Background The shortage in Latin-American Primary Care (PC) workforce may be due to negative perceptions about it. These perceptions might be probably influenced by particular features of health systems and academic environments, thus varying between countries. Methods Observational, analytic and cross-sectional multicountry study that evaluated 9,561 first and fifth-year medical students from 63 medical schools of 11 Latin American countries through a survey. Perceptions on PC work was evaluated through a previously validated scale. Tertiles of the scores were created in order to compare the different countries. Crude and adjusted prevalence ratios were calculated using simple and multiple Poisson regression with robust variance. Results Approximately 53% of subjects were female; mean age was 20.4±2.9 years; 35.5%were fifth-year students. Statistically significant differences were found between the study subjects’ country, using Peru as reference. Students from Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Paraguay perceived PC work more positively, while those from Ecuador showed a less favorable position. No differences were found among perceptions of Bolivian, Salvadoran, Honduran and Venezuelan students when compared to their Peruvian peers. Conclusions Perceptions of PC among medical students from Latin America vary according to country. Considering such differences can be of major importance for potential local specific interventions.

Peri-urban expansion patterns typically aggravate inequality and environmental precarity. Planners attempt to improve the quality and location of development by employing new tools that connect semi-private entities, national policies and non-governmental coalitions. Along the way, they overlook how action in the ongoing operations of local government offices employing the ‘old tools’ of land use regulation, zoning and the issuance of building permits often fosters the very patterns they are seeking to change. Using a sociological-institutional lens, this collection of essays examines how municipal land use staff create and sustain practices that interact with the growth pressures driving expansion, and the related spaces of possibility to improve outcomes. The information and data for these essays was drawn from field work undertaken in municipalities across metropolitan Guadalajara, as well as a review of official and other documents. The results are presented in a series of four essays that explore varying aspects of the institutional threads driving ongoing land use planning action. The first essay, "Ground rules: When daily practices among land use officials repeat to become 'gray institutions' of planning" examines the role of review by municipal employees and the presence of institutions. The second essay, "Making the ropes: How daily practices in a booming peri-urban municipality become durable 'gray' institutions shaping land use" analyzes the way prior experience creates precedent. The third essay "From archive to checklist: An ethnographic study of a municipal land use office in peri-urban Guadalajara" identifies an array of everyday collective practices in use. These include checklists, shared spreadsheets, rules of thumb, ways of talking, and archive creation. These 'gray institutions' strategically create and sustain power inside the municipality and with developers, as well as transmit and communicate values around municipal permitting and approvals of land use development. The last essay, “Play before the rules change: Building permit issuance and administrative transitions in municipalities in metropolitan Guadalajara, 2004-2020” identifies how local election-related changes and turnover generates uncertainty and can shift regulatory application. Taken together, the essays suggest that institutional analysis can be a powerful way to foreground action in planning – and that the day to day operations inside local government matter to the immediate and long-term implementation of regulations, plans and pressures on urban land use.

