Latin American Studies Commons^™

Our Claims Matter: Latin American Migrants’ Nonviolent And Everyday Resistance Across Transnational Spaces, Pryanka Penafiel-Cevallos

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how Latin American migrants engage in nonviolent resistance across transnational spaces in Ecuador, challenging dominant narratives that portray migrants primarily as passive actors or humanitarian subjects. Focusing mainly on Venezuelan, Colombian, and returned Ecuadorian migrants, the study places migrants’ political agency at the center of analysis. It asks how migrants resist, for what purposes, and under which conditions they mobilize nonviolent and everyday resistance practices to claim rights, dignity, and human security in a host country marked by both legal innovation and growing exclusion.

Drawing on civil resistance theory, everyday resistance approaches, and migration scholarship, the research …

Damming Sustainability: How Social And Environmental Networks Influence The Construction And Management Of Large Dams In The Amazon Basin, V. Miranda Chase

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

,p>Dams are powerful structures that engender a flood of controversies. These projects face great criticism from numerous groups, many of whom succeed in influencing such enterprises. This research is an in-depth study on dam-related social and environmental movements in the Amazon: how they are created and internally organized; how members share information and resources, how they identify alternatives; and how they design strategies and implement agendas. Social movements include, but are not limited to, domestic and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academic researchers, journalists, religious organizations, grassroots associations, and large private foundations. They create formal or informal coalitions and design …

La Tragedia Latinoamericana: Una Investigación Cualitativa Sobre Cómo La Cultura, Los Medios De Comunicación Y Los Roles De Género Conducen Al Feminicidio, Vanessa Gonzalez

Honors College Theses

Este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar cómo los valores culturales latinoamericanos y los medios de comunicación populares perpetúan estereotipos de género perjudiciales que posteriormente pueden contribuir a las crecientes tasas de feminicidio que se producen en toda la región. Aunque la violencia contra las mujeres es un problema global, el feminicidio en América Latina se caracteriza por factores culturales, sistémicos y políticos que no sólo permiten que prospere, sino que lo hacen único en un contexto global en relación con el debate sobre la violencia contra las mujeres. La adhesión a la cultura del honor, los estereotipos basados en el …

The Latin American Tragedy: A Qualitative Research Of How Culture, Media, And Gender Roles Lead To Femicide, Vanessa Gonzalez

Honors College Theses

This study aims to analyze how Latin American cultural values and popular media perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes that can subsequently contribute to the growing femicide rates happening across the region. Although violence against women is a global issue, Latin American femicide is characterized by cultural, systemic, and political factors that not only allow it to thrive but make it unique in a global context as it relates to the discussion around violence against women. Adherence to honor culture, gender-based stereotypes like that of machismo and marianismo, along with the overt sexualization of Latin women in popular media, create a domino …

Migration And Identity In Host-Communities: Global North And South Influence On Ecuadorian Identity, Jefferson F. Cruz Ruales

Graduate Masters Theses

In the South American region that encompasses Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, patterns of human mobility have been predominantly influenced by various forms of internal conflict and limited economic prospects. The relative political, social, and economic stability which Ecuador has experienced in the region since the beginning of the 21st century, however, has made it a desired destination for many of its neighbor’s displaced populations and opportunity seekers. Similar factors have also enticed certain populations proceeding from areas of higher global development to settle into the nation’s tranquil environment. These Ecuadorian circumstances allow two very distinct groups of individuals, who exist …

Hollywood Imagines Revolutionary Haiti: The Forgotten Film Lydia Bailey (1952), Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

This essay explores the history of Lydia Bailey, the only US studio-made film to depict the Haitian Revolutionary period. It asks why, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such an unlikely project might have seemed commercially promising enough to justify a significant production budget. The essay draws on private studio memos as well as public press discussions to shed light on the high stakes in debates over racial representation and colonialism/decolonization in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and to illuminate everyday assumptions of white supremacy as these shaped the making of the film and its promotion. Production files …

Effects Of Visual Impairment On The Preparation, Response, And Recovery From The 2017 Hurricane Season In Puerto Rico, Kevin D. Mccormack

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

The 2017 hurricane season in Puerto Rico brought rain and wind forces the likes of which had not been seen in 90 years on the island. Some say it will take at least ten years to recover from the damage caused to functional necessities such as roadways, assuming full recovery is possible. While the general populace in Puerto Rico struggled to recover, populations such as people with visual impairments experienced the struggle more acutely. Independent living, limited as it generally was before Hurricane Maria, was further compromised. There was a feeling of abandonment throughout the community of people with visual …

