Latin American History Commons^™

Todo Sobre América Latina, Kayla Madeline Schwartz

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to inform a Spanish-speaking audience about the humanities of Latin America. The format is a blog which solicits more engagement with the embedded research and written text. Colorful photos and informative videos attract the attention of a general public that may otherwise not be interested in learning extensively about history and culture. Such focus is important because Latin American past has great bearing on the lives of much of the Latinx community today—in many regions.

Specifically, this blog contains articles about history, literature, movies and shows, dance, and travelling. The audience can learn about a broad timeline …

Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …

Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao

Theses and Dissertations

Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.

U.S History: The Constant Reliance On Immigrant Labor From Asian Immigrants In The 19th And Early 20th Century To Mexican Immigrants In The Bracero Program, Moises Gonzalez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

During the late 19th and early 20th century, as the United States implemented stricter immigration laws, there was a gradual shift from Asian migrant labor to Mexican migrant Labor. The Bracero Program, which was established in 1942 at the request of U.S agribusinesses, best exemplified this development in the U.S. Throughout the duration of this guest work program, it demonstrated the discriminatory and exploitative nature of U.S agribusinesses. Yet, few studies have emphasized the thoughts of former braceros. Therefore, this proposed thesis will shed light on a more positive outlook of the Bracero Program where former braceros would persevere through …

Café Con Mucha Leche: The Pasts, Presents, And Futures Of Puertoricanness And Puerto Ricanhood, Anthony Rosado

Masters Theses

The central theme of this text is self-governed naming. I am implementing Black feminist storytelling procedures to write and paint without the “white,” the “male” or the “elitist gaze.” I’m writing an anti-colonial historical narrative about the making of the Puerto Rican people. I am providing to the field of American Studies an Afrocentric narrative–and series of paintings–through an interdisciplinary study of the presence of the African in the Americas. Although many colonial narratives center Spain in histories of Puerto Rico and of Puerto Ricans. I’m rewriting my Afro Puertorriqueño ancestors’ abolition story and collecting my family’s oral histories. I …

Beginnings Of The Nuevo South: Mexican Migration In 1970s And 1980s Mississippi, Isabel Loya

Master's Theses

Mexicans and Mexican Americans have been present in Mississippi since the early twentieth century with a large increase in the 1970s. The majority of the scholarship surrounding Mexican migration focuses on the 1990s leaving a historiographical gap concerning this earlier period of significant population growth. This thesis argues that Mexican migrants during the 1970s and 1980s were uniquely affected by Mississippi’s racial climate due to their ambiguous status in a Black and white society, where they fit in neither category. The examination of tactics by businesses, like B.C. Rogers Poultry plant, show the impact recruitment had on migrants’ living conditions …

(Re)Constructing National Memory In Neoliberal Chile Through Patricio Guzman's The Cordillera Of Dreams (2019), Mica Barrett

Scripps Senior Theses

One of the most renowned Chilean exile filmmakers is Patricio Guzmán. Best known for his documentary work regarding the Allende years, Guzmán has continued to make films regarding his homeland in the decades following his initial exile.

The Cordillera of Dreams is the concluding film in a trilogy exploring the natural lands of Chile and their relationship to physical remnants of the human past. The initial and most renowned film in the series, Nostalgia for the Light, centers the Atacama Desert and Chileans’ relationship to the geography as a gateway to revealing artifacts of Chile’s recent history of genocide …

La Cultura Que No Cambia, Karina Arreola-Gutierrez

MFA in Visual Art

In the text of La Cultura Que No Cambia, I mention how my work has been influenced by becoming more aware of generations of altar making that occur in my family. By collecting stories and photographs of altars, I can observe and create work based on how the legacies can change through generations or stay the same. The memory of my ancestors and family traditions is strengthened. Growing up seeing discrimination towards others has influenced me to highlight my Mexican heritage of traditions, culture, and language through several different methods. Using these elements, I can create work informing audiences about …

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

The Political Power Of Museums: A Case Study On The Museum Of Spanish Colonial Art, Emily Snyder

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

Museums hold an esteemed position that grants validity to the objects and history held within them based solely on their inherent authority as institutions. This makes the analysis of what museums portray incredibly important given the extent of people’s belief that they hold the power to determine authoritative truth concerning art, history, and society. In the late 1970s, museums underwent a period of change tied to becoming more pluralistic. Beginning in the 1990s, many museums touted their postcolonial status in the wake of their inclusion of and collaboration with traditionally outsider communities. Despite this change appearing to create more diverse …

Historical Underpinnings And Consequent Effects Of Labor Exploitation Of Mexican And Central Americans In The United States, Andrew Elkins

