This study was conducted to examine the problem of attrition from a public middle school foreign language enrichment program by students who were admitted on the basis of superior grades, test scores, and recommendations from their teachers, counselors, and parents. The study took place in inner-city San Antonio and involves Latino sixth and seventh graders from mostly low-income families. Literature pertaining to school choice options, education of Latino students, and student attrition was reviewed. Research questions pertained to the differences in characteristics of students staying in the program and leaving it and in the reasons students gave for their decisions to stay or leave. In addition, the efficacy of an existing student attrition model, modified for this study, was tested for organizing data. Data sources included surveys of students and teachers, interviews with administrators and counselors, and school records. Logit regression analysis revealed two factors linked to student persistence in the program to be significant to the .01 level: student involvement in the initial decision to apply to the program, and the presence of a student's best friend at the school the student attended. A third variable approached significance (at the . 10 level): the student's score on the math subtest of a criterion-referenced test given statewide. Recommendations to the district program administrators include incorporating the math subtest score on the statewide instrument into the screening process and providing more and better information to parents and students who are eligible and wish to apply for acceptance into the program.

Why do some communities have access to essential services, such as water or health care, and neighboring communities do not? How do citizens influence the distribution of public services? This dissertation presents a theory of "trading favors" in which I argue that communities can coordinate and trade their collective votes for preferential access to public services. This long-term relationship with politicians is a form of local distributive politics, and I highlight that neighborhood associations provide a platform for voters to organize and increase their bargaining power towards politicians. I argue that 1) high community activity and 2) strong, unified leadership can enable group members to coordinate their votes before an election and get the attention of politicians after the election to improve their access to public services. I focus on variation in water access: water scarcity is a growing global concern, and access to water is often manipulated as a political tool. During 18 months of fieldwork, I collected extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence from the state of Ceará in Northeast Brazil. I include a historical discussion of the origins of community organizing and introduce a typology of community organizing. I illustrate the theoretical mechanisms through case studies of neighboring communities that draw on 104 qualitative interviews with rural residents, local leaders, state bureaucrats, and academic experts. I test my main hypotheses through statistical analysis of an original household survey with 1,990 respondents from 120 rural communities merged with precinct-level electoral data. I also analyze long-term voting patterns at over 15,000 electoral precincts across Ceará in five municipal elections. I find that water access is most reliable and secure in communities with high community activity, strong social ties, and constant leadership. I find evidence for my main mechanism: organized communities are more likely to concentrate their votes, and bloc voting improves water access. Communities are very consistent in their bloc voting behavior over time: the same places continue to concentrate their votes, and the same places continue to disperse their votes. I also find evidence that many communities switch allegiance across elections, which indicates that communities are credible in their threats to switch their electoral support if they do not get the services they need. My findings shed light on the important but poorly understood influence of collective action on local politics and development. The distributive politics literature tends to focus on decision-making by parties and politicians. My results demonstrate the agency of voters in organizing collectively to select and influence candidates that make distributive appeals, especially through neighborhood associations. I develop our understanding of local leaders, who often serve as development/vote brokers and intermediate access to the state, and I provide evidence that poor citizens bargain with their votes and can use bloc voting as a grassroots strategy for improving public service access.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 259-270) / ix, 270 leaves : col. ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Based on 18-months fieldwork, 1997-1999, in various organisations, social clubs and radio programs that were constructed by participants and 'outsiders' as an expression of a local migrant community. Attempts to answer and challenge what it means to be a Latin American in Adelaide and in what sense Latin American migrants and refugees in Adelaide can be spoken about as members of an 'ethnic/migrant community' in relation to the official multiculturalism discourse and popular representations of migrants in Australia. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Anthropology, 2001

