Social History Commons^™

(Un)Making The Food Desert: Food, Race, And Redevelopment In Miami's Overtown Community, William Hall

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, efforts to transform food environments have played a key role in urban revitalization strategies. On one hand, concerns over urban food deserts have spurred efforts to attract supermarkets to places where access to healthy food is difficult for lower income residents. On the other, the creation of new spaces of consumption, such as trendy restaurants and food retail, has helped cities rebrand low-income communities as cultural destinations of leisure and tourism. In cities around the US, these processes often overlap, converting poorer neighborhoods into places more desirable for the middle-class. My dissertation research examines the social and …

The Sound Of Silence: Ideology Of National Identity And Racial Inequality In Contemporary Curaçao, Angela E. Roe

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses racism in contemporary Curaçao—a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean that remains a component of the Kingdom of The Netherlands. The dissertation theorizes racism as a partially hidden constituent of the island’s ideology of national identity, which throughout its history has emulated hybridity before being influenced, more recently, by multiculturalism. The research’s main objective is to uncover the ways race and racism have been entangled with Curaçao’s hegemonic ideology of national identity, a reality too often omitted and always under-theorized in Dutch and Dutch Caribbean scholarship.

Using historical, ethnographic, statistic, and discourse analysis data, the dissertation reveals …

Firm Foundation: Rebuilding The Early Modern State In Lima, Peru After The Earthquake Of 1687, Judith M. Mansilla

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One early October morning in 1687, the ground under the large Spanish colonial city of Lima, Peru rumbled. If longstanding historiographical portraits of Spanish government as inefficient and weak were true, the earthquake that was about to shatter Lima should have devastated it beyond repair. The study of the aftermath of this natural disaster reveals that behind the landscape of destruction, the pillars of the colonial state in Lima not only held up but also permitted its rapid recovery after the event. As part of a more recent historiographical trend that reappraises the Spanish decline during the seventeenth century, my …