Real-life costumed avengers patrol the streets in Mexico, Honduras, Chile and Colombia.  Vinodh Venkatesh tells us the story of Latin America’s real-life superheroes.

In the United States today, if you want to find a masked hero opposing injustice, you’ll have to go to the movie theater to catch one of the latest epics from Marvel or DC studios.  You’d probably have to go back to the days of Bass Reeves, the real-life African-American U.S. Marshall who inspired the fictional Lone Ranger, to find well known, nonfictional masked crimefighters.  In Latin America, however, self-proclaimed, real-life superheroes are everywhere.  Vinodh Venkatesh is a Professor of Spanish at Virginia Tech University and he has studied the real-life costumed avengers that have become a part of everyday life in Latin America.

Photo of Superbarrio:

The Influencers festival, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons