At a moment when many of us are facing the specter of what National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman has called our shared “inhumanity,” it seems appropriate to reflect on our roles as scholar-educators.1 All too often the teaching leg of the academic three-legged stool becomes truncated, unbalancing the equilibrium that academic scholars work so hard to maintain. Institutional pressures to publish, obtain grant funding, and collaborate with international partners on expansive research projects are fueled by the academy’s patriarchal foundation. To focus on teaching or service is all too often met with institutional disdain at best and the denial of professional advancement at worst. However, it is the true integration of research, teaching, and service that can form the bedrock of what the twentieth-century Brazilian educational theorist Paolo Freire called a “pedagogy of love.”2 Freire’s commitment to harnessing the potential of education empowers teachers to focus on their most vulnerable, systemically oppressed students by leading with love. In this issue, Charlene Villaseñor Black and I reflect on what it means to teach from a place of love and at the same time to teach toward a place of love. It is our hope that Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture can continue to serve as a valuable tool for educators as they foster the growth of what Freire termed “critical consciousness” among their students and colleagues. This work not only maintains balance within academic systems; it can serve as a hopeful springboard into a future where dehumanization has been replaced by love.The essays presented in this issue of LALVC invite readers to nurture their “critical consciousness” with a healthy dose of intellectual curiosity. The issue begins with Miguel A. Gaete’s work on nineteenth-century depictions of South American landscapes as visions of earthly paradise that were shaped by the colonial gaze more than the scientific lens that is usually assumed to be prevalent in the wake of Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in the region. Using firsthand travel accounts, paintings, and drawings, Gaete contrasts how the traveling German Romantic painters Johann Moritz Rugendas, Otto Grashof, and Carl Alexander Simon represented Brazilian and Chilean landscapes during 1822–57, with the former taking shape as lush pristine wilderness and the latter emphasizing visual parallels to European landscapes with colonialist undertones. He concludes that German Romantic landscape paintings depicting Chile and Brazil projected biblical ideas of paradise onto these South American landscapes while at the same time infusing the final works with what he observes to be “colonial ambitions and racial prejudices.”From landscape to soundscape, the next article in this issue focuses on the 2014 Mexican feature film Güeros, which was written and directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios. Camila Torres-Castro focuses on this film as an expression of how artistic experimentation with the relationship between the visual and the aural can shape our collective sociopolitical experience. Set against the backdrop of the 1999 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) student strike, Güeros demonstrates how the soundscape of Mexico City is an integral actor in how Mexican youth confront their vision of the past while grappling with the most pressing contemporary challenges, such as political uprising, educational inequality, and racism. Torres-Castro’s analysis suggests that Ruizpalacios combines a particular image aesthetic with “musically framed silence” to create secure places of intimacy and quiet domesticity that open up spaces for resistance to neoliberal political attempts to shape public and private life in Mexico.The theme of resistance through visual expression is one that carries through many of the contributions in this issue of LALVC. Agustin Díez Fischer explores the work of the Argentine activist-artist León Ferrari during the 1960s and subsequent decades. Ferrari created multimedia works, including collage and literary expression, that directly confronted the violence of Judeo-Christian culture he observed during the Vietnam War. His cultural confrontation with biblical and apocalyptic themes, according to Díez Fischer’s interpretation, positioned the Vietnam War as the epitome of ecological exploitation intertwined with political violence.Maurice Rafael Magaña also situates visual culture in the realm of sociopolitical resistance. Magaña’s essay focuses on the pioneering Oaxacan graffiti and street art crew Arte Jaguar as both an artistic collective and a grassroots movement that gained prevalence in the first decade of the 2000s. Founded in 2006, Arte Jaguar opened a creative gathering space in 2009 in the Mexican tourist hub of Oaxaca, while transforming other urban environments into spaces of celebration and political action. Magaña’s research demonstrates how Arte Jaguar has harnessed the power of what he terms a “rebel aesthetics” in the creation of artistic interventions and collective political movements, using diverse media from graffiti and wheat paste to stencils and elaborate murals. By engaging with the politics of heritage tourism and militarization, the cultural production of the Arte Jaguar collective offers a valuable contrast to state efforts to shape Oaxacan and Mexican heritage and public spaces.Magaña’s exploration of a Oaxacan aesthetics of resistance is an apt segue to the Dialogues in this issue, guest-edited by Lorna Dillon, a fellow at the University of Cambridge. In “Repairing the Fabric of Society through Needlework,” Dillon convenes a group of scholars who are positioning surface-stitched textile art at the center of Latin American social justice studies as a medium suited to collective activism, community building, post-conflict reconciliation, and craftivism. Textile artists and artist collectives have deployed needlework as a performative platform for tackling humanitarian crises, conflicts, and rights abuses. These grassroots sewing collectives, known by the Indigenous designation Abya Yala, are the focus of scholarly debate here for the first time. Monica Salazar, Beatriz Elena Arias López, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Berena Torres Marín, Danielle House, Mathilda Shepard, and Dillon herself demonstrate how scholars can begin to interpret needlecraft as a powerful performative medium that expresses the transformation and repair demanded by social justice movements. Examples drawn from Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, as well as the USA/Mexico border region, vividly illustrate the ability this powerful visual medium has to affect social change as a form of protest and activism, as a way to heed Gorman’s exhortation and uplift our common humanity in the twenty-first century.