Thesis (M.S.)--Central Connecticut State University, 2003. / Thesis advisor: Gustavo Mejía. In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Spanish. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-83). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2002. / Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 208-213).

Greenbelts have been used around the world to control urban growth and to enhance the natural environment of cities since the last century. However, some Latin American governments, influenced by urban renewal principles and modern planning, have implemented greenbelts to beautify and order cities. Much criticism has arisen about the social repercussions of using greenbelts as a way to control citizen behavior, which in many cases has resulted in exclusionary practices, especially of low-income populations. Based on a case study that documents and analyzes the uses and perceptions of residents of the informal settlement, Los Platanitos, of the Parque Nacional Mirador Norte, my research attempts to illuminate the political and social processes shaping urban environmental planning in Santo Domingo in order to understand practices of exclusion and marginalization in contexts marked by socioeconomic inequalities. / text

The assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in 1961 marked the beginning of many rebirths for the Dominican Republic. Confronted with the growing pains of an emerging democratic national consciousness, the island was also faced with an unprecedented circumstance: a massive exodus that displaced thousands of Dominicans to the United States and Puerto Rico. My dissertation focuses on contemporary narrative representations of Dominican migrations to the United States and Puerto Rico. In chapter 1, "A Product of Exiles, Travels and Displacements: The Constructions of an Ethnic and Racial Consciousness in the United States in Pedro Henríquez Ureña's Memoir," I propose my own working definition of a Dominican transnational subjectivity at the beginning of the 20th century as I see it surfacing in Henríquez Ureña's memoir. In chapter two, "With Floating (Intranational) Borders: Displaced Dominicans in Puerto Rican Narratives," I explore the narrative representation of Dominican migrations to Puerto Rico and the challenges they bring about to the Puerto Rican national discourse constituted in the late 1930s. This chapter analyzes José Luis González's La luna no era de queso: memorias de infancia (1988), Ana Lydia Vega's "El día de los hechos" from her short story collection Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (1982) and Magali García Ramis's "Cuatro retratos urbanos" from the short story collection Las noches del riel de oro (1995). In chapter three, "Of Absent (nomadic) Fathers and Boys in Construction: Dominican Diasporic Subjectivities in Junot Díaz's Drown," I analyze the short story collection titled Drown (1993) by Junot Díaz. My reading of Diaz's work interprets his characters as gravitating towards communities in which they become active components of multi-racial and multi-ethnic communities fostered by global migrations. In the last chapter, "Crooked City Women: A Reading of Race, Ethnicity and Migration in Narratives of Late 20th and 21st Century Dominican Women writers," I focus on Loida Martiza Pérez's novel Geographies of Home (1999) and Josefina Báez's performance piece Dominicanish (2000) to illustrate how their work challenges patriarchal forms of expression that are rooted in the homeland and then disseminated in U.S. diasporic Dominican communities. / text

Transportation planning initiatives are assumed to further the development of growing cities across the globe. Latin American cities, especially, suffer from a deficit of infrastructure that presents greater challenges to the efficient movement of people and goods, which makes transportation one of the biggest hindrances to development in Latin America. Throughout the twentieth century, development projects in the Dominican Republic were carried out in the contexts of foreign military occupation and state repression, whereby processes of technical modernization arrived alongside state-led violence. Meanwhile, grandiose infrastructure projects were paired with narratives of national greatness. Decisions regarding land use and distribution of public services remained inattentive of the poorest residents, causing enormous inequalities in increasingly urbanized cities. President Leonel Fernández campaigned for his third term promising to break from old forms of corruption, and has symbolically delivered this promise of progress through the construction of a new subway system. The Santo Domingo Metro revolutionizes transportation options in key areas of a chaotic and congested road system, where many public transportation vehicles are old and dilapidated. Metro can save hours in commute times, provide safe, reliable transit at low cost, and promote sustainability. However, critics note that billions of dollars invested on Metro expansion preempt the funding of health and education. Construction processes displace neighborhoods, while many communities situated near the stations still face daily hardships associated with inadequate housing and lack of sanitation. My paper blends the perspectives of technical transportation planning and critical development theory to understand whether the Metro will serve these communities by improving their access to services, schools, and job sites, or simply drain scarce funds from these very areas. This paper also critically evaluates the way that the current administration‘s symbol of progress at times mirrors the top-down political culture of the past. The Metro thus elucidates larger theoretical and practical questions regarding the interactions of transportation planning and political culture, and their impacts on spatial hierarchies and growth within urban spaces. / text

Documenting temporal changes to coastal zones is an essen­tial part of understanding and managing these environ­ments. The exclusive use of traditional surveying tools may not be practical for monitoring large, remote, or rapidly changing areas. This paper investigates the utility of multispectral Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite data for docu­menting changes to a Caribbean coastal zone using the change vector analysis processing technique. The area of study was the coastal region near the village of Buen Hombre on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The primary habitats of interest were the intertidal mangrove for­ ests, and the shallow water seagrasses, macroalgae, and coral reefs. The change vector analysis technique uses any number of spectral bands from multidate satellite data to produce change images that yield information about both the magnitude and direction of differences in pixel values (which are proportional to radiance). The final products were created by appending color-coded change pixels onto a black-and-white base map. The advantages and limitations of the technique for coastal inventories are discussed.