World Languages, Literatures and Cultures Undergraduate Honors Theses

The experience immigrants have today working and living in the southern United States is defined by systems that have developed out of lingering racist attitudes and reactions toward these individuals. The flow of people across the U.S.-Mexico border has a long history, and it is characterized by patterns that have continued from early guest worker programs to the present-day flow of migrants, both legal and undocumented. Also continually present is the racialization of these migrants, which has often forced them to work and live as marginalized members of American society. This project will explore the establishment of Mexican American citizen …

Contextualizing The 2019 “Chile Despertó” Movement: The Impact Of Historical Relational Processes On Mobilization And Repression, Tanya Leon

International Studies (MA) Theses

To expand our theoretical and empirical understanding of mobilization and repression in Latin America, this thesis asks three critical questions. Are economic indicators sufficient predictors of social movement emergence in Latin America? What other factors contribute to large-scale mobilization in Latin America? How do government’s respond to large-scale Latin American social movements? Specifically, when, and why do democratic governments choose to employ repression against social movements? Accordingly, I construct a quantitative model to test the correlation between rise in protest and worsened economic conditions. I apply it to a comprehensive dataset of political events in multiple South American countries throughout …

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

Colonial Markets, Consumers, And Trade: A Comparative Analysis Of Historic Ceramics From The Bluefields Bay Area, Westmoreland, Jamaica, Lacy Risner

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The ceramic assemblages from a British colonial settlement in Bluefields Bay, Jamaica, provide a unique window into the market availability, exchange routes, and consumption patterns of the eighteenth century. This study compares the historic ceramics collected from two sites in Bluefields Bay to one another and to other intra-island (Jamaica), intraregional (Lesser Antilles), and international (North America) colonial and postcolonial sites to reveal patterns of individual and global ceramic consumption and distribution in the emergent capitalist networks and markets of the colonial era. Integrating small British colonial sites into the networks of other more extensive studies focusing primarily on plantations …

The Immigrant Nannies Of New York City: An Examination Of The Friendships Between Nannies And Mother-Employers, Esmeralda Paula

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This ethnography focuses on the emotions of the women of color who elaborated on their experiences working for wealthy, white families in ethnographic interviews. This project is interested in the connections formed between nannies and mother-employers with the goal of better understanding the positionalities of female domestic workers of color. Immigrant populations are frequently depicted by news outlets as overworked, underpaid, and poor. When interacting with nannies, I realized that these women did not consider themselves impoverished despite working in a role that is identifiable with servanthood. The labor that nannies perform calls back to a long tradition of women …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

Pero...Maybe, Adrian Gonzalez

Graduate School of Art Theses

Through collage, assemblage, and object making, I fit unlikely fragments that I call manchitas—stains—together. In my paintings and mixed media assemblages I incorporate references to Spanglish as un acto of making. To me, it’s like the visual work that I make: thinking in one language and speaking another, words start with English but end in Spanish. They sound like English but are Spanish or vice versa. The words look misspelled but are used in everyday conversation. Spanglish is idiosyncratic and is what I build my practice on. I collect materials around me, some I find and some I make. …

Community And Idolatry: San Francisco Cajonos, Yalalag, And Betaza Through The Criminal Court Of Villa Alta, 1700-1704, Jessica Mitchell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The trials of San Francisco Cajonos and Betaza and Yalálag heard in Villa Alta’s criminal court depict many important facets of life in Colonial Oaxaca, and they especially paint the picture of community, how it was defined and how it operated in reality. Looking specifically at these two rich examples in Villa Alta’s criminal court, at the time, idolatry – native religion, rituals, and devotions defined by Catholics as idolatrous -- helped shape the lines of community and defined who belonged in which space. It also highlights how betrayal and revenge were construed by a community and the response for …

Us, Abundantly: From Africa To The Americas, Karisma Jay

Theses and Dissertations

"Us, AbunDantly," a Live theatrical dance performance and film, delves into the African Diaspora and its influences. An artistic and academic project built upon the amplification of Black excellence and Black pride, this paper contextualizes a work within the oral histories and contemporary dance studies of a powerfully ancestral community.

