This project seeks to address issues in cultural politics brought on by difficulties in cross-cultural communication, particularly as these problems manifest themselves in twentieth century Latin American testimonial narratives. By developing a critical line of questioning drawn from Gayatri Spivak's influential article "Can the Subaltern Speak," one aim herein is to analyze and describe the ways in which the narrative, Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú Me Nació la Conciencia, translated into English as I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, exemplifies the incommensurable nature of cross-cultural discursive attempts. This is done through a twofold method: one, by placing heavy emphasis on the role of the reader as constitutor of meaning in a (textual) discursive transaction between culturally-different agents, and two, by drawing attention to the role of historically-determined interpretive frameworks in the reception and interpretation of Subaltern ennunciative acts. The latter, I argue, is necessary for gaining an adequate understanding of receiving and conveying meaning within cross-cultural paradigms. To this end, as an example of the problems, contextual and methodological, that arise in such communicative attempts between cultures, I take up the academic controversy stirred up by the publication of David Stoll's Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Lastly, I investigate the socio-political implications of such failures in intercultural communication, giving rise to secondary lines of questioning such as finding ways to create favorable conditions for the possibility of genuine cross-cultural dialogue. One possibility, I suggest, is adopting a method of reading/listening which, borrowing from phenomenology, is continually on the way, always unfinished, and lets the life of the subaltern emerge by remaining open, not just to what is said, but to what is left unsaid.

<p>The Global South, and particularly Latin America, experienced a remarkable expansion in conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in the last fifteen years. Although a large literature examines the effects of CCTs on human development, the political behavioral consequences remain underexplored. In the dissertation, I address this gap by analyzing the effects of CCTs on political participation and policy. I also explore the implications of these effects for human development. </p><p>My central argument is that CCTs increase political participation among beneficiaries, and both program transfers and conditionalities contribute to these positive effects. More specifically, CCTs provide beneficiaries with politically relevant resources, including civic skills and access to state officials and community leaders. These resources reduce the costs of political participation and facilitate more involvement in political activities, particularly in more demanding forms of participation. In addition, I argue that CCTs increase the private provision of local services and influence the outcomes of some non-national elections. </p><p>To test this argument, I use four main sources of data: (1) existing survey data from Latin America in 2012; (2) original survey data from Mexico in 2014; (3) experimental data from Mexico in 1998-2000; and (4) in-depth interviews and focus groups from Mexico in 2012. Multilevel models and linear regression models are used to estimate the effects of CCTs on political behavior and service provision. The in-depth interviews and focus groups help to unravel more of the causal mechanism that connects CCTs to political participation. </p><p>The evidence largely supports my argument. I find that CCTs increase participation in a wide variety of political activities, including electoral and non-electoral activities. In addition, the pathways to increased participation include improved civic skills and increased access to state officials and local leaders. Moreover, CCTs increase the private provision of sewerage services.</p><p>I conclude that CCTs have both desirable and undesirable consequences. On the one hand, CCTs increase democratic political participation, improve civic skills, reduce the distance between beneficiaries and government officials, and increase access to local services. The increased access to sewerage services creates an indirect pathway to improved human development outcomes. On the other hand, CCTs reduce the pressure on local officials to provide local services, and in some contexts contribute to electoral rewards for undeserving incumbent parties.</p> / Dissertation

Since the 1960s, the inhabitants of the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda have serially considered and rejected becoming a sovereign nation. This thesis investigates the extent to which the positions taken by politicians and social commentators, who are involved in the debates concerning independence, are informed by their lived experiences and understandings of the island’s past. Grounded in an analysis of the island’s past, this thesis also investigates how Bermudians have historically defined belonging in the political sphere and public spaces according to ‘race’ and class and how this affects the way in which they interact with each other and regard their relationship with the United Kingdom. The study critically engages with postcolonial theory and asks what the existence of this 21st century colony says about the processes of colonialism and post-colonialism. It also considers how this study fits with other research concerning other remaining Overseas Territories to show the value of conducting in-depth studies of specific societies. By surveying archival documents and conducting interviews a fuller understanding of the political and social development of this island is gained, as viewed by colonial administrators, local government officials, and those who publicly challenged the norms that allowed for social and political inequality on the island. These methods are used to engage with questions of how ideas of self and nation were shaped by segregationist formal education and how this was either reinforced or challenged by what was taught around the kitchen table and in the wider society. It explores how Trade Unionist and the fledgling Progressive Labour Party (PLP) saw a move to independence as part of a wider aim to rectify social injustices. The continuity and change in the debate is then reviewed to see how and the extent to which changes both internally and externally interact with narratives of the past to inform how those involved in the debate imagine the island’s future.

