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This abstract summarizes the findings and implications of the LARRP-CRL Priorities Survey conducted from March 21 to April 9, 2024. The Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP) aims to enhance access to information in Latin American Studies through collaborative initiatives among academic libraries. The survey, designed by Dr. Liladhar R. Pendse and D. Ryan Lynch, achieved a response rate of 44%, providing valuable insights into member perceptions of LARRP's activities.Key findings indicate a strong emphasis on digital initiatives, with 71% of respondents rating them as highly important. Additionally, the survey explored perceptions of open access projects and distributed resources, highlighting the critical role of LARRP in supporting institutions with limited budgets. Qualitative responses suggest a desire for further collaboration and innovative projects to enhance resource sharing. This survey underscores the importance of LARRP in fostering collaborative efforts, promoting open access, and ensuring the sustainability of Latin American research resources. Keywords: LARRP, CRL, Latin American Studies, web archiving, digital initiatives, open access, collaborative resources, survey findings.

This dissertation examines a genre of painting called “true portraits,” or “statue paintings,” to produce new understandings of artistic media in viceregal Peru during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This project treats the relationship between painting and sculpture in the religious and intellectual colonial South American contexts. Painted and printed true portraits, which represented miraculous Catholic cult sculptures, originated in Europe but gained more popularity in South America during the early modern period. These simulated sculptures typically depict an altar occupied by a statue of the Virgin Mary in a large, richly adorned triangular dress. These artworks have been studied in-depth for their individual iconographies, but this dissertation contributes insight into the trans-medial presentations of statues and the resulting artistic hierarchies found within these paintings. My study places true portraits in conversation with European artistic treatises to demonstrate fundamental differences in how Spanish and colonial Peruvian subjects perceived the media of painting and sculpture. In Europe, painting was considered a noble artform, but in these artworks, local (mainly Indigenous) artists use paintings to diffuse the likeness of miracle-working sculptures for devotional and evangelical purposes. This common practice implies that sculpture, as a medium, was as important as the figures represented in that form. I illustrate the reasons for this shift in artistic thinking using Peruvian texts on idolatry, printed books that describe the cult statues these paintings represent, didactic printed images, and manuscript sources such as inventories and ship registries. This dissertation consists of six chapters and is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the visual and textual precedents for painted true portraits and the theological connections between statues and paintings in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Here, I present the contrasts between viceregal Peruvian and Spanish imperial ideas about painting and sculpture as artforms. This part also illustrates how sculptures were perceived in relation to other local artistic media and materials including stone, textiles and Indigenous huacas (devotional objects and elements of the natural environment). The second part uses two chapter-length case studies to demonstrate the ways in which the circulatory patterns of statue paintings and Marian devotional iconographies re-enforced the prominence of the art of sculpture in this colonial religious society.

In this dissertation, I examine how 21st-century novels and short stories written by women authors from Brazil and Argentina participate in the contemporary debates about feminicide in Latin America. Mexican anthropologist Marcela Lagarde introduced the legal and political concept of feminicide to the murder investigations at Ciudad Juárez, at the US-Mexico border, in the 1990s. Feminicide addresses the killing of women because of their gender, and it has been studied in various disciplines, such as law, anthropology, sociology, and public health. Feminist scholars such as Rita Segato affirm that this extreme form of violence against women is structural and instrumental to maintaining a hierarchical social organization. Over the past decade, massive protests throughout Latin America helped popularize the concept, and several literary works focusing on this topic have been published. Although violence against women is an age-old problem that has always been present in literature, the conceptualization of feminicide has given contemporary writers a feminist framework to approach the topic anew. This phenomenon is only just beginning to be addressed by literary scholars.My dissertation highlights the aesthetic dimensions of the political struggle against feminicidal violence while exploring the potential of literature to create knowledge, build community, and perform acts of disobedience to a patriarchal political order. In Chapter 1, I study the nonfiction novel Chicas muertas (2014) by Argentine author Selva Almada. I argue that Chicas muertas produces feminist theory about feminicide by exploring several narrative aesthetics, including journalistic chronicle, crime fiction, and autobiography. Moreover, Chicas muertas disrupts the national history of political violence by suggesting that feminicide is political and by centering on border towns in rural Argentina. In Chapter 2, I study how the novel Mulheres empilhadas (2019) by Brazilian author Patrícia Melo confronts the Myth of Racial Democracy in Brazil. By contrasting how the national justice system deals with violence against white middle-class women and violence against Indigenous women, this novel exposes the justice system’s biases against women and against racialized communities. I argue that the novel suggests that confronting culturally constructed imaginaries about Indigenous peoples and Indigenous women in Brazil is a necessary step in the feminist struggle to combat feminicide. In Chapter 3, I study the horror short story “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” (2016), by Argentine author Mariana Enriquez. This story engages with the topic of female monstrosity as a response to feminicide. I argue that when women choose to transform themselves into she-monsters by walking through a bonfire and surviving, they are performing an act of embodied resistance to feminicidal violence. Overall, this dissertation shows how feminist writers expand the conversation about feminicidal violence beyond simplistic victim-perpetrator paradigms that neglect systemic violence. Moreover, I contend that these works challenge national histories of political violence when they frame feminicide as political violence, exposing the biases of local and national justice systems against women and racialized communities. Finally, I sustain that feminist literature about feminicide co-create a counter-discourse about feminicide in dialogue with other feminist arts, scholarship, and activism.

