The theme of violence is natural to the history of Latin America and, therefore, it is endless in any of its multiple material and symbolic manifestations, from its colonial origins to the present. At a continental level, the praxis and discourse of violence can be traced back to the spread of the colonising voracity that conditioned Latin America within the cultural development of the West, followed by the most recent and subtle forms assumed by state violence, including the instances of imposition of cultural and economic models that, at the different times, radically impacted the Creole and vernacular cultures. Thus, Latin America has historically suffered the consequences of a founding violence which condemned it to a peripheral position in relation to global systems which centres have spread in their corresponding areas of influence, the 'rationality' of their own cultural, political and economic replication. In this way, the social fabric resulting from the colonialist matrix has recorded from the beginning the indelible traces of violence that are displayed both at racial and economic levels, both in terms of gender policies and in terms of the geocultural distribution of power, at all levels. The 'painful Spanish-American republics' of which Martí spoke, have since fought against the normalisation of the violence of exclusion and authoritarianism, the internal misery and imperialistic greed, the cultural colonisation and political actions always condoned by a legitimising rhetoric that the ruling classes wielded in every instance to perpetuate their power. This volume, which compiles papers that were presented and discussed at the Second International Conference on Latin American Cultural Studies to be held at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2000, has as its main focus a specific articulation around the topic of contemporary violence: it analyses the intersections and specific ways in which violence presents itself in the urban centres of Latin America as its main scenario, and the modalities from which the phenomenon of violence is recorded and represented by the mass media, as well as popular culture, art, literature and other forms of literary discourse and 'high culture'.