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Street children in Central America are largely denied protection of their human rights. They live in difficult situations of poverty, inappropriate work and neglect, and thus are not able to enjoy most of their rights and basic needs. / The international framework for children's human rights law, composed primarily of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the principles inherent to it, can be described as based on a doctrine of integral protection, a notion developed primarily by Central American legal scholars. At the same time, however, most Central American states ignore their obligations to conform their domestic legislation to these standards. / This thesis is meant to provide Central American countries with guidelines captured by a model referred to as UPPP2. Its main objective is for States to acknowledge that the plight of street children needs to be understood; prevented by adequate domestic legislation; and requires protection by effective implementation and provision of justice.

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Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua have all experienced significant social, economic, and political changes during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua experienced violent national revolts, while Costa Rica and Honduras did not. I tested a process theory that endeavored to account for the origins and intensity of national revolts in Central America. The analysis was formulated in a most-similar-systems (MSS) design. Pooled cross-sectional time-series regression techniques were employed in order to conform with the MSS variation-finding strategy. The findings supported the conclusion that armed attacks against the state were not random occurrences, but rather, that they may have arisen in response to certain economic and political conditions.

Central America and Mexico are characterized by high levels of poverty. In response, labor migration has emerged as a major strategy among families through the sending of earnings (or remittances) to households back home. Large amounts of remittances are sent, with over $13 billion to Central America and more than $23 billion to Mexico in 2011. While remittances to Mexico have been studied extensively, much less is known about the factors associated with remittances to Central America. This mixed methods study examined remittance sending and use patterns of Mexican and Central American labor migrants to the United States. Data on remittance behaviors were drawn from two major surveys, the Latin American Migration Project and Mexican Migration Project. Quantitative analyses were conducted using multiple regression to examine family-level predictors for the decision to engage in labor migration, whether remittances were sent, amount of remittances sent, and the purposes for remitting. Qualitative analysis involved focus group interviews of Mexican and Central American migrants in the United States who currently remit to their families back home. These interviews helped to discern the meaning of remittances for migrants and their families. The quantitative results suggest that top purposes for remitting include food and daily maintenance, education, health, and housing. Additionally, remittance sending patterns differed by region of origin. Mexican migrants were more likely to send remittances and to remit larger amounts. Additionally, individuals from Mexico had increased odds of sending funds for housing expenditures while Central Americans had greater odds of remitting for education and consumer goods. According to respondents who participated in the qualitative study, increasing costs of food, health, and education coupled with limited employment options contribute to a reliance on labor migration in both regions. For many, remittances have emerged as an essential source of income for economic wellbeing and even survival. A key implication for social work of this study on the larger population patterns on remittances is that at the family level, migrants carry a dual responsibility to settle into a new country while also maintaining the economic wellbeing of family left behind. / text

From March 2006 until March 2008 I worked and did research with young people in El Salvador. I coordinated a local youth participation project in the capital, where, at the same time, I conducted fieldwork for my PhD research. The youth project aimed at empowering young people through participatory action research (PAR) and, together with the young participants, I critically reflected on the empowering impact of this participatory process. While participatory researchers and practitioners traditionally stress the importance of critical consciousness and critical discourse as the principal motors for individual and social transformation, my research with the young people particularly confronted me with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges. This research focuses in particular on the politics of emotions; their role in confirming exclusion and oppression and in facilitating empowerment and resistance. In this thesis, I bring together different bodies of theory. I start from the critical literature on PAR and from a poststructuralist account of power and empowerment. I build on an understanding of emotions as socio-culturally constructed and, at the same time, as deeply embodied phenomena. I look into emotional geographies considering emotions as relational and as always functioning within power relations and I use non-representational theory to challenge the privilege of cognition by focussing on practical and embodied knowledges and explicitly recognising their political and empowering potential. I conclude that although participatory researchers have increasingly extended and refined their understanding of power and empowerment, they still focus too much on critical reflection, discourse and conscious/linguistic representation as key to personal and social change. This focus has distracted their attention from the way power works through emotions and embodied knowledges. I believe that participatory researchers should become more sensitive still to the subtleties of power by paying more explicit attention to how emotions and embodied knowledges function within power relations to reproduce or challenge the existing status quo. Such a focus also opens new doors to new ways of empowerment (and politics) by considering alternative methods and media directly engaging with the power of emotions and embodied knowledges to shape the social world.

