Browsing by Subject "Latin America"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 138

Adaptation to Climate Change: A Prospective Collaboration in Flood Control
(Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, 2011) Sounny-Slitine, M. Anwar; Alexander, Jennifer; Twomey, Kelly; O'Rourke, Julia; Ward, Paul; Hershaw, Eva; Moorhead, Scott
Ambition vs. Success in Latin America's Left
(2007) Weyland, Kurt
An analysis of Latin America’s electricity market restructuring efforts : the role of energy regulators, performance, and competition
(2009-12) Baca Bañuelos, Miguel Alejandro; Spence, David B.; Foss, Michelle
This thesis reviews restructuring efforts of the electricity market in Latin America. The work first examines the drivers that have encouraged Latin American countries to restructure their power markets, going from government-held monopolies to fully privatized systems. Then a general conceptual theory is presented to describe the main differences between restructuring and privatization, and antitrust theory. Next, five countries are selected due to their leadership role in electric reforms in the region as well as their economic weight. Then a complete description of their power generation and electricity consumption is described as well as their experiences undergone before and after electricity restructuring. A summary section is presented by benchmarking the five countries and identifying the common issues faced that will help others plan better electric systems. Then, an analysis of their internal market competition is presented, analyzing the impact of electricity costs and rates. Finally, the last portion of this thesis concludes by exploring future trends in market integration programs as well as the challenges for sustainable economic growth, environmental impacts, and cooperation.
Aqui hay mucha demanda : a case study of renting in Lima's Northern Cone
(2013-12) Rojas, Danielle M; Ward, Peter M., 1951-
This thesis contributes to the growing literature on low-income renting and affordable housing in Latin America. Through a case study of Independencia – a consolidated community in Lima’s northern cone – I examine the socio-economic foundations and potential implications of self-help renting in lives of participants. Low-income renting has a long history in Lima, but has largely operated outside of State intervention. While these policy decisions were the result of contextually specific political and economic pressures, they seem also to be a symptom of the changes in influential social and economic theories informing academic thinking on the region and their contributions to bias in the housing policies of many Latin American countries. In addition to several policy considerations based on research in Lima, some general considerations for future renting research are offered.
Asia in Latin America: Across Four Continents
(2007-10-19) Center for Asian American Studies
Beyond precautionary measures : the commitment and practice of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights to implement a gender and multicultural perspective
(2019-12-06) Clark, Andrea Christina; Smith, Christen A., 1977-
New iterations of violence have emerged in Latin America as democratic governments replaced old dictatorships. However, human rights abuses have continued as new models of neoliberalism and globalization reinforce old structures of gender, race and ethnicity. The human rights systems, besides its cosmetic procedural changes and new programs, seem to be navigating cautiously and slowly these new iterations and evolving economic models while attempting to monitor and defend human rights. This thesis engages in a reflection on how human rights mechanisms, in general, and precautionary measures in the Inter-American Commission, in particular, are protecting people and communities in vulnerable situations today. Gender-mainstreaming has led to a slow, but visible rise in practices around gender sensitivity in the Inter-American System. As a result of multiculturalism in the human rights regimes, the System has celebrated the rise of collective and cultural rights, but the logic of multicultural neoliberalism has presented challenges to communities accessing the System. Where the literature has fallen short and this thesis makes a contribution is that there must be an intersectional analysis of these two trends—gender mainstreaming and multiculturalism—in order to understand many of the opportunities and challenges confronting the System. The gender violence that results from or exists in the context of multicultural neoliberalism is often silenced but becomes visible in this thesis through a survey of different cases of precautionary measures. Femicides, disappearances, and the assassination of human rights defenders are all on the rise. And these iterations of violence threaten in particular ways the lives of women and indigenous and afro-descendant women. In general, the study aims to expand on the literature of human rights, engage in a reflection of human rights mechanisms, and identify the opportunities and limitations of international human rights systems in achieving gender, multicultural and racial justice as part of transformative, counter-hegemonic projects during a time of neoliberalism.