Taxation is a big part of the larger puzzle behind income and wealth inequality in Latin America, largely considered to be the most unequal region in the world. This dissertation asks why some Latin American countries are more capable of collecting tax revenue than others, and what are some of the main impediments to tax reforms in the region. The dissertation is organized around three main empirical studies, each contributing to specific literatures in the social sciences. First, a cross-national time series analysis of 17 Latin American countries since the 1990s identifies some of the main social and political drivers of variation in levels and structure of tax revenue in the region. Second, qualitative hand-coding analysis of roll-call congressional debates over two different tax reforms in Brazil and Argentina identifies and classifies the rhetorical strategies employed by both proponents and opponents of tax reforms. And third, analysis of rich data collected from more than 50 in-depth elite interviews with Argentinian agrarian producers who mobilized against a tax increase in 2008 describes the different pathways business actors take when they decide to engage in street protests, and the patterns in which they maintain their anti-tax business activism after this initial mobilization.

This dissertation investigates the sources of political power among Mexican forced returnees during two significant periods of expulsions from the United States: The Great Depression and the Great Recession. Through the qualitative analysis of secondary sources, archival documents, government statistics, interviews with forced returnees, and field observation notes, this mixed-methods research provides a comparative historical analysis of how returnees mobilize embodied remittances (non-financial resources accumulated abroad) to legitimize their socio-political incorporation.Key findings from this investigation reveal three critical sociological insights into forced returnees' political mobilization. First, the type of embodied assets remitted shapes returnees' approaches to citizenship. Individuals with less transferable skills employ affective narratives of belonging to establish civic entitlement, while those with marketable skills use instrumental discourses to present themselves as contributors to the origin country’s workforce and society. Second, the implementation of political remittances—another form of embodied capital—is influenced by a foreign-established sense of political efficacy. Returnees with positive interactions with American institutions are more likely to participate in collective political mobilization than those with negative experiences, particularly with the American justice system. Third, the transferability of embodied remittances significantly impacts the extent and type of political involvement. Returnees with transferable skills confidently leverage their potential to contribute to economic and cultural development, exhibiting bolder political behaviors. Conversely, those with less transferable skills adopt cautious political strategies, focusing on achievable gradual changes.This work contributes to understanding the transnational dimensions of political mobilization, emphasizing the interplay between migration experiences and the pursuit of socio-political incorporation in the homeland. The study illustrates how forced returnees use their embodied remittances as organizational and symbolic resources to gain political leverage and advocate for their rights, mapping diverse pathways of social and political integration.