Over the past years, particularly during 2018, Chilean society has experienced a robust feminist movement led by high school students. At the same time, mainstream society and researchers claim that Chile is experiencing a youth civic and citizenship education crisis, particularly among young women. I address this apparent contradiction by challenging the futuristic approach in citizenship education taken in the country and exploring how young women are currently politically engaged and challenge gender oppression within their high schools and their activist spaces. I have used a post-human and post-colonial feminist theoretical framework to answer the following research question, How do female public high school students in Chile who identify as feminist or politically active produce their gender/political subjectivities in the 2018 context of contentious feminist politics? And, sub questions; How do they do this while engaging with feminist discourses and practices in and outside of school? How do they do this while engaging with historical narratives? Finally, how do they do this while engaging with formal political education in school? A context of contentious feminist politics will be understood as a context where feminism is prevalent in public discourse, which forces people -in this case students- to take a stance concerning this subject. To answer the research questions, I conducted a critical ethnography, observing classes and other activities at Edelbina González High School, a Chilean all-female public high school with an active group of high school feminists. During my fieldwork, I invited six 12th-grade participants to be my focal group of observation and to take part in individual testimonios interviews and collective art-based testimonios workshops. Through these methods, I produced fieldnotes of observations, transcriptions and audio-recordings of the interviews and workshops, and photographs of the school space and students’ art pieces. I analyzed the data through a three-layer process using thematic coding analysis, narrative structural and content analysis, visual analysis, and “plugging in with theory” analysis (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). This study engages with lengthy discussion regarding education and reproduction of gender regimes; it explores how oppressive systems transform but remain, particularly in regards to citizenship and formal political education through neoliberal discourses of girl empowerment. It also shows how feminist female high school students communally and creatively respond, theorize, and re-imagine political engagement within these frames, providing insights into what is, and what can be education for democratic citizenship and gender justice. The Feminist students in this study produced themselves as nomadic mestiza bodies engaging with pre-existing political frameworks but at the same time built something more. The students assembled themselves within an antagonistic us/them framework within the Chilean Student Movement, which considers the state and school as adversaries attempting to oppress them. Their high school attempted to reproduce them as feminine, successful, conflict-free neoliberal girls. Regardless, the feminist students displaced both the antagonistic and neoliberal model producing their gender/political subjectivities as nomadic, ever-shifting, vulnerable and strong, and connecting themselves with collective memories and historical narratives. The production of the feminist students’ gender/political subjectivities through “affectivism,” resistance, and political caring rendered the participants as nomadic mestiza bodies, always becoming, collectively connected and empowered by one another to produce political change.

This dissertation examines the post-1968 work of the Argentine artist and architect Clorindo Testa (1923-2013), arguing that 1968 represents a major turning point in his career, when he rethought his artistic practice in response to the dramatically altered institutional, political, and economic circumstances of Argentina in the late 1960s. Over the years between 1968 and 1974 Testa worked out the logic of this transformation and established the conceptual, stylistic, and thematic basis for the final four decades of his career. His studio production from this period is bracketed by the creation of two major, architecturally-themed works: the 1968 site-specific installation Prop for a Museum (Apuntalamiento para un museo) at National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and the 1974 mural-sized Dwelling, Transportation, Work, and Recreation (Habitar, circular, trabajar y recrearse), conceived for the Galería Carmen Waugh, in the same city. This dissertation proposes that, on an international level, Prop for a Museum stands out as one of the pioneering works of the emergent conceptualist practice of institutional critique, and that together with Dwelling, Transportation, Work, and Recreation it represents a kind of manifesto for the new, post-1968 direction in the artist’s work.

Given the growing racial and ethnic disproportionality amongst young Latinxs and early childhood teachers against the established benefits of racial and ethnic matching between students and teachers, in this study I aimed to gain insight into the often ignored trajectories and experiences of Latinx early childhood educators. In this study, I endeavored to address the need for more Latinx early childhood teachers to teach the growing majority of Latinx young children. I situated my study in Los Angeles, California, given the growing presence of Latinxs in Los Angeles County’s population and in its public-school system. It is in such a context that I sought to document and learn from the counter-stories of five Latinx early childhood teachers teaching Latinx young children.Utilizing Latinx Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) as a guiding theoretical framework and a project in humanization orientation, I posed the following research questions: 1. How do Latinx early childhood teachers in the County of Los Angeles, California (where Latinxs are the growing demographic majority) verbally portray their stories of becoming early educators? 2. How do Latinx early childhood teachers verbally portray their stories as early childhood educators in a community where Latinxs are the growing demographic majority? 3. As they reflect on becoming and being Latinx early childhood teachers, what consejos do they have for the field of early childhood education if it is serious about supporting the growth of Latinx early childhood teachers? This study involved a FotoHistorias methodology, which entailed utilizing participatory photography and pláticas (conversational interviews) to elicit lived experiences to “counter” deficit-oriented majoritarian stories of Latinx teachers, families, communities, and young children. Data were comprised of participatory photography, pláticas, and researcher memos. Findings, presented as counter-stories, shed light on necessary transformations in the field of early childhood teaching and teacher education. Implications point toward the importance of listening to and learning from Latinx early childhood teachers’ memoried experiences and stories, as they stand to inform the recruitment and retention of Latinx teachers within the field of early childhood education.

