Purpose. The authors aim to examine the mean and volatility linkages between the gold market and the Latin American equity markets in the entire sample period and two crises periods, namely the US financial crisis and the Chinese crash. Design/methodology/approach. To examine the return and volatility spillovers, the authors employ VAR-BEKK-GARCH model on the daily data of four emerging Latin American equity markets which include Peru, Chile, Brazil and Mexico, which ranges from January 2000 to June 2018. Findings. The results show that the return transmissions vary across the stock markets and the crises periods. The volatility transmission is found to be bidirectional between the gold and stock markets of Brazil and Chile during the US financial crisis. Furthermore, the volatility spillover is unidirectional from Brazil to gold and from gold to Peru stock market during the Chinese cras...