This dissertation examines how organizers and care workers enact change to promote socially just futures (Tuck, 2009). By studying the praxis of transformative change, which aims to address the root causes of social issues (Kivell et al., 2022), we aim to promote knowledge from the grassroots by gathering insights into how change-makers function as a group and enact transformative change in their communities.A praxis (i.e., embodied theory) of transformative change sheds light on grassroots processes that enact the social change many practitioners envision, starting within organizing settings. Learning from organizers’ change praxis offers insights into how people envision futures of ideal co-existence, co-create internal practices to reorganize their settings, and engage in external collective actions (Basso & Krpan, 2022; Kivell et al., 2022; Martín-Baró, 1994). This aim aligns with the goals of critical and decolonial movements in scholar-activist psychology, effectively bringing community knowledge into academia. Specifically, I asked: How do care workers, organizers, and (scholar) activists embody and enact transformative change? To explore this topic, I interviewed 25 care workers and organizers engaged in anti-racist and transformative organizing work. Guided by an information power sampling strategy, we selected 17 interviews most relevant to our study’s aims. Significantly, we noted that many of our participants identified their work as abolitionist, aiming to dismantle systems and ideologies of harm by advocating for redirecting funding, resources, and programming from logics of punishment rooted in carceral systems (i.e., police, prisons, justice system) to structures of care, mutual aid, and community support, We then conducted a critical reflexive thematic analysis with a student-activist research team (Braun & Clarke, 2022). We analyzed insights from change-makers’ expertise on how they: (1) envisioned ideal co-existence in society, (2) enacted those visions to co-create internal practices to ensure equity and unsettle power differentials in their organizing settings, and (3) engaged in collective action to promote justice and liberation in their communities. Our research team discerned results highlighting transformative change internal organizational practices that shaped external community actions: (a) Participants were inspired by their collectives’ rebellious values of care, which shaped (b) the embodiment of care-centered values through relational practices, (c) democratizing decision-making processes aiming for heterarchy, and (d) instilling accountability mechanisms as a refusal to the systemic abandonment of people. This study contributes to understanding and promoting the psychology of social change, by learning directly from grassroots change-makers. Our research highlighted insights from the understory of the social change forest, illuminating clearings toward more just conditions of co-existence.

This dissertation tells a story of social and climate action in urban Latin America. It is a study of policy reform, taking bus public transportation as the sector of analysis and Santiago of Chile and the Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM) of Costa Rica as the case studies. Relying on inductive qualitative methods -cross-case comparison and process tracing-, and based on field research with 47 interviews conducted and official and non-official document analysis, this dissertation project finds the importance of urgency and salience around the need of a bus reform to attend social and climate concerns, as well as the capacity of policymakers to insulate the policy from organized interests, as factors that trigger the bus reform. Moreover, it portrays cases where policymakers also play the role of policy entrepreneurs bringing salience to the need of a reform. The analysis here provided acknowledges that the launch of a bus reform is not the final step to achieving social and climate action, thus it narrates the whole gradual process: from inaction to the moment when the topic is brought to the political forefront to when reform starts. It continues studying the evolution of this reform, analyzing how it shapes institutions, interest groups organization and social and climate outcomes. This research compares a case of a successful reform where oversight and monitoring mechanisms are in place and where the bus service works in an integrated and systemic way -Santiago- to one where inaction and old poor-working structures are maintained throughout time and where the bus service works in an atomized and chaotic way -the GAM. It shows how, through positive feedback, sustained action leads to the strengthening of the institutions governing the sector and data transparency, while sustained inaction leads to a deterioration of the institutions and to structurally powerful interest groups.Even though they tackle environmental, social and climate concerns and the bus is the main public transportation mode used in Latin America, bus reforms embody a type of reform that is electorally unappealing. Sectoral economic capture is focused on mega-projects in the global South and, in a region where there is a culture of automobile consumption such as Latin America, infrastructure investments for private vehicles are particularly appreciated by voters. Therefore, this dissertation provides evidence on why and how action can take place even when pushing for electorally unattractive policies and when that means redistributing power and going against entrenched organized interests.

The Haitian Revolution won national independence through ardent battle with successive European colonial powers, simultaneously sparking a wave of slave abolition and aligning with the most radical sectors of the French Revolution. Against that standard, the states then detaching from Spain like Bolívar’s Gran Colombia appear as deeply ambiguous victories, dangling abolition cynically before the slaves in part to reduce their numbers as cannon fodder, repressing the persistent attempts at state-formation by the descendents of Inca, and preserving the economic and political power of a narrow national bourgeoisie. This dissertation analyzes the role of independence in Latin America, beginning with a close reading of a key narrative of the region’s genesis, Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces. I focus on Carpentier’s concept of Latin American reality as a bridge connecting the elite structure of the Creole Republics in the 1820s to what ensues: an idiosyncratic mix of endogenous vanguard movements with unextinguished tracts of pre-colonial ecosystems, and an ethnically heterodox mestizaje reflecting histories of migration, African chattel slavery, and extant indigenous nations – all in perennial antagonism under the United States’ regional hegemony. Aiming to retrieve Carpentier from the staid tomb of a reputation determined by the Yale Lit Crit of González Echevarría, I track the continuity of his fiction, and folkloric studies like La música en Cuba, with landmark works on the continent’s liberation struggle like The Black Jacobins and Las venas abiertas de América latina. Applying the framework of his musicology in the Caribbean to case studies on Chile and the U.S., the second chapter sketches a genealogy of national-popular aesthetics in the Americas through artists such as Violeta Parra and Woody Guthrie. The Latin American reality that developed out of the colonial and pre-Columbian periods is also given a surprisingly insightful description in writings by Karl Marx. My third chapter is an exposition of those little-known texts and their reception by thinkers like Álvaro García Linera. I argue that the historical materialism of Latin American independence that they articulate finds a complementary narrative form in Carpentier’s realism.In these three long-form chapters, I articulate the historical, cultural, and political valences of the reality represented in Carpentier. Key issues raised include abolition, reification, folklore, the capitalist unconscious, the indigenous peasantry, ecology and the national-popular. The central thinkers considered include C.L.R. James, García Linera, Violeta Parra, Marx, Fredric Jameson, and Eduardo Galeano.

