San Antonio College Library

South America is a territory of contrasts and excesses. It contains the world's longest mountain chain, the largest rainforest, the most powerful river, the driest desert and the largest biodiversity on the planet. This world travelled around the heart of the South Pacific for billions of years, before leaving Gondwana for good to join North America and build ... the Americas.

In 1989, the Brazilian Workers' Party altered the concept of local government when they installed participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, allowing residents to participate directly in the allocation of city funds. Ten years later, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was swept into power with the promise of granting direct participation to the Venezuelan people, who later formed tens of thousands of self-organized communal councils. In the Southern...

As Jonathan travels across Colombia and Venezuela, he discovers that they have strikingly divergent modern realities. Colombia, for so long synonymous with drug wars, is also a country of hope and resilience. Jonathan cycles with a visionary mayor around the streets of Bogotá, meets a reformed FARC fighter, goes to a coffee farm in the Andes, visits a cemetery in Medellín, and enjoys watching a group of breakdancing kids from the notorious hillside...

Colombia is the trade union murder capital of the world. Since 2002, more than 470 workers' leaders have been brutally killed there, usually by paramilitaries hired by private companies intent on crushing the unions. Among these unscrupulous corporate brands is the poster child for American business: Coca-Cola. These unpunished crimes spur American activists David Kovalik, Terry Collingsworth, and Ray Rogers into an ambitious crusade against the soft...

Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo is an Argentinian human rights group made up of grandmothers committed to finding their lost grandchildren, who they believe were stolen by the government during the country's military dictatorship. Between 1976 and 1983 as many as 30,000, dissidents-now known as "the disappeared"--Were kidnapped and presumed killed, with hundreds of new mothers among them. Through interviews with members of Las Abuelas, recovered grandchildren...

Construction of this Palatine chapel, with its octagonal basilica and cupola, began between 790 and 800 under the Emperor Charlemagne. Originally inspired by eastern churches of the Roman Empire, splendid facings were added in the Middle Ages.

Exuma is a documentary film that uses innovative cinematography above and below the surface to highlight the surreal beauty of the Exuma Cays, a string of small islands in the Bahamas. This film, the first to highlight the beauty of these remote "out islands," is a window into this surreal world of sand, sky and water through the eyes and thoughts of a young woman who lives there.

In the heart of the jungle, surrounded by lush vegetation, lies one of the major sites of Mayan civilization, inhabited from the 6th century B.C. to the 10th century A.D. Its ceremonial center contains superb temples and palaces plus ramps leading to public squares. Remains of dwellings are scattered throughout the surrounding countryside.

This Globe Trekker episode follows Neil Gibson's journey through geographically diverse Peru, stretching from the Amazon, across the Andes, and to the Pacific Coast. In capital city Lima, he meets an Irishman who runs a mission in the shanty town Villa El Salvador before traveling north to the Andean city of Huaraz, where he treks up to a glacier 16,000 feet above sea level. He visits the surfer destination beach at Huanchaco, takes a trip in a traditional...