LatimLove: A New Barrio in Print
The transborder magazine that turns language into a commons.
Some magazines don’t just document culture — they become it. LatimLove is one of those rare creations: a bilingual, beautifully argued publication that reads like a community forming in real time.
From its first page, it sets the tone. Every typeface comes from Latin American designers; every text flows freely between Portuguese, Spanish, and Portunhol. The result feels borderless — not a hybrid for the sake of style, but a lived statement that language itself can be an act of resistance.
Led by Editor-in-Chief Rafaela Cardeal, Director Bruna Castro, the team navigates a space between research and intuition, turning design into a political gesture and writing into an emotional cartography. Together they build a publication that’s as rigorous as it is intimate.
Between Philosophy and Layout
LatimLove deliberately blurs the boundary between an academic journal and a design magazine. Typography becomes politics; image-making becomes inquiry. The editors’ letter describes the mission as “stitching together and kissing the open veins of Latin America into a printed platform.” The metaphor captures what the magazine achieves — not nostalgia, but connection: a network of contemporary thought woven through shared histories.
That current runs through the first issue. It moves from reflections on Portunhol as a living border language to the rediscovery of Potygüés, the nearly forgotten mix of Portuguese and Tupi. It journeys through São Paulo’s Kantuta Market and La Paz’s Witches’ Market, collecting fragments of everyday life where migration, trade, and ritual intertwine.
At its emotional center stands Cristina (1987) — a photograph by Afonso Pimenta of a teenage girl from Belo Horizonte’s Aglomerado da Serra favela. Sixteen when pictured, she would die before seventeen from complications of an illegal abortion. The portrait is quiet but devastating, a reminder that systemic violence lives inside ordinary lives — and that print, unlike the feed, can hold silence without erasing it.
Elsewhere, LatimLove moves between poem and polemic. A Corn’s Letter for Humanity reads like an ecological prayer, while Luz del Fuego Is Very Much Alive resurrects the Brazilian performer murdered for her freedom. Essays on monogamy and monoculture mirror each other, connecting ecology to intimacy. Through it all, the pulse of Afrofuturism and Indigenous knowledge beats steadily — not as mythology, but as contemporary science of survival.
More Than a Magazine
LatimLove isn’t interested in neutrality. It’s political, sensual, and proudly Latin. The editors wanted to blur what counts as academic or artistic, to talk about borders in the broadest sense — linguistic, aesthetic, and emotional.
The result is a printed barrio: a shared home where typography becomes activism and storytelling becomes belonging.
In an age of frictionless content and algorithmic fatigue, LatimLove insists on slowness. It’s tactile, deliberate, and defiantly multilingual — a reminder that print can still be radical precisely because it takes time. Reading it feels like being invited into a room where people speak in several languages but share the same silence.
More than an issue, LatimLove is a beginning. A reminder that Latin America is not a geography but a verb — something made and remade each time we speak, translate, and listen.
Order your issue at latimlove.com or come by Escritório 1A and pick up a copy.