My dissertation, titled “Tracking Contagious Cases: Venereal Disease, Sex Work, and the Making of the Male Homosexual at the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1926-1964,” focuses on three critical areas: public health, sexual identity, and the control of national borders. In my dissertation, I investigate how public health initiatives aimed at combatting venereal diseases have played a significant role in shaping social attitudes toward homosexual men. This investigation is conducted within a multidisciplinary framework that accounts for the geopolitical and cultural landscape of the United States, Mexico, and their shared border. I argue that Mexican and American health authorities directing these transnational initiatives confined the discourse on venereal disease to heterosexual interactions involving vaginal penetration. Such medical and legal reductionism rendered female sex workers as especially susceptible vectors of infection while minimizing homosexual disease transmission in public health discourse. Instead, the homosexual body was largely negated as a site of venereal infection, reinforcing the idea that male homosexuals and male sex workers were biological and societal anomalies. Constant but covert sexual surveillance and incarceration targeted both groups. My study outlines how these groups were characterized as sexually threatening: psychiatric diagnoses established sexual deviance in male homosexuals, while ongoing venereal disease infections stigmatized female sex workers. Sexual containment policies cemented distinct narratives about the perceived sexual threats posed by each group, further entwining their social and legal standing as social scourges.My research is innovative in three ways. It is the first study to examine the construction of the homosexual body through the lens of heterosexual prostitution. I argue that prostitution regulation and venereal disease prevention initiatives, while primarily focused on female sex workers and their male clients, were critical to the formation of homosexual identities. Second, the dissertation challenges the traditional chronology of twentieth-century gay identity formation by demonstrating that homosexual men formed transnational communities and confronted widespread persecution well before the 1940s. Finally, my study charts the historical feminization of sex work and the associated erasure of male homosexual venereal disease transmission before the HIV/AIDS crisis. By tracing how homosexual men were rendered invisible and neglected in states’ efforts to regulate sexual health, I provide critical historical context that helps us better understand the HIV/AIDS crisis, when homosexual men became hyper-visible in sexual health projects. This study thus offers a critical intervention into the ongoing conversations surrounding sexual health and identity at the U.S.-Mexico border.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the leaders of Mexico’s governmental and imperial regimes employed French photographers to produce official imagery for the country. François Aubert (1829-1906) created thousands of cartes-de-visite portraits for Maximilian I (1832-1867) within the Second Mexican Empire (1864-1867). Aubert also photographed ethnographic ‘popular Mexican types’ and upon Maximilian’s execution in 1867 by firing squad, captured historical views of Maximilian post-mortem. In 1880-1910, left-wing dictator Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915) furthered Maximilian’s tradition of state-sponsored photography and commissioned Alfred ‘Abel’ Briquet (1833-1936) to produce albumen prints of his regime’s success; photographs of landscapes, ethnographic portraits, railroads, and Mexica sculpture within Porfirio’s new Gallery of Monoliths epitomized the regimes slogan of ‘order and progress’. The images created by Aubert and Briquet provided views of Mexico to a wide audience who would construct an imaginary image of Mexico that shaped the nation’s reception and perception thereafter. Through historical and formal analysis and calling upon post-colonial methodologies, I critically engage with the works of François Aubert and Alfred ‘Abel’ Briquet as propagandistic productions of Mexican views during their respective historical moments. I argue that these photographs venerated imperial and governmental control over Indigenous Mexicans and Mesoamerican visual culture. Throughout this Master’s thesis, I work towards a connected art history by laying out multiple visual lineages centering around Aubert and Briquet’s imagined views of Mexico during the Second Mexican Empire and the Porfiriato to consider the relationship between their propagandistic photography and imperial power.