Neoliberalism Redux: The Global Health Policy Agenda And The Politics Of Cooptation In Latin America And Beyond, Anne E Birn, Laura Nervi, Carlos Eduardo Siqueira

Gastón Institute Publications

This article explores the neoliberal cooptation of social justice-oriented global health policies over the last three decades, from primary health care and ‘health for all’ to various contemporary so-called ‘health equity’ initiatives, such as Universal Health Coverage and ‘health convergence’. The authors illustrate and contextualize the different periods and approaches with examples from a range of Latin American countries, drawing on diverse political experiences and social struggles in the health arena. The analysis concludes with reflections about the region’s experiences of resisting and challenging the neoliberal health agenda, in spite of domestic and global environments that have constrained these efforts, …

Pa'lante! Toward The Presidency: Understanding Factors That Facilitate Latino Leadership In Higher Education, Gloria Lopez

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of my study was to explore the role of cultural values in the lived experiences of Latino college and university presidents at four-year higher education institutions and to determine how cultural values contributed to and reflected their professional strengths. Using the Community Cultural Wealth framework developed by Tara Yosso (2005) to capture the assets or forms of capital that people of color bring with them to all settings, this study utilized a strengths-based approach to examine the ways in which Latino higher education executives translated their cultural upbringing and values into skills and approaches that facilitated their ascension …

Las Abuelas E La Memoria, Doris Cristobal

Archives of an Activist: Celebrating the Donations of Rita Arditti to UMass Boston

Viví en Buenos Aires Argentina durante cuatro años y en mi estadía en ese país aprendí mucho acerca de los efectos que les había dejado la Dictadura militar de 1976. Conocí a hijos, familiares, madres y abuelas de los desaparecidos y de su trabajo importante luchando por la vigencia de los derechos humanos en la Argentina. Aprendí también, que existen fuertes lazos de solidaridad entre el pueblo argentino y los pueblos de Latinoamérica; por ejemplo que el pueblo argentino es muy agradecido con mi país porque durante la dictadura muchos exiliados encontraron protección del gobierno peruano, y que en la …

Remarks By Ann Blum About Rita Arditti, The Abuelas, And Latin American Studies, Ann Blum

Archives of an Activist: Celebrating the Donations of Rita Arditti to UMass Boston

From Ann Blum's remarks:

My own area of research is family history. Students and other scholars sometimes ask me why I study the family when there are other far more important, more politicaltopics. Rita’s activism and scholarship provide a ringing rejoinder. The family is political and it is key to our understanding of politics on intimate, national and global scales. Rita’swork with the Grandmothers centered on family. Her study embraced the complex interactions among three generations as family relations were projected onto national and international politics. The Argentine military regime was brutally astute: they made state terrorism a family affair. …

Social Equality And Environmental Education In Brazil, Sherrod Williams

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

Beacon Voyages for Service (BVS) is a program within the Office of Student Leadership and Community Engagement that coordinates Alternative Break programs. BVS Brazil traveled to Porto Alegre. This group of students partnered with “The Brazilian Association of Cultural Exchange (ABIC)” and the Center for Environmental Education to learn about the social problems that affect the citizens of Brazil and tackle issues of waste management. The students work alongside community members in a recycling unit and spend many hours working with local youth.

Honduras: Local, Regional And Global Partnerships To Improve Health In Olancho, Lisa Kennedy Sheldon, Hasan Bailey, Carlo Najera, Mary Roy

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The Honduran Mission Team-New Hampshire (HMT-NH) in partnership with the Olancho Aid Foundation (OAF), works in the Olancho department to improve the health and education of the Honduran people. The HMT-NH 2012 Healthcare Team included UMass Boston faculty and a nursing student working with American and Honduran doctors and nurses to provide culturally-appropriate healthcare and collect data about the needs of the Honduran people in Olancho.

Adult Children Of Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Memories And Influences, Nga-Wing Anjela Wong, Paul Watanabe, Michael Liu

Institute for Asian American Studies Publications

Probing the changing makeup of American college campuses, Adult Children of Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Memories and Influences offers unparalleled insight into the journeys of today’s graduate students born to immigrant entrepreneur parents.

Through interviews with 40 graduate students attending Massachusetts colleges from across the country, Adult Children of Immigrant Entrepreneurs unearths the unique challenges, skills and propensities engendered by growing up in a household where at least one parent ran a business. It also reveals that the students feel a deep-seated desire to give back to the immigrant communities into which they were born and which helped to mold their identities.

