The purpose of this study is to examine the Contadora and Esquipulas phases of the Central American peace process of the 1980s as inter-related case studies that provide important insights into the interests, capabilities, and limits of contemporary Latin American diplomacy and foreign policy making. By reconstructing and analyzing the diplomacy of the regional peace process, this study seeks to understand why it persisted for as long as it did despite tremendous political obstacles and expectations of failure. This study shows that the peace process is rooted in the diplomatic traditions of Latin America, but it emerged and persisted because of the development of the new interests, capabilities, and diplomatic innovations of several Latin American states. To understand the lessons of the Central American peace process, this work opens with the study of the traditions and historical development of Latin American diplomacy through the 1970s and up to the emergence of political crisis and war in Central America. Then it focuses on reconstructing the significant phases and diplomatic events of the Contadora and Esquipulas peace processes and examines their central documents. Finally, it analyzes the specific foreign policy interests, capabilities, and contributions of four states actively involved in the peace process, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Costa Rica, in order to understand the nature of contemporary Latin American diplomacy and its import to both the persistence of the peace process and the future of inter-American relations. This study's primary level of analysis is at the inter-regional level, focusing on Latin American diplomacy, however, factors at the systemic and societal levels of analysis also receive considerable attention. The data used comes from both primary and secondary sources and includes interviews by the author with several Nicaraguan and Costa Rican diplomats actively involved in the peace process, including former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. In the end, this study seeks a deeper understanding and appreciation of the foreign policy interests and diplomatic capabilities of our Latin American neighbors.

This dissertation examines the consolidation and erosion of the economic and political institutions governing the economic growth process in a small, predominantly agrarian, open economy. In particular, it explains the economic crisis in Paraguay in the 1980s under the military regime (1954-1989). The dissertation asserts that the end of the boom and the later long stagnation was a result of the shift in not only external but also in the internal conditions affecting profitability and investment. The fiscal crisis of the state and the increase of both the Ricardian effect in agriculture and the product wage (as well as the fall of the world market prices of primary commodities and the slowdown of foreign direct investment), undermined the profitability and accumulation. These claims are substantiated by an institutional history, a simple two sectoral model, and econometric estimations.

This is a study of how sixteenth-century Spaniards used fundamental aspects of material culture, and the ideas and attitudes surrounding them, to subjugate the Aztec empire of Mexico. Edicts, relaciones, court decisions, letters and chronicles have been employed to discern the attitudes of the time. Those attitudes reveal that food, clothing and shelter were used both to distinguish Spaniards from Amerindians and to bind conquerors and conquered to the same social system. Principles of hierarchy and reciprocity were employed by Spaniards and Amerindians to define the appropriate customs and means of exchange in a new, syncretic culture of conquest. Together, Spaniards and Amerindians created a sixteenth-century body politic and organic society in what Europeans deemed a "New World".

In 1945, the business community worried about its ability to shape the post-war political and economic reconstruction. Industrialists had lost enormous prestige in the depression, and during the New Deal faced sharp challenges from liberalism and organized labor. World War II provided business leaders with an opportunity to restore their reputation if not their dominance, but in the post-war decade there were a number of major national issues still open to debate. American society had yet to reach a consensus on the relationship of government to the economy, on the proper size of the welfare state, and on the scope of union power in the factory. The business community began mobilizing to regain the political and economic initiative in this debate. This study explores the business community's ideological attack against its primary opponent, organized labor, and against tile liberal, New Deal philosophy unions represented. It also examines the ways workers and their unions both resisted and reshaped employer actions. In the years after World War II, the business leaders engaged in an attempt to restructure the ideas and images that constituted America's political culture. They conducted a widespread and intensive campaign to sell Americans on the virtues of individualism as opposed to collectivism or unions, freedom as opposed to state control and centrality of the free enterprise system to the American way of life. The most obvious efforts to shape ideology and to create the more conservative, consensual political climate that historians associate with the fifties took place at the national level. National business organizations like the Advertising Council orchestrated massive public relations campaigns that relied on the mass media to sell business and capitalism. Employers also recognized the need for more direct connection with the public. Sensing that organized labor challenged their ability to shape worker attitudes and provide political leadership, moderate as well as conservative employers sought to undermine union power through a program that drew upon human relations and welfarism in order to build worker allegiance to the firm. Fearing for lost authority beyond their factory gates, employers also instituted sophisticated community relations programs promoting the free enterprise system.

