Are digital practices and the scientific production about them actually challenging the historic insularity of Latin America?" we wondered, sitting in a garden on a warm Sunday afternoon in Lisbon. That question resonated even louder with our already latent will to dedicate a full issue of Diffractions to that part of the globe, often considered in regard to peripheral expressions or manifestations from the Global South. One particular concept within Culture Studies suddenly caught our interest

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... as it carried the potential to serve as thematic criterion to our still embryonic dossier: identitybut in digital times. The notion of identity in the young democracies of Latin America has been up for fruitful debates and agendas in and out of academia, much as it has become the main subject in the arts, mass communication, and popular culture. Those formerly colonized territories have always had to negotiate their cartographies, singularities, and the very idea of Latin America itself (Mignolo 2009) mostly with Europe and the United States, thereby facing the challenges proper to a certain cultural periphery (Richard 1992). Particularly after the 1980s, they likewise gave way to modes of consumption and urbanization that blend in what Argentine cultural and literary critic Beatriz Sarlo aptly describes as "abundance and poverty" (1994, 11). The 2020s, however, claim even more dramatically the