Built upon the Tower of Babel : language policy and the clergy in Bourbon Mexico
(2016-05) Zakaib, Susan Blue; Deans-Smith, Susan, 1953-; Twinam, Ann; Butler, Matthew; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; McDonough, Kelly
This dissertation provides the first in-depth analysis of the “Bourbon language reforms”—a series of royal and ecclesiastical policies aimed at spreading the Spanish language in New Spain (now Mexico), enacted primarily between the 1750s and 1770s under the rule of the Bourbon dynasty. The limited scholarship on these reforms has assumed that a monolithic Bourbon state sought to mold a monolingual, Spanish-speaking empire. It has also suggested that creoles (American-born Spaniards), mendicants (Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars), indigenous peoples, or some combination thereof responded by uniformly opposing the Bourbon state’s oppressive measures. I challenge both of these arguments by analyzing the central Mexican Catholic Church’s “language regime”—not only official policies, but also their historical context, and predominant ideologies about indigenous languages and their speakers—between 1700 and 1821. I demonstrate that indigenous languages were deeply integrated into the inner workings of the Church—not only its religious services, but also its bureaucracy and hierarchy. Native language competency helped to determine clerics’ career paths, forge socioeconomic hierarchies within the Church, and shape political disputes between warring royal and ecclesiastical factions. This key role of native languages in the Church helped induce the Bourbon language reforms. In spite of the reform effort, however, native languages continued to play a critical role in ecclesiastical administration through the end of the colonial period. This was due in large part to the fact that the Bourbon state did not seek uniformly to eradicate these languages; indeed, royal and ecclesiastical authorities could not even agree on precisely what their language policy should entail. Few priests (creole or not) felt the need to resist a reform effort that was contradictory, piecemeal, and of limited consequence for the Church. Contrary to many scholars’ assumptions, these findings indicate that modern Mexico’s linguistic inequality is not a persistent vestige of colonial policy. Instead, 18th-century language policy was only an early step in a centuries-long process leading to today’s particular brand of linguistic discrimination.
Bureaucratic Activism and Colombian Community Mothers: The Daily Construction of the Rule of Law
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2014) Buchely, Lina
Whereas mainstream literature affirms that the rule of law is an abstract concept that comes from democracy and liberal institutional systems, people in the local Global South do not experience this certainty. In some ways, the rule of law is a product of the daily life transactions and bargains of social actors. This article analyzes the case of community mothers as street-level bureaucrats who produce the rule of law in their local spaces, within an institutional or democratic mechanism. This case study of community mothers, developed between June 2012 and February 2013, shows how street-level bureaucrats use the rule of law as a tool of empowerment. Community mothers display an undocumented agency that develops a feminist agenda of helping fellow women, contrary to the government agenda that promotes childcare and the early childhood program policies. In this sense, the fieldwork undertaken portrays mothers and children as conflicting actors. Despite this, the social policy hides this conflict reproducing the normative image that ideologically links mothers with their children. The results of this research project reveal, therefore, that the local agents as the street level bureaucrats play an unexpected role in the power dynamics inherent to the rule of law.
Business and Industry Directories: Latin America
(Benson Latin American Collection, 1999-05) Schroer, Craig
Business and industrial directories published in the Latin American countries provide hard-to-find data about companies: addresses, telephone numbers, officers, branch offices, and products. A selection of recent directories available at the Benson Latin American Collection is listed below. Unless otherwise indicated, they are located in the Benson Collection stacks. The most recent editions available at the time that this bibliography was compiled were cited. However, new editions arrive frequently and may be available.