This dissertation investigates how the project of abstraction, initiated in interwar Europe, was reconstructed, continued, and transformed in mid-twentieth-century South America. Through an examination of the work and thought of three key artists (Tomás Maldonado of Argentina, Alejandro Otero of Venezuela, and Lygia Clark of Brazil), it posits historical continuity and universality as both central problems of mid-century South American projects of abstraction and potential avenues toward a new understanding of their historical specificity. I identify three key features of interwar abstraction that were consciously continued in the work of Maldonado, Otero, and Clark: the adoption of abstraction not as a style, but as a progressive teleology with a linear history and singular goal; the ambition to reach the end of painting as an autonomous activity and integrate abstraction into the built environment; and the belief in the power of abstraction to forge new subjects and collectivities. In all three cases, the encounter of a universalistic project with particular socio-historical realities had resonances unanticipated by their European predecessors. Whereas abstraction in interwar Europe was intimately tied to struggles against bourgeois subjectivity and for a new form of egalitarian collectivity, artists in mid-century South America were rather faced with accelerated, state-driven developmentalism and the emergence of populist politics. Against this background, I demonstrate how each artist envisioned abstraction as a tool to contribute to or disrupt newly emerging forms of collectivity, contrasting Maldonado's insistence on an international, class-based collective, Otero's efforts to forge a modern national community, and Clark's advocating for a contingent intersubjectivity as a way of resisting top-down projects of collectivity. Finally, I investigate how the engagement with ideas of continuity and universality, as exemplified by these three artists, intersected with broader conceptions of historical progress and development circulating in Latin America between the Second World War and the Cuban Revolution. The rise and fall of abstraction in South America during this period, I conclude, was closely linked to the dream of catching up with "universal history" and its eventual abandonment. / History of Art and Architecture

Political parties are the basic building blocks of representative democracy. They reduce information costs for voters, enhance executive accountability, and contribute to democratic governability by facilitating legislative organization and aggregating the interests of powerful societal groups. Yet we continue to know relatively little about the conditions under which strong parties form. The dominant theories of party-building are mostly based on historical studies of the United States and Western European countries, almost all of which developed stable party systems. Drawing on this literature, a segment of the early scholarship on party-building in third-wave democracies optimistically took "party development" for granted, assuming that parties would follow from democracy, cleavages, or certain electoral rules. Yet party-building outcomes in third-wave democracies fell short of scholars' initial, optimistic expectations. In many third-wave polities, social cleavages, attempts at electoral engineering, and decades of democratic competition did not produce durable parties. On the other hand, in numerous third-wave democracies, new political parties did take root. What accounts for the variation in party-building outcomes observed across the developing world? More generally, under what conditions does party-building succeed? / Government

The Napoleonic invasion of Iberia shattered the Spanish empire in 1808. The French emperor occupied Spain and forced Ferdinand VII to abdicate the throne. Once the war against the French began, most vassals also rejected the Spanish imperial government in Madrid that had recognized the change of dynasty. The implosion of the Crown severely tested the hierarchical, centralized, and interdependent nature of the empire. Historians of the Spanish Bourbon empire have rightly argued that the invasion catalyzed the emergence of the new nations from 1810 onward. Many of them, however, have failed to notice the concurrent and extraordinary efforts to reconstitute the empire--a critical history that contextualizes the decisions Spanish Americans faced in this tumultuous period. / History