The purpose of the present study is to understand how interpersonal and structural ethnic stigma uniquely and collectively confer risk for adverse mental health outcomes in Latinx individuals living in the U.S. Employing a minority stress mediation framework with 639 self-identified Latinxs, the current study utilized manifest and latent variable correlations and latent variable structural equation modeling to examine distal stressors (interpersonal ethnic stigma, structural ethnic stigma) as predictors of mental health outcomes (psychological distress, psychological well-being), with proximal stressors (expectations of stigma, internalized stigma, perceptions of structural stigma) and a general psychological process (rumination) as potential mechanisms through which stigma experiences confer mental health risk. Findings were mixed in terms of their support for study hypotheses. Overall, results indicate that a minority stress mediation framework is applicable with a Latinx population. Interpersonal ethnic stigma yielded direct and indirect associations with proximal stressors, psychological processes, and mental health outcomes, and both proximal stressors and psychological processes emerged as potential pathways through which stigma experiences confer risk. However, associations among structural ethnic stigma and study variables were mostly nonsignificant. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for clinical practice, education of mental health practitioners, and immigration policy, along with limitations and future directions.

Examining the rise and fall of a socially democratic Gotham between 1945 and 1985, my dissertation presents a multiracial history of American popular culture. "Syncopating Segregation" links two previously disparate domains of scholarship: studies of postwar urban segregation and cross-cultural mediation. I argue that African American, Latinx, queer, and ethnically white New York musicians served as mediators who sought to rethink and remap the spatial contours of a divided city. In doing so, my work presents a somewhat unfamiliar picture postwar urban life: it moves beyond narratives of cultural appropriation and differs from many historians who posit that rigid patterns of segregation turned cities into racial and ethnic battlegrounds. While acknowledging that cities created new forms of de jure segregation, I show how African American and Latinx New Yorkers spurred musical cross-pollination during an era of mounting racial and ethnic division. Over the course of five chapters, I explore how musicians facilitated cross-cultural exchange in mambo, doo-wop, psychedelic rock, disco, and hip-hop. Each chapter revolves around mediators who used music to bridge racialized boundaries; by creating and popularizing integrated performance spaces premised on racial interaction rather than isolation, artists disrupted—but did not destroy—patterns of segregation in New York. I maintain that they changed the rhythm of the city just as they syncopated their music with off-beat cadences. Dancing at mixed-race clubs allowed New Yorkers to momentarily escape their segregated day-to-day lives. The existence of these venues in a divided landscape speaks to mediators’ successes in syncopating segregation. Although my dissertation serves as one of the first historical studies of musical forms that have traditionally been the purview of record collectors and fans, it is more than a series of genre studies. Instead, I reconstruct a social history of interracial musical scenes in post-World War II New York. Unlike most urban historians, I draw on oral histories, bootleg concert recordings, and fan magazines, in addition to an array of municipal and scholarly archives.

