors continue to honor the quality of the journal with their research. Which renews the commitment of our editorial team and the Cultural History Section with academic excellence and the dissemination of knowledge through open access.

M.Sc. Ileana D'Alolio Sánchez

Director