Latin America has been envisioned, time and again, as home to the semi-civilized. Or so (post)colonial imaginaries continue to impress upon us in developmental renderings of a New World that has yet to take off. Neither backward (in the ways of a ‘dark continent’) or advanced (as guaranteed by the status of a ‘first world’), its giants are, at best, chronically emerging. This in-between position is acutely exemplified by the Brazilian dilemma of an interminable modernization, responsibilized for curing all of our ills. The most wide-ranging projects of development are mobilized within this context, but the closer that we get to their distinct materializations, the more that they appear to us as mirages of what ought to be rather than what is, measured against the incorruptible standards of a modernity realized somewhere ‘out there’. In this study, I look to everyday dynamics in Brazil’s aspiring world-city, Rio de Janeiro, that compose the fields and subjects on which development projects operate, in turn revealing and obscuring ‘successes’, ‘failures’, and ultimately, assorted desires and expectations that (mis)lead a politics of transformation in the peripheries of the modern world. In Part III, I elaborate this history of the present as a way to reorient such grand narratives of arrested development, corruption, and other ‘third world’ problems, by drawing on a range of sites of sociability that nurture particular kinds of relations between (dis)obedient subjects and their governing institutions. To this end, I reconceive the terms of debate for thinking about places of an allegedly incomplete or corrupted modernity, in Part II, where I largely reframe the problems that a developmental ethos appropriates for itself, which situates the third world as the constitutive outside of idealized ways of living. By investigating the predominant developmental archetypes of the last century of Brazil’s promised take-offs, in Part I, I set up the pathways to decondition and recondition how we think about the limits and possibilities of a peripheral politics of transformation. In these ways, I conclude that the standards of political judgement that follow from such idealized ways of living neutralize contentions and negotiations over how we want to live, here and now, making way for confused desires, expectations, and responsibilities more in line with (inter)nationalist paradigms and prescriptions than the politics of everyday life in out of the way places. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / 0700 / andrea.b.gill@gmail.com

The challenge of both the public and private sector to provide infrastructure to meet the demand of current and future housing has emerged as a central issue in discussions urbanization in the developing world. Informal settlements, rapidly developing on the outer peripheries of urban areas are straining cities abilities to provide the infrastructure resources necessary for their survival. This thesis is based on a case study of an informal settlement in Tijuana, Mexico named Las Lomas del Valle. This thesis explores the conditions of infrastructure within the colonia, focusing on the condition of the current road network and its interrelationship with the residents of Las Lomas. It explores the current needs of the residents and how their dependency on the road network and its conditions is essential to their well being. / text

This study describes how economic policies in Latin America are informed by, and have affected, social norms regarding equality and solidarity. Through the rise and fall of institutions such as cooperatives and unions, and via social policy in education, health, and pensions, one can trace the ebb and flow of social solidarity as a justifiable socioeconomic policy aim in Latin America. As a result of the decrease in the legitimacy of social solidarity and equality that follows the implementation of neoliberalism, a new social movement in the region- the Solidarity Economy- has emerged to reestablish these values. However, it is largely borrowing from a tradition of associativism and other private-sector civil-society initiatives rather than vying directly for State power to institute its goals from within the polity. I provide a case study of the Santiago Solidarity Economy Network, in which I analyze their strategies of consciousness-raising and participation. The case study also explores generational and institutional differences within the Network that stem from varied political experiences of neoliberal policy. Finally, the case study details the obstacles to growth that this Network encounters, with a particular focus on those challenges that have emerged as a result of neoliberal policy and its’ effects on social norms of solidarity. / text

In immigration and sexuality research there is new and emerging literature that understands the convergence of these two topics. However, scholarship primarily examining Latina lesbian immigrants is not as visible. This thesis examines the lives of Latina lesbian immigrants residing in Texas and California to understand greater meanings of immigration, sexuality and citizenship. Ten Latina lesbian immigrants participated in in-depth interviews, answering questions about growing up, sexuality, migration, citizenship and meanings of home. The research questions asked the following: What affect does immigration have on the sexualities and sex lives of Latina lesbian immigrants? How does their age of migration impact their sexualities? How do these women define and conceptualize citizenship? How do immigration and sexuality converge in the lives and on the bodies of Latina lesbian immigrants? The interviews revealed that the age in which the women migrated and their resettlement in urban areas contribute to their conceptualizations of a “sexually open” United States and a not-as-queer-friendly home country. Second, the women interviewed categorize citizenship in local and global ways. While some saw citizenship as part of every day practice, others found it to be connected with a sense of global community. Migration also developed a consciousness surrounding citizenship, as many of them were confronted with the concept upon migrating to the United States. Finally, immigration and sexuality unfolds in my participant’s lives in contradictory and non-linear ways. While many of the women felt a connection to their local gay and lesbian communities in positive ways, their lives are met with adversities in other ways that are affected by their immigrant status – including inability to obtain a driver’s license and obligations to become United State’s citizens. The women also conceptualize home in fluid and unfixed ways. Home and the body collapse when discussing migration, citizenship and nation. The research presented attempts to offer a conversation about the historical and current relationship between immigrants and LGBT people. It is also my objective to further conversations about multiple levels of oppression and how Latina lesbian immigrant women use their circumstances to gain a better awareness of themselves, and hopefully improve their rights and living conditions as human beings. / text