On December 12–13, 2025, the Asociación de Amistad Marroquí Iberoamericana, led by its president, Randa Jebrouni, a research professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Abdelmalek Essaâdi University in Tetouan, and Hisham Aidi, editor of Souffles magazine, convened a conference in Tangier entitled “Latin American Studies in the Maghreb.” Scholars from Morocco, the Americas, and beyond gathered for four panels devoted to travel writing and displacement, migrating texts, transatlantic feminist discourse, and the politics of decolonization and the Global South. The conference concluded with a conversation with the writer Mohammed Serifi about his prison memoir, El Cielo Cuadrado. This issue of Souffles brings together essays emerging from that conference, tracing cultural, political, and economic exchanges between North Africa and Latin America whose histories are older—and more deeply intertwined—than the historiographies of either region have generally acknowledged.
The timing is deliberate. Sixty years ago, in January 1966, the Tricontinental Conference convened in Havana, bringing together delegates from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in what its organizers hoped would become the founding moment of a unified Tricontinental movement of the formerly colonized world. Souffles emerged the following year as one of the most distinct literary and political manifestations of the Tricontinental project. It published translations of Latin American writers through its partnership with Havana’s Casa de las Américas, debated the relevance of Latin American revolutionary thought for North Africa, and gave expression to what the Moroccan sociologist Abdelkébir Khatibi called decolonial “other-thinking.”
To publish this issue on the anniversary of the Havana gathering is therefore not simply to ask what remains of the Tricontinental tradition. It is also to look further back, tracing relations between Latin America and North Africa to an era well before the 1966 conference. The essays gathered here reveal connections that took shape through anti-colonial struggles, migration, trade, intellectual exchange, trade, religious networks, diplomacy, and translation. We have organized the contributions from the Tangier conference into five thematic clusters.
I. The Rif and the Americas
Three essays revisit the figure whose presence looms over this shared history: Abdelkrim al-Khattabi, the Riffian leader whose defeat of Spanish forces at Anoual in 1921 reverberated far beyond North Africa. Yassin Akouh’s essay reconstructs Abdelkrim’s campaign of public diplomacy—his letters, interviews, and appeals to the League of Nations—as an early critique of the colonial international order. His interventions found attentive readers among intellectuals and journalists in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. Brahim Harchaoui’s pieces narrows the focus to a single document: Abdelkrim’s December 1924 letter addressed to the peoples of Latin America and written to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Ayacucho in Peru, that ended Spanish rule in most of mainland South America. Harchaoui reads the letter as an act of genealogical construction, reaching back through Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre to forge a common anti-colonial internationalism linking the Rif, the Arab world, and Latin America. He also reminds us that Moroccan–Latin American diplomatic contact predates the twentieth century, going back to Sultan Moulay Abderrahmane’s recognition of Gran Colombia in 1827.
Zeyad El Nabolsy and Migdalia Arcila-Valenzuela’s “From Oriental Despotism to Anti-Imperialist Vanguard” traces the place of North Africa and the Middle East in Latin American political thought, from Bolívar’s use of the language of “Oriental despotism” in his critique of Spanish rule to the subsequent reimagining of the Maghreb and Mashreq as sites of anti-imperialist vanguard politics. Taken together, these essays reveal a relationship that moved in both directions: Latin American revolutionaries drew upon the political vocabulary and example of the Rif, even as Riffian leaders actively cultivated Latin American solidarity as a political strategy.
A fourth essay examines this history through a more explicitly theoretical lens. In their contribution, Silvia Ferabolli and Nizar Messari adopt a dialogic approach. Ferabolli, writing from Brazil, examines Maghrebi thought through Abdelkebir Khatibi, while Messari, writing from Morocco, approaches Latin America through the work of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Lélia Gonzalez. Their exchange points toward something Souffles has long aimed for: a mode of comparison that illuminates difference rather than dissolving it into an undifferentiated “Global South.”
A fifth essay returns to Khatibi himself and to his encounter with Latin America in Caracas, Venezuela. Amine Bit traces how Khatibi’s training as a sociologist—at the Sorbonne under Albert Memmi, and later as director of Morocco’s Institute of Sociology until its closure by the state in 1970—shaped his subsequent engagement with Latin American thought. In 1973, Khatibi attended an international sociology conference in Caracas as its sole African participant. Bit reads this encounter as reinforcing Khatibi’s critique of the limits of Western functionalism and as contributing directly to his formulation of “double critique”: the imperative to interrogate both the intellectual legacy of the West and the traditionalism of the Arab-Islamic world. For Khatibi, Bit argues, the relationship between the Maghreb and Latin America was never one of contradiction but of translation.
