No description available.

The Miami Freedom Tower was built during the 1920s and then used during the 1960s as a processing center for newly arriving Cuban refugees. This report will demonstrate the ways in which a particular, powerful segment of the Cuban American community used the tower as a means to establish for themselves a more positive, Euroamerican identity in the wake of the Mariel boatlift and in the context of national debates over immigration in the 1980s and 1990s. By first looking at the U.S. government’s establishment of Cuban American identity during the early Cold War as positive and ideologically aligned with the United States and then examining the ways in which that identity was challenged in the 1980s and 1990s, this report demonstrates that national and ethnic identities are constantly in flux. Further, it is necessary to break down and fully analyze the ways in which the identities of immigrant groups are framed both externally by the press, popular culture, and the government and internally by their own goals, conceptions, and histories. / text

This report explores Club Cubano Inter-Americano’s history in order to show how it helped situate Cuban immigrants within the Anglo and Latino communities in New York City in the early 20th century, and it examines the ways in which immigrants balanced their island heritage with community building in the United States. The different parts of the report focus on the organization’s foundation, leadership, activities, events, and treatment of race. A historiography of similar social groups provides a necessary background of the overall structure and goals of Cuban mutual-aid societies. Although the question of race was never officially present in Club-related rhetoric, a number of similarities link its makeup and functions to an existing tradition of Afro-Cuban mutual-aid societies on the island and abroad. The analysis of the New York Club Cubano Inter-Americano provides a glimpse into a part of the Cuban migration in the United States that simply does not fit with the rest. / text

This study examined whether the widely reported positive relation between "authoritative" parenting and adolescent adjustment among middle class white American families was also present among Cuban Americans, and whether this relationship was moderated by various degrees of parents' acculturation, including biculturalism. A sample of 112 adolescents of Cuban origin who attended high schools in South Florida was included in the study, along with their mothers and fathers, for a total of 336 participants. Three different standardized measures were employed—the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ), the Bicultural Involvement Questionnaire (BIQ), and the Child Behavior Checklist/6-18 (CBCL/6-18)—as well as a Demographic Information Sheet (DIS). Scores from the PAQ and the BIQ were examined first to determine any relationship between parenting styles and parents' level of acculturation/biculturalism. Parenting styles and level of acculturation/biculturalism scores were later analyzed to predict adolescents' developmental outcomes as measured by the Total Competence and Total Problem scales of the CBCL/6-18. Multiple Regression Analyses revealed that no significant relationship was present between parenting styles and parents' level of acculturation/biculturalism, and that these two variables in turn did not significantly predict adolescents' developmental outcomes. Given that participants resided in an area with unique cultural characteristics as compared to the rest of the United States, the possibility of the acculturation/biculturalism variable masking the true effects of parenting styles was considered. Therefore, additional analyses were conducted without including the acculturation/biculturalism variable. In this case, results indicated that the positive correlates of authoritative parenting transcend the middle class white American culture and can be found in the population of Cuban Americans studied. According to these findings, as adolescents perceived their parents to be more authoritative, parents rated their adolescents as demonstrating higher levels of competence and lower levels of behavioral and emotional problems. In addition, as adolescents perceived their parents to be more authoritarian, parents found more behavioral and emotional problems in their children. Limitations in the study, and implications for future research and practice were also discussed. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding and gather insight into the experiences of Cuban American women attending a 4-year, public, Hispanic Serving Institution and how those experiences influenced their identity development. This was accomplished by conducting in-depth interviews and focus groups with 12 self-identified Cuban American women who were classified as sophomores, juniors, seniors, or graduate students. All of the participants had attended Florida International University for at least 1 year. The women had varying degrees of on and off campus academic and campus involvement activities. Participants were asked about six topics: (a) family, (b) cultural influences, (c) gender, (d) ethical and moral development, (e) education, and (f) ethnic identity. Based on the coding of the data provided by the participants, several interconnected themes emerged including the importance of family, familial support, cultural pride, expected gender roles, core values, decision making, biculturalism, and the value of attending a Hispanic Serving Institution. These themes were found to be all related to the identity development of the participants. It was found that looking at identity through a multidimensional lens is essential. Looking at personal growth and development through anthropological, sociological, and psychosocial lenses gave greater insight to a population of students who have been largely underrepresented in the literature. The findings of this case study are that culture is contextual and identity development is complex for first and second generation Cuban American women attending a Hispanic Serving Institution in a majority minority city. It was found that several factors, including the importance of family and gender roles, were not found to be more important than one another; rather they supported each other in regards to the participants’ identity development. The notion of biculturalism as it has been presented in the literature was challenged in this study as it was found that the participants’ experiences living and attending a school in a majority minority city presented a new way of understanding what it might mean to be bicultural. For professionals in the field, the findings of this study may lead to a broader understanding of nuances within the Hispanic community and a better understanding of the distinctiveness of what it means to be a Cuban American woman.