My research focused on understanding how viceregal authority was accepted in Mesoamerica. Rather than approaching the problems from the perspective of institutional history, I drew on prosopographical techniques and the court-studies tradition to focus on the practice of government and the affinities that bound indigenous and non-indigenous political communities. In Chapters two and three I investigate how particular notions of nobility informed the ‘ideals of life’ of the Spanish and indigenous elites in New Spain and how these evolved up to 1535. The chapters also serve to establish a general context to the political situation that Mendoza faced on his arrival. Chapters four to seven explore how the viceroys sought to increase their authority in New Spain by appropriating means of direct distribution of patronage and how this allowed them personally to satisfy many of the demands of the Spanish and indigenous elites. This helped them impose their supremacy over New Spain’s magnates and serve the crown by ruling more effectively. Viceregal supremacy was justified in a ‘language of legitimacy’ that became increasingly peculiar to New Spain as a community of interests developed between the local elites and the viceroys who guaranteed the local political arrangements on which their status and wealth increasingly depended. I conclude by suggesting that New Spain was governed on the basis of internal arrangements guaranteed by the viceroys. This led to the development of what I define as a ‘parasitic civic-nobility’ which benefitted from the perpetuation of the viceregal system along with the crown. The internal political logic of most decision making and a defined local identity accompanied by increasingly ‘sui generis’ ‘ideals of life’ qualify New Spain to be considered not as a ‘colony’ run by an alien bureaucracy that perpetuated Spanish ‘domination’ but as Mexico City’s sub-empire within the Habsburg ‘composite monarchy.

The U.S. Customs Border Patrol reported a total of 67,339 children crossed the Mexican border illegally into the Unites States in the 2014 fiscal year. The Office of Refugee Resettlement found 34% came from Honduras, 32% from Guatemala and 29% from El Salvador. The United States has been strained with the task of finding, providing and funding adequate housing, health care and education amongst other things for these minors while they wait for court immigration proceedings. The purpose of this research was to explore the barriers social and human service agencies face in finding a safe, stable and nurturing environment for Central American unaccompanied undocumented minors in the United States. A qualitative method to understand the phenomenon was taken. This study revealed six common themes: 1) barriers in providing a safe, stable and nurturing environment was lack of the English language in the children and stigma surrounding immigration 2) barriers in education were lack of English language, financial situation and lack of transcripts or history of the child’s educational background, 3) barriers in health care was the limited access to health care 4) barriers in housing were crowded living situation, lack of affordable housing and placement in foster care, 5) barriers in language were the child’s limited knowledge of the English language, lack of bilingual providers, lack of educational material in Spanish, child’s limited knowledge of Spanish language, 6) other barriers not inquired about were the participants lack of knowledge of available resources for the children and the child’s immigration status.

Studies of political parties in Latin America have often been descriptive and not directed to link a theoretical foundation about political parties with qualitative or quantitative empiricism. This was in part because parties in the region were usually perceived as rather unimportant in the political arena. This study attempts to correct this often unjustified proposition by focusing on the development of political parties in five Central American countries: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The analysis focuses particularly on the relationship between party fragmentation, party polarization, the level of democracy, and socio-economic modernization. The quantitative analysis uses a cross-national longitudinal research design and tries to overcome shortcomings in prior descriptive approaches based on case studies. The overall findings show that party fragmentation and party polarization are positively related to the level of democracy in Central America.