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Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéresserons à l’évolution du système migratoire entre l’Amérique latine et l’Espagne depuis la fin du XIXè siècle jusqu’à la crise économique qui a débuté en 2008. Notre hypothèse de départ est que cette dernière remet en cause la théorie de la « proximité culturelle » selon laquelle la communauté de langue, de culture et de religion avec les Espagnols faciliterait l’intégration des Latino-Américains en Espagne par rapport aux autres communautés d’immigrés. Après le boom migratoire des années 2000, les chiffres de la crise semblent indiquer un changement de cycle migratoire et une recomposition des flux, basée sur un processus de « délatino-américanisation » en cours. Qu’en est-il réellement ? Ce processus est-il réversible ? Nous répondrons à ces questions en étudiant la façon dont les Latino-Américains sont affectés par la crise dans deux Communautés Autonomes aux traditions migratoires différentes, l’Aragon et la Catalogne / Throughout this thesis, our interest will be drawn to the evolution of the migration system between Latin America and Spain from the end of the 19th century until the economic crisis that took place in 2008. Our starting hypothesis is that the latter makes us reconsider the theory of the « cultural proximity » according to which the language, cultural and religious communities with the Spanish, would make the integration of the Latin-Americans easier than the other migrant communities. After the migration boom in the 2000’s, the crisis figures seem to reveal a change of migration cycle as well as a recomposition of the migratory flows on the basis of an ongoing « Dis-Latin-Americanization» process. What about the real facts ? Is that process irreversible ? We are going to answer these questions by studying the way Latin-Americans are affected by that crisis in two Autonomous Communities, the migratory traditions of which are different : Aragon and Catalonia.

"The purpose of this study was to formulate a recommended program to aid in the social integration of Latin-American and Anglo-American children in the secondary schools of Texas. In preparation for the development of this suggested plan, some of the more serious problems involved in the education of Latin-American children in schools designed primarily for the instruction of Anglo-American pupils were studied in available literature, and a set of psychological, sociological, and democratic criteria was formulated to serve as sound principles upon which to base the suggest program."--Leaf 1.

This dissertation examines how Black and Latino men who have sex with men (MSM) are making sense of the contemporary HIV/AIDS epidemic and their relation to it. Black and Latino MSM in the United States are disproportionately impacted by HIV. Interdisciplinary scholarship on the matter has conceptualized risk as an intrinsic facet of HIV. However, this research has paid little attention to the process by which Black and Latino MSM form their HIV risk perceptions. In this dissertation, I advance the “risk ecology framework” as a novel socioecological approach for understanding risk perception. This framework conceives of HIV risk perception as emerging from individuals’ relationship to HIV as shaped by the intersecting influences of the broader social environment. I base my analysis on 40 in-depth semi-structured interviews with HIV-negative Black and Latino MSM in New York City, as well as a year of participant-observation with a health advocacy group that serves this community. I find respondents form their risk perceptions by reflecting on HIV vis-à-vis their respective and distinctive social locations. The intersections of race, class, and sexuality come to be associated with HIV risk across the ecological levels of an individual’s lived experience, revealing a risk ecology, or a set of interrelated potential threats posed by HIV. I find this risk ecology to be reflected in Black and Latino MSM’s framing of HIV as a risk to their bodily health and social wellbeing, on the one hand. Or, its framing as personally irrelevant, on the other. Relationships and interactions with family, friends, and romantic/sexual partners inform what Black and Latino MSM understand HIV to potentially threaten. Respondents and the people in their lives draw upon culturally-available discourses, rhetoric, and beliefs concerning HIV that reflect how the institutionalization of racial, social, and sexual inequalities structure risk perception. With respect to health-relevant behaviors, I demonstrate how the analysis of risk perception formation clarifies the ways in which Black and Latino MSM make use of preventative tools and construct meanings about sex. I conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of the risk ecology framework for future health policy and further sociological research. By interrogating what it means to be at-risk, this dissertation lends crucial insight into the persistence of the HIV epidemic at a time when the means to end it are available, and also enriches sociological understandings of risk both within and beyond the public health domain.

