Latin American Studies Commons^™

The “Politically Motivated” Defense: An Example From Paraguay, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes and analyzes the construct of a specific defense strategy employed by political leaders against allegations of wrongdoing.

The Pros And Cons Of Fearing Fear: Examples From Venezuela And New York State, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes consequences of fear for security-related public policy.

Longing For Running Water: Ecofeminism And Liberation, Ivone Gebara

Journal of Hispanic / Latino Theology

No abstract provided.

The Evangelical Movement In Ecuador, Steve Grosz

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Common Origins/"Different" Identities In Two Kaqchikel Maya Towns, Walter E. Little

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

Kaqchikel Maya residents of San Antonio Aguas Calientes and Santa Catarina Barahona (neighboring towns in Guatemala) tell the same origin story. This story is used to root historically their concepts of collective identity and community. However, residents in each town hold that those in the other town have no real claim to the story. Both towns can equally claim this origin story, but the debate between residents of these towns offers an opportunity to discuss how the meaning of place is related to the historical and ethnographic contexts of which that place's residents are part. By weighing the story and …

Performing Tourism: Maya Women's Strategies, Walter E. Little

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

Walter Little is assistant professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Albany and codirector of Oxlajuj Aj, Tulane University’s Kaqchikel Language and Culture class in Guatemala. He has conducted fieldwork among Maya handicrafts producers and vendors since 1992 on issues related to tourism, gender roles, and identity performance, and this research is the subject of his book, Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity (Austin: University of Texas, 2004).

In Defense Of Social Justice: From Global Transformation To Local Resistance, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

The global transformations that enveloped Latin America over the past decade resulted in uneven consequences for diverse social groups. Scholars witness an increasing tension between a macroeconomic agenda concerned with profitability and local community access to employment and sustenance. As neoliberal reforms intensify Latin America's integration into the world economy, they may adversely impact local communities. Should local people lose their ability to obtain basic rights, will they be able to effectively challenge the neoliberal model? In the absence of more adequate attention to social justice, it is probable that occurrences of local resistance in defense of these rights will …

Entre La Cotidianeidad, El Pacer Y La Fuga: Fragmentos Narrativos De Una Transición, Alvaro Kaempfer

Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Faculty Publications

Tanto la reflexión cultural bajo la dictadura como aquella surgida durante el proceso de transición han nutrido una literatura que indaga los límites del lenguaje en relación con las diversas experiencias vividas bajo los regímenes dictatoriales del cono sur. La producción literaria de Andrea Maturana (Chile, 1969) no es ajena a dichos fenómenos. Desde sus primeros cuentos, esta escritora dio cuenta de escenarios vitalmente atomizados donde los demás eran, precisamente, los bordes tangibles y cotidianos de experiencias sociales tan traumáticas como insolubles. Esa atomización vital no sólo se deja leer como una respuesta a un medio agresivo sino, además, como …

The Evolution Of Human Life Expectancy And Intelligence In Hunter-Gatherer Economies, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

The economics of hunting and gathering must have driven the biological evolution of human characteristics, since hunter-gatherer societies prevailed for the two million years of human history. These societies feature huge intergenerational resource flows, suggesting that these resource flows should replace fertility as the key demographic consideration. It is then theoretically expected that life expectancy and brain size would increase simultaneously, as apparently occurred during our evolutionary history. The brain here is considered as a direct form of bodily investment, but also crucially as facilitating further indirect investment by means of learning-by-doing.

Antonio Jose De Sucre (1745-1830), Janet Butler Munch

Publications and Research

Antonio Jose de Sucre was a military leader and statesman in the 19th century Spanish American independence movement against Spain.

Hispanic Citizenship, Registration, And Voting Patterns In Comparative Perspective During The 2000 Presidential Elections, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This study examines citizenship, registration, and voting patterns of Latinos during the 2000 presidential elections.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: The participation rates among potential Hispanic voters who were citizens of the U.S. 18 years of age and older were the lowest of any of the major racial/ethnic groups in the nation during the 2000 presidential elections as well as …

Truth And ‘Truth’: The Social Construction Of Truth And Memory In International Human Rights, Rachel A. May

Latin America and the Caribbean Studies Faculty Publications

Transitional justice is a rich area of inquiry. The literature and the academic discourse surrounding the phenomenon of transitional justice are at the forefront of human rights scholarship. Much of this discourse focuses on questions of the functional choices: restorative or retributive justice. A “restorative” approach to justice focuses on the idea of reconciliation while the “retributive” approach focuses on the punishment of perpetrators. The idea of truth telling, which encompasses truth commissions and historical memory, is most closely connected to a restorative approach to justice, although seeking the truth is also an implicit and explicit goal of criminal courts …

Comparative Income Distribution Patterns Among Hispanic Households In New York City, Census 2000, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This study examines demographic and socioeconomic aspects of the Latino population of the New York City area in the year 2000.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: Household income distribution data found in the 2000 U.S. census revealed a pattern of stark differentiation in New York City among the three principal racial/ethnic groups: Whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics or Latinos. Additionally, within …

Defining Microcredit Success In Bolivia, Kelly Miller

Honors Theses

The structure of this study is as follows: The first chapter describes the origin of microcredit and the three major lending models. This chapter also includes a description of the motivation of the study as well as the methodology used. The second chapter illustrates the changes of development strategies in Bolivia and identifies the motivation behind and significance of each development method. The third chapter discusses the informal sector, which is the targeted population of microcredit. This chapter presents several theories about the development of the informal sector and illustrates how politics shape the informal sector in Bolivia. The fourth …

Secolas At 50: Imagining The Future, Anne Fountain

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

On March 7, 2003, Anne Fountain and William Harris presented papers at the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Council On Latin American Studies dealing with the history and future of SECOLAS. SELA is pleased to publish both papers.