We are living in an age of widening inequality and fragmented social solidarity and trust. Simultaneously, our social connections and relationships are increasingly disperse. In this context, how do people understand and respond to their experiences of marginality and alienation? This dissertation uses the case of transnational intimate relationships in Peru to understand how these relationships and the context in which they occur become sites for individuals to resist experiences of subordination and disaffection, and reimagine future possibilities for themselves. Máncora, Peru is a small coastal town that has experienced rapid growth as a tourist destination, but that contends with high levels of socio-political and economic informality and precarity. Against this backdrop, I examine the relationships that have emerged between a group of local men and tourist women mainly from North America and Europe. Previous scholarship has understood these relationships as “female sex tourism” or “romance tourism,” however this dissertation moves beyond these sometimes one-dimensional accounts. Ultimately, beyond arguing that these relationships are not merely transactional, I argue that these relationships, and the context in which they occurred, provided the men and women I met in Máncora with something curative: a remedy for the marginality and alienation that they experienced in their everyday lives. Specifically, I examine how their relational pursuits of pleasure, escapism, and desire gave rise to fantasy. This fantasy fueled and was fueled by their relationships, and allowed the men and women to contest and cope with a sense of alienation and marginality engendered by neoliberalism, and make meaning under conditions of structural constraint. Using qualitative methods, including participant observation, interviews, photography, and social media content analysis, I explore three key themes. Part one describes a masculine subculture that emerged on the beach where the men worked and met their partners. This subculture was premised on pleasure and leisure, and shaped how they cultivated relationships with their partners, managed everyday experiences of subordination, and planned for the future. Part two examines the economic and gendered dynamics that underpinned the women’s desire for travel and escape. These dynamics also shaped why they sought out relationships with unlikely partners, and how they envisioned that they could transform their everyday lives to be more fulfilling. Finally, part three explores the role of fantasy in how the men and women imagined alternative possibilities for themselves within their relationships, and in the touristic context of the town. This dissertation also makes three key contributions. First, within sociology, Weber’s thesis of the “disenchantment of the world” is well known. It describes the sense of a loss of purpose, meaning, and transcendence in people’s lives as a consequence of modernity and the rationalization of social life. Less explored, however, is Weber’s recognition of the possibility of re-enchantment that can paradoxically emerge in response to these forces as people seek to recover meaning. This dissertation locates this process of re-enchantment in the ways that people engage with fantasy. Second, this dissertation advances a sociology of fantasy. I define fantasy as material, economic, and erotic imaginaries that allow people to project and construct alternative lives. I argue that fantasy can be understood as operating beyond the realm of individual-level behavior, and be recognized as a social condition or relational phenomenon. I also argue that while sometimes improbable and limiting, fantasies can also be a productive means through which people cope with and contest experiences of marginality and alienation. Finally, this dissertation makes a theoretical intervention by bridging conceptions of the future from sociology and queer theory. Queer theorists argue for utopian orientations to the world that permit for potentiality where there is none, and a being and doing for the future to move through the present. Sociologists have written about “imagined futures” to describe how people use seemingly irrational ideas about the future to make identity claims, assert moral worthiness, and transcend present realities. I argue that queer theory provides us with models for thinking about the reasons for, and means through which, marginalized people find spaces to exist, thrive, assert identity, and find community. A queer lens is useful because it demonstrates how and why marginality can lead to responses centered around pleasure, utopic imaginaries, and the projection of alternative futures.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the accuracy of intelligence tests when they have been prepared for Anglo-American children and applied to Latin-American children and to find the type of test that is best for Latin-American children.

Yes / We report a genome-wide association scan in over 6,000 Latin Americans for features of scalp hair (shape, colour, greying, balding) and facial hair (beard thickness, monobrow, eyebrow thickness). We found 18 signals of association reaching genome-wide significance (P values 5 × 10−8 to 3 × 10−119), including 10 novel associations. These include novel loci for scalp hair shape and balding, and the first reported loci for hair greying, monobrow, eyebrow and beard thickness. A newly identified locus influencing hair shape includes a Q30R substitution in the Protease Serine S1 family member 53 (PRSS53). We demonstrate that this enzyme is highly expressed in the hair follicle, especially the inner root sheath, and that the Q30R substitution affects enzyme processing and secretion. The genome regions associated with hair features are enriched for signals of selection, consistent with proposals regarding the evolution of human hair.