Digital Commons Network^™

Our Day Has Finally Come: Domestic Worker Organizing In New York City, Harmony Goldberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tells the story of Domestic Workers United (DWU), an organization of Latina and Caribbean nannies, housecleaners and elder care providers based in New York City. I trace DWU's efforts from its campaign to win basic employment protections for domestic workers in New York State through its efforts to enforce those new rights and to raise working standards above the minimum.

The driving motivation behind this work is the search for new paradigms for worker organizing that respond to the political and economic challenges of our times. I argue that domestic workers and other low-wage workers of color are …

The Second Generation's Homeland Trips: A Parental Expectation For The U.S.-Born Children Of Mexican Immigrants In The South Bronx, Alexia Raynal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

New deportation policies in the United States are making it harder for undocumented immigrants to return home periodically (Dreby 2013a). This has a direct impact on their children. Because parents can't travel, thousands of foreign-born minors have recently been forced to travel alone in hopes of reunification. Their U.S.-born counterparts face a similar challenge: immigrants' lack of mobility places a new expectation on them to visit relatives that were left behind. Unlike their parents, these children can move freely across borders and maintain family ties. This project explores the second generation's homeland trips as experienced by a small group of …

Manuel De La Cruz Gonzalez: Transnationalism And The Development Of Modern Art In Costa Rica, Lauran Bonilla-Merchav

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While scholars are increasingly scrutinizing twentieth-century Latin American art and inserting it into the canon of modern art history, studies of the region usually leap from Mexico to South America, skipping Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. This is not due to a lack of dedicated artistic effort in the isthmus, but rather to poor cultural infrastructure, which made being a modern artist in the region particularly challenging, and the underdeveloped state of local art histories, which have yet to traverse national borders. This oversight of Central American art makes it difficult to grasp the full …

The Transnational Latin American Regionalism Of Mario Vargas Llosa And Milton Hatoum, Michele C. Kettner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present dissertation analyzes the novels The Green House (1966) and The Storyteller (1987), by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, and Two Brothers (2000), by Brazilian novelist Milton Hatoum and reinterpret literary regionalism in the Amazon region. I claim that the new variety of regionalist literature represented by both authors challenges hegemonic national representations of Peru and Brazil and conceptualizes Amazonian ecology in the context of global capitalism. In the first chapter, I evaluate the critical apparatus of the older tradition of Latin American regionalism proposing the concept of the "region" as an "invention" (Albuquerque Jr.). My reading reveals how …

Human Trafficking Across Borders And The Need For A Global Response, Ying Chieh Lee

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.