Bomba And The Evolution Of Puerto Rican Activism In New York, Katherine Smith

Capstones

While Bomba, a traditional dance style that originated in Puerto Rico, has recently become more visible to a mainstream national audience, local activists in New York City have been working for years to promote the art and elevate the history of their community. For dance leaders like Milteri Tucker, Bomba dancing is not only a celebration of Puerto Rico’s African heritage, but an effective way to address social issues within the city’s local and Latino community. She is one of many activists in the city’s history that has used art and community try to uplift the culture and work on …

La Conquista RetóRica: La AutolegitimacióN De HernáN CortéS Y Su JustificacióN Del Colonialismo EspañOl A TravéS De Las Cartas De RelacióN (1519 - 1526), Kent Shi

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Female Experience Of Trauma And Mourning In Two Postconflict Novels Of El Salvador And Peru: Roza, Tumba, Quema By Claudia Hernández, And La Sangre De La Aurora By Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro Salas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on how literature approaches the Salvadoran and Peruvian armed conflicts and contributes with perspectives of the female experience while offering illustrations of mourning processes. It is based on a close analysis of two postconflict novels that emerged after the publication of the corresponding truth commissions final reports. These novels are Roza, tumba, quema (2017) by Claudia Hernández from El Salvador, and La sangre de la aurora (2013) by Claudia Salazar from Peru. The contributions studied in this analysis focus on two areas: (1) a problematization of the female experience of the armed conflicts, and (2) a focus …

Becoming Legible: The Racial Making Of The Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole People In The Coahuila–Texas Borderland, Rocío Gil Martínez De Escobar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This historical ethnography analyzes the making of the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as part of the production of the Coahuila-Texas borderland. In the quest to become legible to improve their living conditions and maintain a sense of dignity, Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles use history and racialization as tools of negotiation between themselves and the two nation-states where they live: Mexico and the United States. I analyze the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as a case of racialization that illustrates the ongoing mechanisms of settler colonialism (dispossession, exploitation, and elimination via genocide or assimilation), as they play out in specific socio-historical contexts.

The …

Just A Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy And Racialized Performance In Black Vaudeville, The Chop Suey Circuit, And Las Carpas, Michael Shane Breaux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the practice of white musical variety clowns embodying stereotypes of African, Chinese, and Mexican Americans has been widely documented and theorized in scholarship on US American popular performance, it has been done largely in segregated studies that maintain the idea that racial impersonations in musical variety is a privilege of white performers. For instance, no study exists that focuses on more than one stereotype at a time, and the performer’s body is always either white or of the same “color” as the type being played. In addition, very little has been written about the tours and circuits run by …

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

Intimate Indigeneities: Aspirational Affective Solidarity In 21St Century Indigenous Mexican Representation, Jacob S. Neely

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation analyzes six contemporary texts (2008–18) that represent indigenous Mexicans to transnational audiences. Despite being disparate in authorship, genre, and mode of presentation, all address the failings of the Mexican state discourse of mestizaje that exalts indigenous antiquities while obfuscating the racialized socioeconomic hierarchies that marginalize contemporary indigenous peoples. Casting this conflict synecdochally as the national imposing itself on quotidian life, the texts help the reader/viewer come to understand it in personal, affective terms. The audience is encouraged to identify with how it feels to exist in a space where, paradoxically, the interruption of everyday life has become the …

Lords From The Desert, Caroline Mercado

Capstones

Lords from the Desert

This work explores a reality that is little talked about: how the most prestigious pre-Columbian art exhibits in the United States hide a murky origin. From looting of temples to illicit art trafficking, to smuggling and collectors’ affairs, the pieces gain value in proportion to the social prestige of their owner. Along the way, the most important is lost: research that provides context and allows us to know history. The First World wins a seductive, but simplistic story. The Third World, from which all these cultures emerge, loses patrimony and possibilities of understanding themselves. A pair …

Cartographies Of Power: Unequal Urban Development And The Racialization Of Space In São Paulo, Jessica Hyman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This work aims first and foremost to add to the literature on urban politics and race in Brazil. Where other scholars have not so explicitly addressed the ever present ideology of whiteness in regards to spatial organization and displacement in Brazil, this piece aims to do so. I build off of the work of past scholars in reinforcing that the belief in the racial democracy of Brazil is in fact a myth. I do so by illustrating the processes of the racialization of space that occur in São Paulo’s favelas and their development. The right to the city —a Brazilian …

Mapping The Nature Of Empire: The Legacy Of Theological Geography In The Early Iberian Atlantic, Ángel Jazak Gallardo

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

This investigation revolves around one central question: if Christianity became the official ideology for sixteenth-century imperial expansion, then how does a theological conception of nature undergird or undermine colonial configurations of knowledge and power? I argue that, in the wake of 1492, Iberian empires racialized religious identity and mapped hemispheric dominion by leveraging a theological geography, that is, a scholastic vision of the natural world.

In Chapter One, I examine the order of nature in late medieval cosmology. By analyzing Fra Mauro’s Mappamundi (c. 1450), I show the ways in which Aristotelian Thomism provides an intellectual framework for subsequent global …