Caminos de la Villa : a case study in civic advocacy through crowdmapping
(2018-05-01) Radtke, Alexandra Rose; Sletto, Bjørn
The availability and ease with which digital platforms and maps can now be made offers a unique tool for informal communities. Many informal communities have never been “officially” put on the map. Now they can do so through the use of new digital mapmaking and crowdmapping tools. By controlling these maps, they control the narrative of these maps, creating a new tool for communicating with official authorities and people outside the community. This report reviews the directions this trend has taken in the context of Latin America and summarizes some of the key factors that have helped such projects succeed or limited their success. While the focus is on digital crowdmapping platforms that address infrastructure problems, the analysis can potentially serve to inform additional applications of this tool. The majority of analysis centers on the Caminos de la Villa project in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where six different stakeholders in the project were interviewed.
Campaign clientelism in Peru : an informational theory
(2013-05) Munoz Chirinos, Paula; Madrid, Raúl L.; Weyland, Kurt Gerhard; Madrid, Raúl L.; Weyland, Kurt Gerhard
While clientelism has been intensively studied in comparative politics from very different theoretical perspectives and angles, scholars typically emphasize the importance of organized networks and long-term relations for sustaining electoral clientelism. However, electoral clientelism continues to be widespread in many countries despite the absence of organized parties or electoral machines. In order to account for this puzzle, I propose an informational approach that stresses the indirect effects that investments in electoral clientelism have on vote intentions. By distributing minor consumer goods, politicians buy the participation of poor voters at rallies and different sorts of campaign events. I argue that this particular subtype of electoral clientelism -- "campaign clientelism" -- helps politicians improvise political organizations, influence indifferent clients, and signal their electoral viability to strategic actors. Thus, by influencing competition and the dynamics of the race, campaign clientelism shapes vote choices and electoral outcomes. Campaign clientelism affects vote choices through two causal mechanisms. First, this subtype of electoral clientelism can help establish candidates' electoral viability, especially where alternative signals provided by well-organized parties are weak. By turning out large numbers of people at rallies, candidates establish and demonstrate their electoral prospects to the media, donors, rent-seeking activists, and voters. In this way, politicians induce more and more voters to support them strategically. Second, campaign clientelism can convince unattached rally participants of the candidates' electoral desirability. While providing different sorts of information at campaign events, politicians help campaign clients make choices. Other things being equal, viable and desirable candidates have better chances of actually achieving office. Qualitative, quantitative, and experimental evidence from Peru, a democracy without parties, supports the informational theory's expectations.
Careful crackdowns : human rights and campaigning on public security in Latin America
(2012-05) Uang, Randy Sunwin; Hunter, Wendy; Weyland, Kurt; Dietz, Henry; Madrid, Raul; Greene, Kenneth
Crime and violence are regularly seen as being ripe for politicians to turn into campaign issues and win votes. This study argues, in contrast, that success on public security is not so automatic: human rights values constrain the use of security and the winning of votes on it. Even in Latin American countries, where voters' concerns about rampant crime and violence are among the highest in the world, considerations of human rights combine with low trust in security forces to restrict the viability of the issue in key ways. Examination of presidential campaigns in Colombia in 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2010 supports this claim. Success on security is a two-step process: invoking the issue and then gaining voter support on the topic. Usability depends on the absence of recent repression and the degree of organization of security threats. Then, winning votes on it depends on having a civilian background, a campaign that balances security with other issues, and messages of careful enforcement. These messages of careful enforcement promise targeted, deliberate use of security forces' enforcement activities in a way that pays attention to human rights, rather than promising unbridled enforcement, increased punishment, or programs of long-term prevention. This study therefore shows how candidates are forced to walk a fine line between promising to establish order and promising to protect basic rights and liberties. These findings are powerful, providing an understanding of public security in electoral campaigns that maintains a much closer fit with empirical reality than existing research. The results also provide a critique of the sociological school of vote choice and points to ways in which ownership of the issue of security may be leased away. Furthermore, because the results are driven by the spread of human rights values, the results demonstrate the importance of quick shifts in political culture as a factor that explains changes in political patterns.