This dissertation examines the environmental activism of (im)migrants and their kin in the Inland Empire, CA to explore what their relationships might tell us about nations, borders, place, and relationality. As concerns about climate change and “mass migration” heighten in American discourse, a relational, no-borders approach to (im)migrant and ecological justice enables us to consider how borders organize societies and limit particular struggles within national lines. In order to demonstrate an alternative path forward, I asked: What kinship networks are formed between Latinx (im)migrants after migration/displacement and by extension, what are Latinx (im)migrants’ definitions of place? What sorts of ephemeral ecological relations are formed between non-human and humans and what do these ecological kinship networks tell us about Latinx futurities and world-making projects? In order to address these questions, I engaged with existing migration and environmental scholarship in the following ways: 1) I argue that (im)migrants defy borders and citizenship claims, even while they remain locally and nationally politically engaged by drawing particular attention to the ways that diasporic dialects are less about negotiating with states, and more about fleshing out the global from the local and national. 2) I also integrate the importance of the more-than-human world for diasporic dialects by paying particular attention to the ways that land, water, and non-human animals come to be represented, inform, and transform (im)migrant political struggles. 3) Finally, I analyze the ways in which (im)migrant kinship networks are imaginative and embodied calls for the abolition of borders and nations.

This dissertation studies the identity formation and cultural production of Latin American authors of Arab descent. More specifically, it focuses on the strategies used by Arab-Latin American authors and cultural producers to build spaces of belonging and transform the cultural landscape of Latin America through the production of cultural artifacts such as travelogues, testimonies, short stories, novels, films, documentaries, and poetry. Since most of the research on the Arab presence in Latin America has been studied from socioeconomic and political perspectives, this study attempts to fill a vacuum in the study of contemporary cultural production of Arab and Latin American authors of Arab descent in two ways. First, from an interdisciplinary approach and the perspectives of postcolonial, decolonial, and affect theory lenses, this dissertation analyzes the cultural products of Arab-Latin Americans as emotional repositories that served as the basis for the creation of spaces of belonging where Arab-Latin American communities were able to not only survive but thrive and climb the social ladder as they immersed themselves into different countries across Latin America. Moreover, this study reflects on how these emotional repositories assisted in the development of self-identities and pride in Arab ancestry while simultaneously promoting the process that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz identified as transculturation. Second, most studies on the relationship between the Middle East and Latin America have focused on the Arab people and Arab-Latin Americans as passive objects of study by analyzing their migratory patterns, socio-economic conditions and development, and political structures, among other topics. While this dissertation builds upon this prior research, it attempts to underscore Arab-Latin Americans' agency and self-definition of identities as it highlights their experiences and voices as agents of their own history.

Six years after the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution, North American entrepreneurs Baron Long, James Crofton, and Wirt Bowman (together referred to in the press as “the border barons”) partnered with Baja governor Abelardo Rodriguez to create the Agua Caliente Casino and Spa. Long envisioned transforming the natural hot springs that Rodriguez acquired from rancher Alejandro Argüello into a Spanish-Moorish-Mission style getaway nestled in a tropical landscape. He hired self-taught San Diegan architect Wayne McAllister and partner Corinne Fuller to design it. Phase one of the project, the casino and 500-room hotel, opened on June 23, 1928. The baths, racetracks, and golf courses opened the following year. In contrast to the utilitarian saloons, bordellos and gambling halls that represented a typology of vice architecture during the Prohibition Era, Agua Caliente established its own semi-autonomous and refined community five miles from the border, signaled through its modern amenities, luxurious interior decoration, and globally sourced construction materials. The dissertation examines how the casino complex influenced Tijuana’s urban development, political economy, and lastly, its cultural self-image. The chapters chronicle Baja California’s trajectory from a territory propelled by gambling and sport to "la empieza de la patria." The life cycle of the "complejo aguacaliente," through its construction and adoption as a gambling utopia for the Hollywood crowd in 1927 to its take over and conversion to technical school for the children of the casino workers in 1937 point toward the possible worlds of the U.S.-Mexico border, beyond the "herida abierta," or open wound, where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.

