Thesis advisor: Hiroshi Nakazato / In Latin America, Indigenous peoples still exhibit markedly lower qualities of life compared to their nonindigenous peers. One of the most direct ways to change this cycle is through reforms to existing and implementation of new systems of education, such as intercultural bilingual education (EIB), to reflect a greater understanding of and sensitivity to Indigenous linguistic and cultural needs. Through an exploration of EIB in Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala countries, this study determines some of the primary conditions necessary for EIB’s success to be: national and regional stability; governmental support in both legal and fiscal terms; funding and resources; community support and participation; and system design, program adaptation, and flexibility. If these prerequisites are met, EIB can be an effective way to provide an education to Latin America’s Indigenous peoples in such a way that it is adequate according to local, national, and international standards while simultaneously fulfilling the Indigenous groups’ articulated desire and need for an educational system that appropriately respects, preserves, and fosters the distinct languages and cultures existing within a multicultural state. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: International Studies Honors Program. / Discipline: International Studies.

Thesis advisor: Richard McGowan / Thesis advisor: Robert Murphy / Microfinance has been heralded as the solution to global poverty by optimists in the development field. Many regard the practice of extending unprecedented financial access to the poor through small loans as a necessary and important tool in the development process. The industry has grown and changed shape over the last two decades and recently has come under fire. The new face of microfinance has included for-profit lenders, usurious interest rates, loan sharks, and suicides. Many critics are beginning to question the ethics, practices and efficacy of microfinance. They claim that microfinance cannot make more than a marginal impact on poverty, and more serious development efforts should address structural causes of underdevelopment. This paper will examine the effects microfinance on extreme poverty as defined by the poverty headcount ratio at $2 a day and $1.25 a day. The study will focus on the Latin America and Caribbean. Through regression analysis, this paper measures the effects of microfinance on the poverty rate while controlling for structural economic changes. We will conclude that microfinance has a statistically significant effect on extreme poverty in this region. These results are an important response to critics who posit that the costs of microfinance outweigh the benefits. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis advisor: Lisa S. Cahill / As ethicists, we have a responsibility to engage with major issues around the world. In Latin America, gender-based violence has become a reality for far too many women, and community organizers from faith-based organizations are working to change attitudes and structures in society. Many women from these organizations are using theological resources to aid them in their activism. This dissertation will examine how theological resources contribute to the activism of Latin American women. Through an examination of Jon Sobrino’s Christology, we can see that “resurrection” serves as a major theme for women who are fighting gender-based violence, and that specific concepts within this Christology can inspire hope. Sobrino’s work offers women a theological framework through which they can understand their protest activities as an important part of their spiritual lives. Although Sobrino provides this helpful paradigm, his writing refers to all Latin Americans in general and does not take the contextual specifics of women’s lives into consideration. Therefore, in order to add a gender lens to the conversation about women’s uses of theological resources in Latin America, this dissertation will put Latina feminist theologians in conversation with Sobrino. Although liberation theology has contributed to an important foundation for feminist theologians, liberation theologians often do not consider the realities of women’s lives as unique experiences. By looking at the writings of Marcella Althaus-Reid, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Ivone Gebara, María Pilar Aquino, and Nancy Pineda-Madrid we can see that a gender lens is especially important for women who are using theological resources to animate their protest activities. In addition to offering important resources for women struggling against the reality of gender-based violence, it is also necessary for theologians and ethicists to develop responses to gender-based violence and to support activists in their work for change. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Chapter One asks whether Christianity and religion have been re-defined in the Jamaican context. The definitions of spirituality and mysticism, particularly as defined by Lartey are given and reasons for using these definitions. Chapter Two examines history and the Caribbean religious experience. It analyses theory and reflects on the Caribbean difference. The role that literary forefathers and foremothers have played in defining the writers about whom my research is concerned is examined in Chapter Three, as are some of their selected works. Chapter Four reflects on the work of Lorna Goodison, asks how she has defined God whether within a Christian or African framework. In contrast Olive Senior appears to view Christianity as oppressive and this is examined in Chapter Five. Chapter Six looks at the ways in which Erna Brodber re-connects the spirit. Chapter Seven regards the spiritually joyful God of Jean 'Binta' Breeze. Conclusions are then drawn as to whether writers have adapted a God to the Jamaican context, whether they have re-connected to the spirit and if it is true that Jamaica is a spiritual nation.