Cartographies of engagement : the parallels and intersections of Latin American and South Asian literature in the twentieth century
(2015-05-20) Kantor, Roanne L.; Salgado, César Augusto; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Snell, Rupert; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor
“Cartographies of Engagement: The Parallels and Intersections of Latin American and South Asian Authors,” establishes comparisons between Latin American authors who lived in South Asia and their South Asian contemporaries from 1906 to the present. Working in South Asian literatures in English, Hindi and Urdu, and Latin American literature in Spanish, this project recovers a century-long literary exchange between two previously unassociated regions and suggests a shared trajectory of professionalization for authors in the Global South. In the first half of the twentieth century, authors from both regions traveled abroad as a means of supporting themselves – whether through cultural exchanges, diplomatic postings, or in visiting positions with foreign universities. I suggest that their growing commitment to transnational solidarity was not a precondition for these travels, but the product of them. In the second half of the century, authors from both regions experienced a radical shift as their writing gained cache in the global north. I therefore conclude by demonstrating the connections between the emergence of Latin American Boom literature and its translation into English in the 1960s, its influence on the subsequent generation of South Asian Anglophone writers, and their own emergence as a global phenomenon beginning in the 1980s with Midnight’s Children. In bringing together two world areas that are rarely associated, it reveals a paradox in contemporary methods of comparative literary scholarship: even as disciplines expand to accommodate an ever greater diversity of language traditions, the frameworks for comparing those traditions remain remarkably narrow. In mapping the circulation of authors and texts around the globe, literary scholars have typically relied on just two different types of what I call “literary cartographies.” First, “cartographies of domination,” describe historical relations of power, as elaborated in postcolonial and decolonial theories. Second, “cartographies of contiguity,” describe relations based on physical proximity and historical routes of exchange, such as area studies designations or the more recent “oceanic turn.” By contrast, this project carves out methodological space for “cartographies of engagement,” which highlight the routes of authors and texts that contravene larger patterns of political domination and economic exchange.
Cartography and community planning among indigenous communities in Latin America
(2007-05) Russo, Suzanne Rebecca; Beamish, Anne, 1954-
Map-making is viewed among many planners, geographers, and anthropologists as a necessary first step in achieving land claims for indigenous communities in Latin America. However, map-making has yet to result in a land claim for any indigenous group, but the effects of establishing boundaries and claiming territories that have been traditionally shared are contentious. Through a literature review and interviews with three practitioners, this paper will critically examine the role of participatory ethnomapping on indigenous communities in Latin America, specifically their efforts to demarcate territory, procure land claims, and use these land claims to plan for social and economic development.
Catalog of Documents Principally Related to Land Holding, Land Use, Tribute, and Population of the Valle del Mezquital, Mexico, During the Sixteenth Century
(Benson Latin American Collection, 2007) Grossmann Cairus, Brigitte; Cairus, Jose
This catalog lists documents from the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, selected by Elinor G. K. Melville during her research to produce A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (1994). The documents were selected from various ramos of the AGN. The 18 reels in this catalog correspond to her original numbering of reels 1-15 and 18-20 of the documents. Her originally numbered reels 16 and 17 have been separately cataloged to provide better access to two whole volumes (2346 and 2627) from the Ramo de Tierras which they contain; see Benson Latin American Collection FILM 26437 for a description of these two reels.