Settlement workers sought to reform American society in order to make it truer to its democratic ideals. They erected the seedling of modern social work, the social settlement, which uniquely combined social services and reform. Attentive to the daily concerns of their neighbors, settlement workers aimed at nothing short of total social transformation based on the revitalization of local communities. However, when black migrants from the rural South began to replace European immigrants in settlement neighborhoods during and after World War I, settlements responded by closing down completely, following their white neighbors out of the slums, conducting segregated activities, or only rarely, opening a separate branch or an independent black branch. This dissertation seeks to explain the failure of the mainstream movement to redirect its efforts toward the needs of its new black neighbors. It analyzes many settlement leaders' belief in the amorality of black individuals and the deficiency of their culture. Settlement workers attempted to put into practice what they considered a cosmopolitan world view, yet its secular, urban, and Northern biases further inhibited their understanding of black culture and religion. Their "liberalism" ironically helped stall the translation of "the settlement idea" from immigrants to blacks. While the mainstream settlement movement failed to welcome blacks, other reformers did conduct settlement work in both urban and rural black communities in the North and South. School settlements, the YWCA, and independent black settlements all embodied the settlement's marriage of social services and community revitalization. Some of this work influenced the broader movement toward civil rights and State responsibility for social welfare. Innocuous doctrines like industrial education and moralist womanhood veiled serious commitments to social change. This study describes a reform movement plagued and directed by racial tension. It provides evidence of the great impact of race on the history of the settlement movement from the Progressive Era to the 1940s, and reveals the importance of collective confrontation of issues such as racism and separatism in all efforts to bring about change in a pluralistic society.

This dissertation deals with part of Juan de Velasco's (Riobamaba 1727-Faenza 1792) historiographical work. While exiled in Italy he wrote the History of the Kingdom of Quito in Meridional America (1789). With this work he engages in the famous polemics known as the “Dispute of the New World” as other ex-jesuits such as Clavijero or Molina had done before him. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I look at the way Velasco articulated his historiographical discourse in the first part of his History, the Natural History, in order to see how it already reflects a strong regionalist consciousness. In this sense, Velasco's work is particularly relevant since it is the first written history of what we today know as Ecuador. Conscious of this fact, the author develops a historiographical project that seeks to define a “Quitean” historical and cultural identity, different from Spain as well as from other Spanish American regions. It also seeks to make the Quitean creole community conscious of this identity. The first chapter describes the development of the Jesuit Company within the Spanish American historical and political context, with special attention to the second half of the 18th century. It also describes the situation of the creole community during that same period as well as the “Dispute of the New World.” The second chapter situates the History of the Kingdom of Quito within the whole of Velasco's work examining the criticism it originated, mainly in Ecuador. The chapters that follow analyze in detail the different parts of the Natural History to show how Velasco's patriotic feelings reveal themselves throughout in this part of his work: in the regional specificity of his History, in the body of autoctonous tradition and folklore recorded in this part, in its defense of the “Quitean” native man and “patria,” in the intolerance towards the attempts to discursively appropriate “Quitean” territory (Father Gilij), and in its effort to show the actual existence of a historical written record for the “Kingdom of Quito” through the elaboration of a “Catalogue of Writers who Wrote about Peru and Quito.”

During the 1960s, the University of Salvador (UES) was a normally functioning university, graduating thousands of professionals to feed El Salvador's rapidly-growing economy. By the end of 1980s the school had become a battleground. Almost every day student protests took place. Army troops surrounded the school on several occasions. Within the University itself rival groups struggled for control. How and why did this happen? The purpose of this study is to investigate how the University of El Salvador struggled to accomplish its educational mission in midst of the political and economic crisis that overwhelmed El Salvador during the last three decades. Essentially, I am concerned with the unwritten history of the UES. To accomplish this, I am relying to large extent on primary sources. These include interviews with members from the inside and outside the university community, including those living outside the country; periodicals available in El Salvador; and Salvadoran newspapers available on microfilm here in the U.S. The situation of the UES is a complex one that needs to be analyzed from a number of different perspectives. My study will help us to better understand the pressures that face a university under critical conditions. Its findings will help us to comprehend not only the situation of the UES but also that of other universities in Latin America.

This dissertation examines the history of alcohol among the Anishinaabe (also known as the Ojibway or Chippewa) people from the middle of the eighteenth century until the enactment of National Prohibition in 1920. As early as the eighteenth century, alcohol was an integral part of the gift-giving which preceded negotiations for the French--and later British and American--fur trade. Some Anishinaabe people incorporated alcohol into funerals, and there is also evidence that the Anishinaabeg had reasonable social controls around drinking into the twentieth century. Alcohol was also pivotal in shaping non-Indian stereotypes of Indian people. In the nineteenth century, the drinking habits of the Anishinaabeg were seen first as a sign of cultural weakness. The rhetoric of American missionaries emphasized that once the Anishinaabeg had accepted Christianity, they would choose to give up alcohol. However, these same missionaries also argued that in order to become Christian, the Anishinaabeg first would have to reject liquor. By the early twentieth century, the stereotype of the culturally inferior Indian combined with scientific racism to create the image of racially inferior Indians. These images served as the justification for Anishinaabeg dispossession in the early years of the twentieth century. Further, as Prohibition agitation increased in the early twentieth century, non-Indians used the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota to wage an ideological war not only about alcohol in white society but also about the extent of federal power in enforcing treaty provisions on non-Indians lands. Hence, the Anishinaabeg became the rhetorical vehicle for a complex debate which at times only marginally included them. By focusing on one Indian group at a particular point in time, this dissertation seeks to historicize one Indian group's experience with alcohol and to move away from generalizations about "Indians" and drinking. By presenting as full a picture as possible of the diversity of the Anishinaabe experience with alcohol, this dissertation hopes to emphasize both their humanity and their history.

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