Puerto Rico: State Formation In A Colonial Context, Pedro Caban

Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Faculty Scholarship

This article examines U.S. Puerto Rico relations during the American century through the prism of the colonial state and identifies eight periods of fundamental political and economic change that altered the conduct of U.S. colonial practice in Puerto Rico. These periods witnessed the emergence, ascendancy and decline of local political coalitions that competed for control of the control state. The coalitions articulated distinct economic projects and pursued different strategies to resolve Puerto Rico's status as an unincorporated territorial possession. Each period was also marked by insular economic restructuring precipitated by shifts in U.S. fiscal policies and changes in the economy, …

Trends. Confessions On Confessions In A War On Terrorism With Global Reach, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This Trends article discusses the role of confessions in terrorism interrogations.

Dancing For Land: Law-Making And Cultural Performance In Northeastern Brazil, Jan Hoffman French

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

In Mocambo, cultural practices and performances are being reconfigured and retained in new forms and surrounded by new discourses, revealing modes of local self-fashioning and political action. However, our inquiry should not end there. Thomas Abercrombie (1991:99) argues that whatever meanings might adhere to a certain "traditional" cultural form "are today produced and interpreted, within the (semi-open) semiotic systems produced at locally or situationally specific intercultural loci..., which intersect with national and international systems as significantly as with neighboring town groups." In this essay, I suggest that the demands, interests, and desires of the larger society, as manifested in laws, …

Political Psychology In The Contemporary Political World, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This edition of IBPP explores several recent political events from the vantage point of political psychological perspectives and constructs.

Bombs, Ballots, And Nationalism: Vieques And The Politics Of Colonialism, Pedro Caban

Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Assessing The Third Transition In Latin American Democratization: Representational Regimes And Civil Society In Argentina And Brazil, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Kathryn Hochstetler

Politics

Recent political and economic transitions in Latin America have shaped a third transition in the nature of civil society and democratic representation. The conceptual territory of democratic representational regimes can be mapped out in four theoretical patterns of state-society relations: adversarial, delegative, deliberative, and cooptive. A comparison of representational regimes in state-society relations in Argentina and Brazil shows a shift in civil society towards organization in nongovernmental organizations, in addition to social movements. Despite this common characteristic, the different emerging representational regimes in these two countries carry different implications for the quality of democracy.

Osmotic Borders: Thinking Locally, Thinking Globally About The Causes And Effects Of Labor Migration, Roberto L. Corrada

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus defines osmosis both as "any process by which something is acquired by absorption," and as a biological cellular function by which solvents are absorbed through semipermeable partitions. The two articles by Professor Sylvia Lazos and Donna Maeda, which both deal with the causes and effects of labor migration, though on different levels and involving different populations, challenge traditional notions of the physical and metaphysical borders between nation-states.

In "Latina/o-ization" of the Midwest: Cambio de Colores, Professor Sylvia Lazos takes a close look at the increasing migration and presence of Latinas/os in the Midwest, particularly Kansas, …

Analyzing The Success Of The Usaid-Funded Empleando Futuros And Crime And Violence Prevention Projects In Reducing Emigration From The Northern Triangle To The United States, Sofia M. Munoz

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper explores the role of USAID-funded projects focused on the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle as a U.S. immigration prevention strategy. Through analyzing the Empleando Futuros activity in Honduras and the Crime and Violence Prevention Project in El Salvador, I found that the projects followed an overly simplistic approach to migration based off of neoclassical economic theories of migration. When compared to alternate migration theories and empirical evidence from the region, I found that the individualistic and employment-based approaches utilized by these projects do not have the desired effect of majorly decreasing someone’s propensity to migrate …

The City Encomium In Medieval And Humanist Spain, Jeffrey Stephen Ruth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation narrates the history of city encomia in Spain from the genre's roots in the eighth-century De laude Spanie of Isidore through the humanist laudes urbium of ca. 1455 to 1506. Preliminary context for the Spanish tradition is provided in a survey of classical and medieval theoretical writings for the praise of place. The major European city encomia from those periods are also presented.

Ancient authors tended to write about Iberia as a unit—Hispania—rather than to focus on its regions or cities. Hence the establishment of the early laus Hispaniae tradition in passages of Pliny, Solinus, Claudian, and Pacatus. …

Subjects And Immigrants During The Progressive Era, Pedro Caban

Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Darkness In Anthropology, Peter Van Arsdale

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An essay covering Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon by Patrick Tierney. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. 417 pp. and related documents.

The Status Of Brazilian Legal Education, Nadia De Araujo

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Trends. Colombian Rebels And Elite Interests: Rights And Wrongs On Human Rights, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article discusses and analyzes the reactions of elites to rebel actions (e.g., human rights violations, other violent actions) in Colombia.

Facilitating Communications And Murder: Operation Condor And United States Complicity, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article explores levels of United States Government (USG) complicity during the late 1970s in the murder of individuals alleged to have been left-wing opponents of South American, right-wing, authoritarian governments.

Sovereign Limits And Regional Opportunities For Global Civil Society In Latin America, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Kathryn Hochstetler, Ann Marie Clark

Politics

In this article, we evaluate whether Latin American participation in international arenas reinforces traditional divides between state and society in global politics or transforms state-society relations in ways compatible with the concept of global civil society. We examine the participation and interaction of Latin American nongovernmental organizations and states at three recent United Nations conferences: the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women. We conclude that Latin Americans are full participants in any emerging global civil society. Their experiences at the 1990s issue conferences closely …