Charisma lives on : a study of Peronism and Chavismo
(2019-08) Andrews-Lee, Caitlin Elizabeth; Weyland, Kurt Gerhard; Madrid, Raul; Albertson, Bethany; Shaw, Daron; Auyero, Javier
Conventional wisdom suggests that political movements founded by charismatic leaders must undergo “routinization” to survive beyond the death or disappearance of the founder. Yet charismatic movements have persisted or reemerged in countries as diverse as Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Italy, and Thailand. Consequently, party systems in these countries remain deeply personalistic and vulnerable to authoritarian threats. Focusing on Argentine Peronism and Venezuelan Chavismo, my research investigates how such movements can survive without becoming thoroughly institutionalized. To explore this puzzle, I first examine citizens’ deep emotional attachments to the movement. Rather than becoming depersonalized through programmatic or organizational means, citizens’ bonds can survive by sustaining their original affective nature. Moreover, subsequent politicians can strategically reactivate citizens’ attachments and garner support by (1) symbolically associating themselves with the founder and (2) achieving bold, impressive performance to “rescue” the followers from their suffering. I illustrate the survival of charismatic attachments using public opinion data and original focus groups with Peronist and Chavista followers. To substantiate my theory of reactivation, I draw evidence from two survey experiments conducted in three distinct regions of Argentina and Venezuela. Next, I use elite interviews and archival research to analyze the conditions under which new leaders can implement these strategies to consolidate power. Whereas successors handpicked by the founder struggle to establish independent authority, selfstarters who emerge years later enjoy more leeway to step out of the founder’s shadow. If self-starters can leverage a crisis to portray themselves as heroes and adopt the founder’s personalistic style, they can inherit his mantle and return the movement to power. Yet their success is temporary: Ungrounded institutionally, their daring policies eventually tend to collapse, causing followers to feel betrayed and seek out a more convincing successor to the founder. The short-lived successes and subsequent failures of new leaders cause charismatic movements to develop in a spasmodic fashion unlike the stable, linear trajectories of more conventional parties. The results suggest that these movements can survive without forming strong institutions. But their survival compromises citizens’ democratic representation and hinders the development of stable, programmatic parties
Coca—Colonization, Latin America, and Contemporary Art
(2019-05-07) Thomas, Courtney
The collective El Sindicato, 1976-1979 : intervening in conceptualism in Latin America
(2011-05) Rodríguez, María Teresa, 1983-; Giunta, Andrea; Tarver, Gina M.
Conceptual practices developed in Colombia towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Even a cursory look at surveys of Colombian conceptual art shows that the collective El Sindicato, active between 1976 and 1979, secured its space in these accounts with its 1978 work Alacena con zapatos, which won the top prize at the XXVII Salón Nacional. However, Alacena con zapatos was neither the only, nor the most significant, contribution of El Sindicato to the development of conceptual practices. The collective’s rich oeuvre, while concise, was nonetheless remarkable in its interventions on public spaces as a means for social change. A number of factors have led to the critical misunderstanding and, ultimately, the historiographical neglect of these interventions. This thesis problematizes these factors in order to reframe and expand El Sindicato’s role within the narrative of Colombian art. To elucidate El Sindicato’s contributions, and taking into account that much of Colombian conceptual art remains unknown in the United States, this thesis also registers Colombia’s artistic field as it stood in the 1970s. In all, my project situates El Sindicato’s practices within the broader narrative of Conceptualism as a means to both enrich our understanding of contemporary art in Colombia and help expand the familiar boundaries of the map of conceptual art.
A Comprehensive Analysis on the Healthcare Systems in Latin America
(2019-12-08) Calderon, Melinda; Haque, Sarah; Gallagher, Matt; Jackson, Kelly; Khatry, Melissa; Solimano, Elena
Constitutional change : the frequent attempt of new beginnings in Latin America
(2021-05-07) Avila Ordoñez, Maria Paz; Brinks, Daniel M., 1961-
Latin American countries have experienced frequent processes of constitutional change. Just in the first century of independence, constitutions of Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Peru were rewritten at least ten times. After the third wave of democratization, almost all countries in the region drastically amended or replaced their constitutions, and some, such as Venezuela and Ecuador, had done so more than once. By selecting two cases of study in the region (Argentina - Ecuador), this paper explores what are the factors that might explain constitutional replacements. Overall, this paper argues that high rates of constitutional replacement in the region can be attributed to their institutional origins. Constitutions are often created in environments generally unstable, under rapidly changing coalitions of power, non-inclusive constitution-making processes, where institutions are often used as “weapons” against the opposing political forces. These conditions under which constitutions are created can make them either resistant or vulnerable to rapid replacement