This dissertation is a study on the role of race mixing in the formation of national identity in Mexico. It analyzes the cultural and political phenomenon of mestizofilia in 1920s Mexico, examining the national and international ideological crosscurrents that shaped it. This first chapter uses post-colonial and anthropological paradigms to explore the concept of the Other as a Western construct that objectifies the primitive, and rationalizes colonialism. Chapter two of the dissertation examines the history of thought on race mixing in Mexico, from the Conquest to the Revolution of 1910. The study looks at the effects of Western models for assimilation of the ethnic Other in New Spain and Mexico, as well as examines how negative European stereotypes of the primitive influenced Latin Americans' collective self-perception. Chapter three of the dissertation studies the ideological polemic of early 20th century between science and culture, and how it affected notions of the primitive as related to the post-revolutionary project of national construction. This chapter highlights the thought of three writers whose ideas express the socio-political and aesthetic sensibilities of the era: Manuel Gamio, premier Mexican anthropologist during the Revolutionary period; José Vasconcelos, writer/philosopher and Minister of Education under Obregón; and D. H. Lawrence, British travel writer and novelist who resided in Mexico during the mid-1920s. For the two Mexican writers, assimilating the primitive was part of their country's project of national construction. Both sought to create a sense of national unity around the symbolic figure of the Mestizo. The indigenous Other must become a part of the mixed-race body politic if Mexico was to progress. D. H. Lawrence was a vitalist thinker and primitivist artist who journeyed to the New World in order to write his novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), about the necessity of assimilating a primitive “blood consciousness” into the modern experience. For the European writer, reintegration of primitive tendencies was part of an aesthetic awareness and a personal endeavor that modern man must undergo in order to save Western civilization, but he denied that mestizaje could solve the problem of the lack of a shared collective consciousness in Mexico.

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".

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.

Between December 1960 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, 14,048 Cuban children were sent by their families out of the country to the United States through a program known as Operacion Pedro Pan. The children's memories of their homeland, their adopted country, and the program itself were formed by such factors as their age at the time of their expatriation, the length time that they spent apart from their families, and the communities that they were exposed to in the United States. While several novels and scholarly works have been written about Operation Pedro Pan, many authors have debated its purpose- whether or not the Central Intelligence Agency was trying to destabilize Fidel Castro's government- and its effectiveness because, having been a part of the exodus, their experiences influence how they report the stories of others. This paper analyzes newspaper articles, surveys, interviews, and literature written by Pedro Pans such as Carlos Eire's Waiting/or Snow in Havana, to determine how the widely accepted narrative of the United States saving Cuban children from "communist indoctrination" was formed in the United States and how this compares to the experiences of the Pedro Pan Children.

No description available.

In 1819, Ferdinand VII ordered the creation of two Colegios de Abogados in Cuba to prevent the expansion of the number of legal professionals, as well as the unauthorized practice of law. The strategy, however, failed, and lawyers increasingly became a force of political and social change in the island, being mostly inspired by the debates about the implementation of liberal agendas in and out of Cuba. Some Colegios de Abogados eventually became centers of anti-Spanish conspiracy and lawyers even led recurrent uprisings for Cuban independence. Ideas of reform among Cuban lawyers, however, were diverse, and different interpretations of liberalism surfaced, especially under the influence of other movements such as annexationism and autonomism. This variety of ideas encountered one another at the Constitutional Convention of 1901, where self-proclaimed liberal delegates still questioned, for example, free education and universal suffrage, which made evident the many shades that liberalism still had in Cuba at this time. This study takes legal professionals to be a strategic window to approach and explain key social, political and intellectual transformations in nineteenth century Cuba, while unveiling the leading role lawyers themselves played in those processes. Relying on personal and professional documentation, correspondence and job applications, the dissertation recreates lawyers’ political, intellectual and social positions, and shows how they had a decisive participation in historical change in late colonial Cuba. Their ideas survived in periodical publications, newspapers, and political writings that they established or where they participated, as well as in legislations that they enacted, applied or commented on. Being the most influential professional group of the period under study, lawyers represent a perfect tool to understand the end of Spanish times in Cuba and its transit, under the flags of liberalism, to an independent republic.

To counter regnant arguments in the historiography about the putative historical “forgetting” of Afro-Platines in their nations, “‘¡Pobres negros!’” explores the various social representations and commemorations devoted to blacks in the River Plate over the period from the mid-1800s to the 1930s. While never uniformly or consistently positive, over the nineteenth century these social remembrances nevertheless experienced a radical transformation. Early intellectual nation builders among the Generation of 1837 associated blacks with the forces of social, political, and cultural “barbarism.” These representations remained a part of the national memory until well into the late 1800s in liberal and progressive circles. For these thinkers, European immigration was the solution to all of Argentina’s ills. However, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, blacks in Argentina and Uruguay became the objects of more favorable remembrances, especially among nationalists. Blacks were now often depicted and historically remembered (and reimagined) as Platine Creoles and national heroes. Their white compatriots remembered that Afro-Platines, for instance, fought for and died defending their nations, and often lamented the fate of the “Poor blacks!” By dying for the cause of national sovereignty, blacks were seen as having vanished from the national scene and became the convenient objects of Creole nostalgia. National leaders like Bartolomé Mitre, the founder of the modern Argentine state and its historiography, nostalgically recalled and reimagined them as loyal patriots and heroes. Especially in Argentina, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this nostalgia was further encouraged by the social and political problems often blamed on foreigners, Jews, and radicals (i.e., non-Argentines). In this socio-political climate, therefore, Afro-Platines were fondly depicted in sites of social memory as loyal sons of the nation, as opposed to foreign anti-patriots and subversives. Even if incorporated as inferiors into the national imaginary, Afro-Platines were nonetheless variously commemorated by Creole elites at the turn of the nineteenth century (and, indeed, beyond).