This study contemplates the limitations of traditional conceptions of Latin American Pentecostalism to account for and understand the phenomenon as it developed in the lives of individuals during charged moments like the Chilean dictatorship where meanings and significance – religious and otherwise – were challenged, disrupted, and altered. Its goal is to explore how Pentecostals lived with and against the changing religious expressions and practices that were available to them under authoritarian rule. I argue that Pentecostal religion and practice were infused with new meaning and reimagined through shifting conceptions of community, society, and faith that flowed into and nourished one another. The boundaries of Pentecostal identity and belief were ultimately less rigid and more porous than the traditional historiography suggests, as people sought to find meaning in the face of mounting oppression and insecurity. In doing so, normative definitions of terms like Pentecostal, religion, religiosity, and religious practice as they have been used as categorical frameworks for historical study are also reconsidered. This investigation examines how transformations in religious thought and practice developed and how they found meaning within the everyday experiences of the church’s members as they confronted the harrowing events that engulfed Chile between 1973 and 1990. Key to this work is the concept of ‘lived religion’. The term, often used to collapse the distinction between the personal religious experiences and the prescribed religion of institutions, is used here to approach religion within the realm of la vida cotidiana (everyday life). Based on church documents and oral histories collected from members of the Misión Iglesia Pentecostal (Pentecostal Mission Church – MIP), I use a broad historical framework to map the embodied and discursive space between leaders and lay followers, the points of contact, disjuncture, and resonance across the ideas, experiences, and sensations of their shared lives during the dictatorship.

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Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-55). / This work attempts to present the development of a new self-image of Latin American identity as manifested in the New Latin American Cinema Movement. Also, it attempts to help articulate intentions, strategies, and final products that are being formulated throughout the continent. The main part of this thesis is a compilation/documentary (in the form of a 3/4 inch video cassette) comprised of interviews with filmmakers and excerpts from these films as presented at the Second New Latin American Cinema Festival (held in Havana in November of 1980). This tape will illustrate the author's efforts to examine, present, and contribute to this growing movement. / by Joaquin O. Mercado Cardona. / M.S.V.S.

This thesis addresses the production and reproduction of narratives about people born as a result of war-related sexual violence in Colombia. I focus on the social processes through which these individuals have become part of the realities of the armed conflict that are apprehended by the Colombian government, human rights organisations and transitional justice agencies, the media, and the communities. My project draws on ethnographic content analysis of media, legal documents, and ethnographic research conducted between December 2015 and June 2016 in a rural Afro-descendent community in Colombia that was occupied by paramilitaries for approximately five years. Paramilitaries systematically used sexual violence against women and girls and, because of those abuses, children were born and later single out by members of the community as paraquitos, “little paramilitaries”. I conclude that people born as a result of war-related sexual violence have not emerged as subjects within the realities of the armed conflict that are apprehended by the discourse of transitional justice and human rights. Although information about them has circulated, it has done so within the framework for understanding wartime sexual violence. As a collective subject, they have gained a place in the imaginary of human rights organisations through naming practices that assume they are defined by the violence that conceived them. At the local level these children’s identities are dynamic and their experiences are connected to the experiences of their mothers within their cultural and moral system. For the community, these people do not belong to the collective narratives of the violence of the past. Their absence needs to be understood in relation to gendered notions of identity and reproduction that have denied women’s experiences of the armed conflict, while imposing motherhood. Although the life of people born of war starts as war-affected children, as they grow older their identities and opportunities are under constant negotiation that embody different forms of gender, economic, and social violence and resistance that challenge static notions of victimhood.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1934. / At head of title: The Catholic university of America. Vita. Bibliography: p. 151-156.