This thesis focuses on publishing projects developed by Guillermo Deisler, Felipe Ehrenberg, Ulises Carrión, and Mirtha Dermisache between the 1960s and 1980s in Latin America and Europe, a period marked by the expansion of new mass media and an expectation of political radicalism in Latin America and Europe. By taking charge of the entire publication process, these authors established circulation networks that sought to circumvent institutional frameworks, redefining fundamental concepts for the modern aesthetic code such as author, reception, and work. This thesis argues, however, that this redefinition was not exempt from concessions and negotiations with the cultural, commercial, or political institutions to which, in principle, they opposed. Through an analysis focused on the material aspects of the various publications, my research conceives the technologies used and hinted in the production of these works – the manual platen press, the mimeograph, the typewriter, handwriting – as the place where a series of contradictions linked to the relationship between culture, institutions, and technology materialize. Against the common interpretation of using these devices and techniques as an anti-institutional gesture, the three chapters of this manuscript examine the office origin of these technologies to compare these projects with writing and printing practices that remained excluded from the literary, artistic and publishing market spheres. I conceive these technologies as transaction vehicles, where the limits between what enters and what is excluded from culture are constantly reimagined, and, at the same time, as bureaucratic phantasms, that is, as the imaginary scripts that the authors elaborate to “work out” the anxieties generated by modernizing processes at different levels of culture. In these projects, the office thus evokes bureaucratic values such as productivity, individualism, and commodification, which permeate them both as object of rejection and desire, of aversion and fascination, without a sharp cut between one approximation and the other.

The linguistic landscape of Canadian workplaces is becoming more diverse as organizations employ individuals who come from various countries and speak different native languages. As language is an important marker of identity and group membership, language-based identities are powerful in shaping workplace experiences. Guided by both the ethnolinguistic identity theory (ELIT: Giles et al., 1977; Giles & Johnson, 1987) and communication accommodation theory (CAT: e.g., Dragojevic et al., 2016; Gallois et al., 2005; Giles & Ogay, 2006), this study explores the experiences of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans working in the Canadian National Capital Region in relation to their linguistic identities, coping strategies, and intergroup interactions. A thematic analysis of 24 semi-structured interviews shows that participants experience a dynamic shift in their identity in which they move between feelings of self-doubt and a sense of confidence and comfort in their workplaces. This shift occurs as they navigate the cognitive and emotional experiences of working in a nonnative language. Factors that influence this identity shift include social comparisons, positive implications associated with their native linguistic identity, negative evaluations, and empathy in the workplace. This study also provides a detailed description of the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and interactional coping strategies that participants enact to navigate their workplaces. In terms of intergroup interactions, the participant’s experiences, their evaluations, and reactions to accommodative or nonaccommodative behaviours from native speaking peers in their workplaces are explored. The final pages of this study include some recommendations for human resource practitioners.

This dissertation examines how Latin American intellectuals and artists identified with the 1960s and 1970s counterculture engaged with the idea of the "Third World", and incorporated elements usually identified with Africa, Asia and Latin America to their experimental practices in writing, performance and film. Drawing from an archive of experimental films, underground publications, alternative books, independent documentaries in 16mm and Super8, festival and conference documents, personal letters, travel diaries and notebooks, this dissertation analyzes how cultures and ideas from the Third World were depicted, reimagined and experienced by important Latin American countercultural figures from Brazil and Argentina: Miguel Grinberg, Glauber Rocha and a group of filmmakers and artists that visited Afro-Brazilian religious sites alongside the U.S. American group Living Theater in the 1970s. The dissertation examines the engagement of these countercultural intellectuals with three specific transnational political projects in circulation during the Cold War – Inter-American, Tricontinental, and Afro-Asian– as instances of geographic imagination. The dissertation concludes that, in doing so, these Latin American countercultural intellectuals put forth an alternative internationalist vision for Latin America and the Third World, articulating a worldview that went beyond the political frames of the Cold War and the traditional forms of Latin American nationalism.