Immigration, Ethnicity, And Marginalization: The Maya K’Iche Of New Bedford, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, Gissell Abreu-Rodriguez

Trotter Review

On Tuesday, March 6, 2007, more than 300 armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested 361 presumed undocumented immigrant workers at the Michael Bianco Inc. factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts. More than half of the workers detained were from Guatemala, the majority belonging to the Maya K’iche (we will use K’iche) community, an ethnic group originally from the mountains of western Guatemala whose members began arriving in the New Bedford area from Providence, Rhode Island, where there is an older K’iche community, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the height of a violent confrontation in Guatemala between …

Madre Patria (Mother Country): Latino Identity And Rejections Of Blackness, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen

Trotter Review

When I was in third grade, in Puerto Rico, I wanted to be the Virgin Mary for the community Christmas celebration. A teacher promptly informed me that the mother of Christ could not be black. A girl with blonde hair and blue eyes was selected for the role, and I was given the role of a shepherd. In middle school, also in Puerto Rico, I played a house servant for a school play. Only children of black heritage played the slaves and servants. A white student with a painted face portrayed the only significant black character. All the other characters …

Venezuela In The Times Of Chavez: A Study On Media, Charisma, And Social Polarization, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Sociology Faculty Publication Series

My main objective in this study is to deepen the reader's understanding of Venezuela's ongoing socio-political conflict by focusing on the struggle for control over one of the key agents of mobilization and politicization in the country: the media outlets, and particularly television. My methodology strives to interweave the chronological record of events with analysis of the equally relevant theoretical, institutional, political, economic, and cultural components that helped to create those events. Central to my presentation is its analysis of the decline of Venezuela's two traditional parties and the emergence of a charismatic and populist form of leadership.

Mexico As Seen Through American Eyes: The Evolution Of U.S. News Media Coverage, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Sociology Faculty Publication Series

The traditional Mexican view of the U.S. news media's treatment of Mexico and Mexicans is that those media have been mired in prejudice, owing to what Octavia Paz has called "the twin sisters ignorance and arrogance." Mexicans of all social levels have held to this view for many decades, denouncing the obsession of American journalists with drug trafficking, illegal migration, and governmental corruption, and for forming or reinforcing in generations of Americans a vague, exotic, touristy, sometimes downright surreal vision of Mexico.

This view, however, began to shift very markedly during the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). Especially …

Holding To Basics And Investing For Growth: Cuban Education And The Economic Crisis Of The 1990’S, Miren Uriarte

Gastón Institute Publications

Since the middle of the 1980’s, processes of economic restructuring have led to large changes in the landscape of educational and social policy in most of Latin America. Faced with severe economic crisis, Latin American nations have sought structural transformations that have redefined the role of government in the provision of social benefits and sharply reduced expenditures through wholesale privatization and deep reductions in remaining government-sponsored programs. Between 1980 and 1990, expenditures in education as a percent of total government expenditures fell in most countries in Latin America, affecting especially public education, the only recourse for the poor. By 1996, …

Monitoring Elections In El Salvador And Nicaragua, Jack Spence

New England Journal of Public Policy

I observed the February 1990 elections in Nicaragua as a member of both the Latin American Studies Association observation team and that of Hemisphere Initiatives, a group with which I have worked. In El Salvador I headed the Hemisphere Initiatives team. I visited Nicaragua five times during the electoral period, and for El Salvador, for once my academic calendar coincided with Salvadoran history. A sabbatical in the last academic year allowed me to be there during the electoral period.

I should say by way of comparison with Fred Gamst's presentation about Ethiopia that Nicaragua and El Salvador are ethnically and …

Book Review Essay: Brazilian Race Relations In Hemispheric Perspective, Rhett S. Jones

Trotter Review

The late Oliver C. Cox, one of the most insightful black Americans from the leftist tradition, was not often fooled. In his classic 1948 work, Caste, Class, and Race, Cox, a long-time professor of sociology at Lincoln University in Missouri, revealed the nonsensical underpinnings of what then passed for the serious study of comparative race relations among sociologists in the United States. So successful was Cox that his book was thoroughly and deeply buried by the sociological establishment. When Pierre L. van den Berghe published Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective in 1967, sociologists hailed his work as the …

Book Review: The Poor And The Powerless: Economic Policy And Change In The Caribbean, By Clive Y. Thomas, Winston Langley

Trotter Review

With only brief interludes, the Caribbean area has for the past five centuries been a center of global power struggles and internal sociopolitical upheavals of the first order. Those struggles and upheavals show no signs of abating as we move into the twenty-first century. Indeed, there appears to be a consensus among scholars and political leaders in the region that the area now faces problems of crisis proportions.