II. Journals, Organizations, and the Limits of Solidarity
Three essays turn from historical genealogy to the concrete institutions and practices through which Tricontinental solidarity was produced—and to the limits that shaped it. Eman Morsi’s “Cuba en árabe y los límites de la solidaridad del Tercer Mundo,” appearing here in Souffles’s own translation, argues that despite deep diplomatic and military ties between revolutionary Cuba and the Arab world, sustained cultural exchange remained limited. Linguistic barriers and state-mediated festivals left Cuban literature largely inaccessible to Arab readers, while Cuba survived in Arabic primarily in the figure of Che Guevara, who, especially after 1967, was referenced to condemn the corruption of Arab leaders rather than to evoke the realities of the Cuban revolution. Morsi highlights another significant connection: Guevara’s guerrilla strategy itself drew upon Abdelkrim al-Khattabi’s campaign in the Rif, returning us back to this issue’s opening theme.
Shadi Rohana’s “América Latina en la revista palestina Al-Karmel” recovers a less familiar instance of successful cultural exchange. His essay examines Mahmoud Darwish’s Beirut-based journal and, in particular, its landmark 1982 dossier, which published interviews with Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar alongside translations of Mexican and Paraguayan writing. Through these interventions, Al-Karmel’s editors treated Latin America not simply as a political ally, but as offering a conception of literature that could be aesthetically ambitious and politically engaged. Julieta Chinchilla’s essay turns from journals to organizations, tracing the transnational exchanges between Cuba’s Federación de Mujeres Cubanas and Algeria’s Unión Nacional de Mujeres Argelinas from 1962 to 1978. Through these exchanges, the two federations developed a distinctly Third World feminist politics—anti-imperialist and anti-racist, and organized around the figure of the “madre-guerrillera”—that consciously distinguished itself from both Western feminism and Soviet women’s organizations. Together, these essays suggest that Third World solidarity was most effective not where it was proclaimed in the abstract, but where translators, editors, and organizers undertook the patient work of creating material and institutional connections.
III. Coffee, Empire, and Devotional Networks
Three essays uncover networks of material and devotional connection that emerged well before the Global South appeared as a political ideal. John Karam’s “Grounds of a Global South: Coffee, Brazil, and the Maghreb, 1860s–1960s” follows Brazilian coffee as it moved through Algiers, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, and Tunis, traded largely through British and French intermediaries even as Moroccan Jewish return migrants and Brazilian diplomats established more direct ties. Karam traces these connections from an 1861 exchange of horses and cannon between Dom Pedro II and a Moroccan prince, through orientalist debates in Rio de Janeiro’s parliament, to a 1969 cup of Brazilian coffee served to King Hassan II in Casablanca. The movement of coffee provides a material infrastructure for solidarities that a later, more romanticized Third World project would claim to invent.
Yaëlle Azagury’s essay turns from trade to cinema, tracing the Moroccan Jewish migration to Venezuela sometimes known as “hacer la América.” She follows this history through Fortunato Benacerraf, who left Tetouan for Venezuela’s Caribbean coast around 1900, and his daughter, filmmaker Margot Benacerraf (1926–2024). Despite the international acclaim for her landmark films Reverón (1953) and Araya (1959), Azagury explores Benacerraf’s relative invisibility in the Latin American cultural canon, linking it to both gender and class, as well as the unresolved complexities of her Sephardi diasporic identity. Drawing partly on her own family’s migration from Tangier to Caracas, Azagury approaches Benacerraf’s story as both scholar and inheritor.
