Dispatch #42
Read about Mexico’s aesthetics of rebellion, Indonesia’s nickel-fuelled upheavals, and an Italian newsroom uncovering the quiet tensions of a long-negotiated border.
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
This week, from Mexico, writer Dahlia de la Cerda uses the concept of gothic too unpack how personal darkness becomes a lens for understanding class, race, and the aesthetics of rebellion.
From Indonesia, a report travels deep into the country’s nickel frontier, tracing how the global demand for “green” minerals is reshaping entire landscapes and the people who depend on them.
And from the Italy–Slovenia borderlands, a local newspaper revisits the fault lines left behind by a half-century-old treaty, uncovering the memories that continue to define life in this “invisible” border region
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.
Remaining barbaric
How personal darkness becomes a theory of class, race and aesthetic rebellion
In this reflective essay for Mexican publication Revista de la Universidad, Dahlia de la Cerda traces her journey from the working-class barrio that raised her to the rarefied cultural spaces that demanded she shed her origins. At its core, the piece is about the collision between lived darkness and aestheticised darkness but also between the violence of poverty and the violence of being told that poverty must never show. Through a blend of memoir, theory, and political analysis, de la Cerda rebuilds a Mexican Gothic rooted not in European fantasy but in the structural realities of classed and racialised life.
She begins with the world of her childhood: her mother’s bar, thick with cigarette smoke and cumbia; neighbourhood women who heal with rituals; the sense of closeness that comes from living among people who share the same vulnerabilities. It is a place marked by scarcity and by the state’s absence like the electricity that cuts, police who only appear as threat, schools that discipline more than they educate but it is also a place structured by collective care. De la Cerda names this environment “darkness,” but not as metaphor. It is a material condition shaped by political neglect and economic dispossession.
The rupture arrives when she enters a private school, an institution that functions less as a pathway to education than as a factory for middle-class aspiration. Here, she confronts the disciplinary gaze of whiteness: her accent, her family’s work, even her smell are policed as signs of inferiority. It seems that shame becomes internalised policy for her. When she discovers the goth subculture, she sees in it the possibility of transcendence, a way to access a kind of aesthetic capital that seems to grant immunity from class contempt.
But as she immerses herself in the goth scene, she realises how deeply its aesthetics echo the colonial imagination. European darkness is presented through pale faces, Victorian melancholy, an obsession with death detached from material suffering becomes the standard against which all else is measured. De la Cerda begins to understand her participation in this aesthetic as a form of assimilation, as a symbolic whitening disguised as rebellion. Fanon, Grada Kilomba and Bourdieu give her a vocabulary for the process and how selfhood gets rearranged to match the preferences of the ruling class, how even countercultures reproduce hierarchies and how the body becomes the site of colonial and class inscription.
The political turn in the essay comes when she returns to the neighbourhood she once tried to escape. The barrio reveals to her a different kind of gothic, one inseparable from the state’s abandonment and the community’s endurance. Altars to Santa Muerte, secondhand lace, cheap eyeliner, the omnipresence of police violence, the infrastructure that constantly breaks and this is not an aesthetic but a lived political reality. And in recognising this, she begins to articulate a politics that critiques not only cultural elitism but the structural inequalities that shape what is deemed “beautiful,” “intellectual,” or “barbaric.”
Drawing on Louisa Yousfi’s call to “remain barbaric,” de la Cerda reframes barbarism as a refusal to assimilate into the cultural norms of the elite. To remain barbaric is to reject the whitening effects of taste-making industries; to insist that knowledge, beauty and theory are not the exclusive property of institutions or European traditions; to treat the barrio as a site of epistemic production rather than shame. This is her political intervention she says, she argues that reclaiming darkness is also reclaiming political agency.
To write from the barrio is to expose the material consequences of class oppression; to inhabit a Mexican Gothic is to hold together the brutality of the state and the creativity of the people who survive it and to embrace barbarism is to resist the cultural sanitisation demanded by whiteness.
Original article Gótica barrializada: seguir siendo bárbara by Dahlia de la Cerda published in Spanish by Revista‑de‑la‑Universidad in October 2025.
It is available here.