INTRODUCTION: More than 2.2 million people die each year from diarrheal disease. Most cases of diarrheal disease can be linked with a lack of access to clean water and sanitation. The proper usage of sanitation, hygiene and safe drinking water are all mechanisms by which to prevent or limit fecal contamination, and in turn, reduce the risk of diarrheal disease. As a result, it is imperative to examine and understand risk factors for fecal contamination of drinking water in the home. One way to assess fecal contamination is to use indicator bacteria such as E. coli. These bacteria can be easily measured and have been weakly associated with increased risk of gastrointestinal illness. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to determine if characteristics of household drinking water storage containers impacted the concentration of total coliforms and E. coli in the stored household drinking water in rural Dominican Republic communities. METHODS: The data were collected through a cross-sectional survey and from a four month prospective cohort study in rural communities in the Dominican Republic during 2005. Data analysis was conducted using STATA 10. Descriptive statistics were calculated and reported as percentages. Bivariate statistics were carried out to test independent associations between container characteristics and E. coli. In addition, t-tests were used to examine differences in concentrations of E. coli and total coliforms as well as other household and water characteristics that may play an important role in household drinking water management and practice and contamination. RESULTS: After testing independent potential risk factors for E. coli contamination, it was determined that household storage practices have a significant impact on drinking water quality. More specifically, households that stored drinking water in containers with narrow openings (typically < 2 inches in diameter) had lower concentrations of E. coli. The water was more likely to remain protected from additional contamination once stored in the home. DISCUSSION: The association with household storage practices with E. coli contamination reveals the importance of point of drinking water management in the home. Specifically, we documented simple storage practices (commonly practiced in homes in the Dominican Republic) that can protect or reduce drinking water from contamination once in the home. While previous literature has been unable to identify a single most important risk factor of E. coli contamination in drinking water, findings from this study and previous studies indicate that more research is needed to further elucidate the role of household drinking water storage techniques in protecting household members and reducing risk of disease.

Background: 884 million people do not have access to clean water, which is a potential contributor to diarrhea (JMP, 2010). The purpose of this study was to examine the potential associations between the occurrence of diarrhea and the levels of turbidity, total coliforms, and Escherichia coli (E. coli), in 185 households in Bonao, Dominican Republic in 2005-2006. Methods: A biweekly water quality dataset and a weekly diarrhea occurrence dataset were merged using three different methods. T-tests and odds ratios were calculated for all three different datasets. Multivariate logistic regression was also conducted. Results: There were 430 cases of diarrhea out of 14,245 observations. In the age-adjusted multivariate logistic regression, turbidity (OR = 1.36; p-value = .012) and total coliforms (OR = .842; p-value = .006) were found to be significant for an association with the occurrence of diarrhea. E. coli was not found to be significant for an association. Conclusions: This study strengthens the evidence supporting a positive association between turbidity and the occurrence of diarrhea. This study also showed a negative association between total coliforms and diarrhea. Future studies are needed to clarify these associations.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine to what extent Sen's freedom-centred view of development, with its existing theoretical foundations, offers sufficient theoretical insights for guiding development policies towards the enhancement of human freedoms. The theoretical part of the dissertation focuses on the three foundational building stones of Sen's freedom-centred view of development. First, the capability approach sets the evaluation space of development in the capabilities that people have reason to choose and value, but by doing so, it is argued that Sen's capability approach contains tensions between human freedom and human well-being that can be loosened by thickening this evaluation space with a substantial view of human well-being. Second, the capability approach views individual agency as central in development, but because of the socio-historical dimension of human freedom and agency, it is argued that concepts of collective capabilities and of socio-historical agency are more central in promoting human freedoms. Third, promoting human freedoms cannot be dissociated from democratic policy-making. But because the link between the two is not necessary, it is argued that the capability approach's consequentialist evaluation of human well-being will have to be thickened by a procedural evaluation which assesses the exercise of political freedom through certain normative principles of decision-making. The empirical part of the thesis illustrates these theoretical arguments through the analysis of two case studies, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. The case studies particularly point to a country's socio-historical agency, or collective capability in promoting human well-being, through socio-historical narratives. These narratives assess a country's collective capability in promoting human freedoms by looking at the country's socio-historical reality, and how its members have appropriated that reality in the course of the country's history, opening up or closing down opportunities for realising policy decisions towards the removal of unfreedoms.

Four prograding reef terraces (6, 15, 30, and 50 m) have been repetitively exposed to marine and freshwater alteration during the Pliocene and Pleistocene periods. Prolonged freshwater alterations have resulted in many diagenetic overprints that obscure early diagenetic products. This study investigates the sequence of the diagenetic processes and products in the terrace deposits using five long cores and 14 short cores taken from these different reef terraces. The lithologic changes in the cores were documented for reconstruction of the original depositional frameworks prior to embarking on a diagenetic study. Both textural and geochemical changes were examined within all four different terraces in order to characterized the diagenetic history. The textural changes observed in the cores and thin sections, provided preliminary evidence of the diagenetic environment. Through the use of X-ray diffractometry, stable isotopes (C and O), and trace element data, the interpretation of the diagenetic environment can be constrained. The reef terraces were deposited as as shallowing upward units following a down-stepping carbonate sequence. The lithology of the cores is dominated by reefal facies, which consist of the back reef, reef crest, front, and fore reef facies. The exposure surfaces, observed at various depths, constrained the interpretation of early diagenetic environments (met. vadose and phreatic). Three major diagenetic environments can be characterized from the cores, these are meteoric vadose, meteoric phreatic, and dolomitizaton. These diagenetis environments produced different geochemical signatures, which can be quantified through analysis of the stable isotopes and trace elements incorporated into the cements. The different reef terraces represent different duration of exposure, with the higher terraces having been exposed longer than the lower ones. This study enables the documentation and comparison of the processes and products of the meteoric diagenesis that occurred within these different terraces. In addition, this study also constrain the early dolomitization observed in sigmoidal reef deposits. In order to further quantify the process of early dolomitization, mineralogy, isotopes C and O, trace elements, and the Sr-isotopes were examined as well.