Phoebe Carter’s essay follows a parallel (devotional) route across the Atlantic. In 1865, a hurricane diverted an Ottoman naval vessel to Rio de Janeiro, where its imam, ʿAbd al-Raḥmán al-Baghdādī, encountered a community of enslaved and free (Malê) Muslims of West African descent who had been forced underground following the violent suppression of Bahia’s 1835 uprising. Al-Baghdadi spent three years teaching Arabic literacy and Islamic practice among Brazil’s Muslim communities before returning to Istanbul and composing a travelogue that Carter reads as early evidence, for Ottoman and Arab readers, that the umma extended into the New World. Yet the text, she argues, represents neither straightforward solidarity nor simple bigotry. Instead, it embodies what she calls an “ambivalent brotherhood:” a fraternity grounded in shared faith but complicated by al-Baghdadi’s anxieties about the Malê community’s Blackness and imperfect Arabic. Gana Ndiaye’s piece “São Paulo is the New Fez: The Formation of a Senegalese Tijani Community in Brazil” extends this devotional history into the present. Ndiaye traces the Tijaniyya Sufi order, historically anchored in Fez, as it has taken root among African migrant communities in São Paulo, creating an unexpected living counterpart to the Moroccan city on the other side of the Atlantic. Together, these essays remind us that the relationships later articulated through Tricontinental politics were carried not only in manifestos and political congresses, but also in cargo holds, marketplaces, mosques, and synagogues.
IV. Diplomacy and Cultural Memory
Another dimension of this issue is more personal and archival, recovering histories preserved largely through family memory and institutional memory. Veteran Moroccan historian Mhammad Benaboud’s “Taking Al-Andalus to Peru” recounts a lecture tour to the Catholic University and the University of Lima, where Al-Andalus became, not simply a nostalgic cultural evocation, but a shared heritage through which new connections with Peruvian audiences could be imagined. Youssef Boucetta’s family memoir of the Mohammed VI Center for the Dialogue of Civilizations in Coquimbo, Chile, offers a more intimate account of Moroccan–Latin American exchange. As the son of Abdelhadi Boucetta, Morocco’s former ambassador to Chile, he recalls watching an exact replica of Marrakech’s Koutoubia rise over a Chilean port city following a casual 2002 conversation between his father and the mayor of Coquimbo. The story captures the unpredictable ways in which diplomatic encounters can become lasting monuments to cultural memory.
V. Diaspora and Indigeneity
The final cluster turns to the contemporary and the lived, asking what Tricontinental solidarity might mean today and where it takes shape beyond the institutions that once defined it. Biel Delgado-Trabal’s “Decolonizing Solidarity: Puerto Rico and Palestine from the Bay Area to North Africa” examines the uneven work of coalition-building among Latinx and Arab/Maghrebi communities in Northern California. He argues that a decolonial solidarity worthy of the name must reckon honestly with the class and racial positions occupied by its own “cultural workers.” Cynthia Hernández González’s study of Muslim converts in Mexico City examines how a small community interprets its experiences of racism and mestizaje through contemporary Muslim anarcho-leftist thought.
Beatriz García Fuentes and Shadi Rohana document a remarkable experiment in translation: a collective workshop held in Oaxaca in May 2025, in which members of the Triqui Collective and graduate students of Arabic translated a poem by the Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah into Triqui, an Indigenous language of Oaxaca, and a Triqui poem by Marcos Sandoval into Arabic, with Spanish serving as a bridge language between two peoples who have each experienced, in different ways, the violence of dispossession. If the Tricontinental Conference imagined solidarity primarily through relationships among states and liberation movements, these essays locate its contemporary possibilities elsewhere: in cultural centers, migrant communities, intellectual networks, and the patient, word-by-word work of translation.
Next Steps
Souffles was never a journal of the Maghreb alone. From its earliest issues, it understood North African letters as inseparable from a broader anti-colonial and Tricontinental conversation. Sixty years later, the essays gathered here do not so much revive that conversation as demonstrate that it never fully ended. It migrated into new institutions, disciplines, communities, and languages, while returning repeatedly to the same foundational intuition: that the struggles and intellectual traditions of the Maghreb and Latin America illuminate one another and, in important ways, depend upon one another. In December of this year, Souffles will publish a companion issue bringing together essays in Spanish, contributed largely by literary critics, and extending this dialogue into the language in which so much of this intellectual and cultural exchange has historically unfolded.
We are grateful to the Asociación de Amistad Marroquí Iberoamericana, to our Hispanist colleagues at Abdelmalek Essaâdi University, and to Souffles for convening the Tangier conference from which this issue grew. We are equally grateful to the contributors whose work, in its many forms and registers, has helped us return once more to one of Souffles’s oldest questions: What becomes possible when thinking the Maghreb and Latin America together?
The Editors
Souffles