Revista de la Universidad is a respected academic‑cultural magazine based in Mexico, publishing essays, critical reflections and creative work that engage with culture, society and politics across Latin America.Summary by ZN
Indonesia’s nickel frontier
How a global green boom is rearranging lives, land and power
In this sweeping investigation for Mongabay, journalist Irfan Maulana traces the human cost and political stakes of Indonesia’s nickel rush, moving between the intimate realities of those living near the mines and smelters and the national ambitions driving the world’s largest nickel producer.
The story opens with workers like Arif, a twenty-three-year-old from a coastal village in Sulawesi, who arrived at a nickel industrial park convinced he had found a way out of poverty. What he discovered instead was a workplace defined by twelve-hour shifts, minimal safety training and the constant roar of furnaces that blur the boundary between exhaustion and danger. His testimony sits at the heart of the piece, hope and harm unfolding in the same breath, in a sector the government hails as the backbone of Indonesia’s economic future.
Across the islands, families living near smelting zones describe a quieter but equally destabilising transformation. Fishermen return to waters that no longer yield predictable harvests; women show jars of murky well water they now buy in plastic jugs. The investigation neither isolates these accounts as mere local grievances nor romanticises them. Instead, it shows how these disruptions mirror the broader political push to cement Indonesia’s role in the global electric-vehicle supply chain.
Because behind every shift in Arif’s furnace or every failed fishing trip lies a national decision: Indonesia’s choice, beginning in 2020, to ban raw ore exports and require nickel processing to occur domestically. That policy has drawn billions in foreign investment and reshaped global battery markets, but it has also consolidated power in the hands of a few politically connected companies. Many of these operate joint ventures with Chinese firms, whose capital and technology underpin the industry’s explosive growth.
Environmental protections become another point where human experience and political ambition collide. The article shows villagers pointing to newly eroded hillsides or plantations coated in dust, even as government officials speak of “national development” and the necessity of short-term sacrifice. The nickel industry is promoted internationally as a pillar of the green transition, yet domestically it remains powered largely by coal, a contradiction that echoes through the landscapes where communities feel the immediate consequences.
Indigenous groups provide some of the investigation’s most powerful voices. In parts of Halmahera and Central Sulawesi, elders recount how forests central to customary practice have been cleared for mining concessions negotiated far from their villages. They speak not only of ecological loss but of political marginalisation: decisions made by Jakarta, facilitated by foreign investors, and rubber-stamped by regional officials under pressure to deliver economic growth. Their resistance, woven through ceremony, oral histories and community mapping, becomes a counter-narrative to the state’s vision of progress.
As Irfan Maulana widens the frame, the political dimensions sharpen. Indonesia positions itself as indispensable to the global future of electric vehicles, using its resource dominance to bargain with China, the United States and the European Union. The government’s strategy rests on transforming raw minerals into higher-value products, but this ambition often outpaces environmental oversight and labour protections. The investigation documents rising accident rates, limited unionisation and complex hierarchies between Indonesian and Chinese workers, all shaped by the geopolitics of investment.
International scrutiny is building, yet the investigation underscores that many Western companies remain eager to secure Indonesian nickel regardless of the human or environmental cost. The global clean-energy transition, the article suggests, risks replicating the extractive inequalities of the fossil-fuel era just with different minerals, different landscapes and different communities absorbing the fallout.
Toward its conclusion, the piece returns to the people whose lives mark the frontlines of this transformation. Arif still works at the smelter, hopeful the job will eventually stabilise his family’s finances, though he worries what the fumes will mean for his lungs in a decade. Fishermen continue to wake before dawn even as their yields decline. Indigenous families move between protest and negotiation, determined not to be erased from the land that holds their history.
Original article Penjaga Hutan Halmahera Tersingkir Industri Nikel by Irfan Maulana published in Indonesian by Mongabay.co.id on 10 September 2025.
It is available here.
Mongabay is a leading global environmental journalism network providing in-depth reporting on ecosystems, resource extraction, and the human and ecological impact of environmental change.