Thesis advisor: Hosffman Ospino / The Catholic Church’s formal documents throughout the centuries have celebrated and affirmed the role of parents educating their children on faith matters in the context of the home. Nevertheless, the Church offers parents very little practical guidance as to how they can make their home a domestic church or what they can do to organically and consistently incorporate the faith into daily life. As the Church analyzes why presently 6 Catholics are disaffiliating for every new member that joins, it must reconsider the lack of attention the home has received as an authoritative space for religious transmission. The home, as a sacramental space, has the potential to call attention to the divinity that surrounds us and invites us to action and awakening. It is also the haven where we nurture our most important and loving relationships that initiate us into the faith. The home is also a space for negotiation, that is, where we learn to wrestle with mystery and ambiguity. Critical dialogues within the home are imperative to engaging the present world from a Catholic perspective. This dissertation conducted an ethnographic study of a group of Miami-based Cuban American Catholic women across two generations. The women were chosen based on their active involvement within the Catholic Church. The study found that 100% of the women were successful in transmitting their Catholic faith to their daughters due to four socialization practices. Faith modeling by extended kin, engagement in social justice vocations across the community, explicitly affirming the personalization of daily rituals such as prayer, and finally, ongoing intergenerational dialogues were found in the stories of all the women participants. Religious imagination is the glue that holds all of the moving pieces (home, women and socializing praxis) in this dissertation. I provide herein a midrash of Matthew 27:57-61 to illustrate how the physical and relational components of the Cuban-American home serve to negotiate a hermeneutic that is matriarchal, bottom-up, and interdisciplinary. The hermeneutic echoes the message of the women studied herein; namely, that a community working together in the midst of dislocation is already being liberated. Noting the psycho-social importance of a cohesive narrative identity and its impact on authentic faith transmission calls into question whether the pedestrian nature of the home has led to mistaken notions of this pedagogy being too simplistic. Nevertheless, in telling stories and (de/re)constructing life narratives, individuals are placed within the larger scheme of history, redemptive sequences are analyzed and building resilience, and the stories themselves become a safe space from which to discern larger questions. This dissertation proposes communal, home-based activities as an effective method for faith transmission as it fosters the necessary intimacy to share relevant and passionate stories that powerfully answer why being Catholic truly matters now and to our next generation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

Although many other ethnic and cultural studies have moved beyond essentialist labels and categories, Cuban-American studies persists in categorizing the people belonging to the cultural group in terms of how much time they have spent in Cuba, thus creating a hierarchy of "authentic" Cuban-ness. Isabel Alvarez Borland gives a comprehensive overview of Cuban-American literary categories, and through her description we can see how these categories may lend themselves to stratification. These categories include: the first generation, the second generation, the one-and-a-halfer, and the ethnic writer. To say that one generation of Cuban exiles is more or less authentically Cuban discounts the emotional connection of individuals to a homeland—a homeland that is now different for each generation, and therefore, all Cuban-Americans live with constructed ideas of Cuba that are not necessarily reflective of a "reality" of Cuba. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that any of these individuals are any less Cuban or any less culturally or emotionally impacted by Cuba, as evidenced by someone like Cristina García who delves into Cuban culture in her writing and studying. The Agüero Sisters by Cristina García, can be read as a critique of this cultural categorization through the way in which characters in the novel obsess over taxonomizing animals and even other people. It seems in order for Cuban-American studies to move forward productively, these labels must be revised.

A young woman disconnected from her roots tries to save her family’s cigar factory from a greedy developer planning to gentrify their Latin neighborhood.

The aim of this dissertation is to develop and illustrate a spiritually centered narrative method for transforming disorder into agency and action. I use my own position as a second-generation Hispanic female immigrant to show how training in a spiritual practice that mirrors my ancestral traditions helped me productively move through a sense of displacement, illness, and lack of purpose. My research includes travel to Havana, Cuba, and immersion in a five-week shamanic counseling training program in Tampa, Florida, during which I learned how to narrate my experiences as I engaged in shamanic journeying. As I reflect on these experiences, I explore three questions: How can second-generation immigrants 1) overcome family histories of displacement to create a sense of home? 2) engage in self-care practices that promote healing and nourishing relationships? and 3) create healthy identities and a sense of purpose within their communities? Through the process of writing my own story, I move from individual pathology toward communal creativity and tap into the burgeoning activist movement of bruja feminism.

The present study consisted of two parts: (1) The examination of whether demographic differences in utilization of multiple forms of health services existed among Non-Hispanic Whites, Mexican-, Cuban-, and Puerto Rican-American adolescents. (2) The examination of whether the Andersen model, revised for Latino adolescents, fit equally well for Mexican-, Cuban-, and Puerto Rican-Americans. Data for this study were drawn from the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of 7th through 12th-grade students in the United States collected between 1994 and 1996.Logistic regression analyses indicated that there were significant differences in routine physical exams based on ethnicity. Mexican-American adolescents were less likely than Non-Hispanic White, Cuban-American, and Puerto Rican-American adolescents to receive routine physical exams. Finding based both on the logistic regressions and on the latent mean comparisons suggested that Cuban- and Puerto Rican-American adolescents are more likely to utilize health services than Mexican-American adolescents. Cuban-American adolescents were also less likely to indicate the need for medical services, whereas Mexican-American adolescents were more likely to state that they needed medical services but were unable to receive them.The results of multi-group confirmatory factor analyses provide mixed evidence toward the indication that the revised Andersen's conceptual model is an appropriate overall framework to utilize with Mexican-, Cuban-, and Puerto Rican-American adolescents. Based on the structural equation model findings, it appears that the major link between need and use of health care services is not supported in the three Latino subgroups. The Andersen model only partially addressed health care needs among the adolescent Latino subgroups. Although there are connections from the main predisposing predictors (including Latino adolescent-specific characteristics) to enabling resources and need, these indirect associations do not necessarily predict use of health services with Mexican-, Cuban-, and Puerto Rican-American adolescents. Clearly there is a great need for health care services among Latino adolescents, particularly given their health disparities in adolescent risk behavior; however current models need further revision, such as including key cultural factors and social context, to predict use of health care services.