Summary by ZN
The invisible borderland
Fifty years after a treaty to draw the border between Italy and Yugoslavia, a local newspaper investigates
Translator was recently in northeastern Italy in the town of Gorizia – fifty kilometres north of the Adriatic port city of Trieste – and used the opportunity to pick up the local newspaper, Il Piccolo, from a street vendor. The Sunday edition included a pull-out section on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1975 Treaty of Osimo which finalised – decades after the end of the Second World War – the border between Italy and what was then Yugoslavia. (Gorizia itself is a town of two halves – the Italian Gorizia, and the Slovene Nova Gorica).
Drawing on memories of those involved in making the treaty, and those who experienced the formalisation of the border as a kind of partition, a series of articles in Il Piccolo shine a light on a micro-history of the Cold War, which has shaped local identity and feeling down to today in the area around Trieste.
“Osimo was a humiliation for the exiles”, Renzo Codarin tells Il Piccolo. Seventeen at the time, the Osimo treaty became the impetus for Codarin’s later political career. As a member of the Italian-speaking community of Istria – which became formalised as part of Yugoslavia through the treaty – he and his family felt they had been let down. “Italy should not have done this to me”, he remembered his grandmother telling him. One of the articles in the special shows a photo of graffiti stating simply: “No to Osimo”.
Miloš Budin, a member of the Slovenian-language minority in Italy sees a more positive side. “From Osimo the journey began to peaceful and constructive coexistence, both in the field of international relations and within the multi-ethnic society of Venezia Giulia.”
Up until the First World War Trieste and the surrounding area was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its ethnically and linguistically mixed population was ruled from Vienna. When the old empire fell apart, Trieste and the surrounding areas became a flashpoint between Italian nationalists who claimed territory along the Adriatic, and the new state of Yugoslavia. At the end of the Second World War, the question of who owned what was still considered too difficult to solve permanently. Trieste and the surrounding areas were divided into different zones, under the UN Security Council.
The Cold War between the two halves of Europe, grew up and solidified around Trieste, now on a new geopolitical faultline, with local populations finding themselves cut off from land they considered theirs, old patterns of community disrupted even where trade (and a lot of smuggling) continued. Legally speaking, Italy and Yugoslavia retained claims on the same territory.
There were geopolitical concerns at stake in 1975. Raoul Pupo, a historian at the University of Trieste, writes in Il Piccolo about Italian fears in the 1960s about the situation in neighbouring Yugoslavia. “The prospects were bleak”, he writes. What if Yugoslavia were to collapse? Would Moscow intervene, risking a Third World War? “If a crisis exploded”, the historian notes, “an unresolved legal question would provide immense leverage to the Kremlin”. (The Soviet Union had, after all, invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968).
Belgrade hoped to extend the “droit de regard” (essentially a right of oversight) of the Slovenian minority, contained in a memorandum in 1954, to other Italian provinces – thus effectively extending its say on policies in a wider border region. Italy couldn’t accept this because it might complicate the situation of the German speaking minority in Alto Adige (another part of Italy). Western powers hoped that if the border was settled, maybe Yugoslavia could have been brought closer to the West.
Looking back, a local priest is scathing of what happened in 1975. Church leaders spoke to the Italian Prime Minister several times ahead of the Osimo treaty, the newspaper reports, urging caution. “But Rome wanted to close the deal quickly”, Ettore Malnati, told Il Piccolo – ignoring a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the agreement to be revised. “It was a space in the face for democracy”, the priest says. Could things have been different? “It would have been enough to wait, as UN representatives suggested”.
Roberto Menia, a Senator for the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party goes further, calling Osimo a “betrayal”. Even fifty years on, the Senator says, he keeps at home an urn of earth from Istria: “the soil of my mother”. When Yugoslavia broke up, Slovenia and Croatia should, he says, have paid compensation of over a hundred million dollars to Italians no longer able to return to Istria: “we didn’t see a cent”.
There’s very little border control between Italy and Slovenia these days. Both countries are members of the European Union. Translator crossed several times, without difficulty, without a passport, without being asked a single question by Italian border police. But even long resolved border disputes carry a political charge.
Summary by CEM.
Original articles published in Italian in Il Piccolo on 9 November 2025 under the title Trattato di Osimo: La linea e la ferita
The articles are available online here and in the paper edition of the newspaper.
Il Piccolo is a local Italian-language newspaper in Gorizia and Trieste founded in 1881.
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team