My master's thesis is an in-depth look at a video production by the collective Quetzal Beats that includes my role as co-producer. This six minute video production was organized alongside Ana Pano from Fresno, CA and Chiapas, Nancy Escalante from Los Angeles, El Salvador and Honduras, and myself, Paula Ayala from Fresno, CA and El Salvador. Quetzal Beats formed as a sonic space between and with the lineages of ancestral lament opening into pluriversal worlds. As said by the EZLN, ‘a world where many worlds fit’ in (what I posit as) a central Abyssmerica/Yala. This video project invites listening viewers to enter into worlds that sense-think memories, people, land, color, sound and the continuities of socially defying death. The ‘sonic collage’ allows an unraveling of the illusory formulations of settler innocence. Centering the question, “How do the grounded knowledges of experiential opposition to oppression throughout the isthmus, detail what I deem, a condicion istmica? Herein perspectives and actions realize hemispheric convergences with many processes of definition, positionalities, obstructions, and epistemes. This text will offer insights into a six-minute audio-visual curation of 500 years of colonial sonic resistance. My research offers an autoethnographic and communitarian testimony that recovers over 10 years of documentation, archival sources, primary sources, and photographic and sonic collages witnessed in Quetzal Beats’ video. A portion of this thesis is meant to articulate to readers how Quetzal Beats has formed as a collective in various projects, and for the purposes of this thesis, to fully explain how it was that we produced the sonic-collage “Caminxs del Sur.” As author of this piece, I have used my own voice and memory to recount these processes, and have consulted with most interlocutors mentioned here, about the writing for this thesis. Artist, community worker and journalist once described as the “the octopus of Leimert Park,” Ben Caldwell’s KAOS THEORY, is a testament to the power of documenting one's processes of artistry in relation to the socio-political forces and communities one engages and lives among. This thesis may or may not become one of the earliest treaties on Quetzal Beats’ visual and sonic productions made by and about Central Americans.

Adaptive Equity Oriented Pedagogy (AEP) guided my teaching and analysis of Latinx and Chicanx students’ course engagement, transforming their identity development at an R-1 university (Phuong et al., 2017, 2022). The course critically examined the social, political, economic, and historical dimensions of Chicano culture and history. Engaging the constructs of gender, race, and class, students interrogated systems of power and oppression to expand their critical consciousness and reclaim what Chicano means to them. Applying AEP, I triangulated data from my reflections, observations, formative assessments, and student assignments to identify practices that effectively advanced students’ identity development through the 7 Stages of Conocimiento. Engaging in Anzaldúa’s 7 stages of conocimiento, students reflected on their lived experiences, conversations with others, and dimensions of Chicano culture to help reimagine ways of knowing and healing. Integrating AEP, I listened, identified, and verbalized student strengths (i.e., resistance capital) to center the dialogue about their experiences. I then adapted learning activities to focus on healing, reducing barriers, and supporting transformative identity formation. I incorporated the AEP framework to engage in deep listening, facilitate dynamic discussions, and adapt activities and projects that helped all students surpass rigorous and culturally responsive learning outcomes. I advanced my students’ identity development within their zone of proximal self (Nguyen et al., 2022). Specifically, students re-defined and reclaimed what empowered them to shape their possible selves and communities with intention and authenticity, adopting a definition of Chicano that resonated with their identities and lived experiences.

This dissertation discusses the Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement Program in Argentina, 1979-1982. It explores the process by which Posadas became the nucleus of Lao life in Argentina, highlighting important junctures in the transition from a resettlement policy mediated by the UNHCR and the Argentine Interior Ministry (1979-1982) to provincial-level management in Misiones. This work examines why and how Lao refugees made Posadas their home while situating the analysis in Hemispheric Asian American approaches to Asian immigration and racialization in contemporary Latin America.

“Somos Locos Respetosos”: A Bidirectional Ethnographic Project of Reclaimed Childhoods at Casa Asilio*, A Shelter for Unaccompanied Minors in Tijuana (2018-19) provides a space within Latin American studies to orally illuminate the experiences of unaccompanied minors in transit amid globalized ways of life and massive displacement. I theorize the process by which youth develop kin-ship ties, and by extension—their identities, to humanize themselves within the greater mechanism of the Caravan movement. I reconfigure the massiveness directed at the Caravan movement (and those who comprise it) by the Western media. In this work, I collect stories of survival from unaccompanied minors who travel from Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala to the Tijuana-San Diego border as well as the staff at Casa Asilio1. I freeze-frame the Caravan’s unaccompanied youth under the scope of Global political-economic forces that create social conditions in which violence, namely familial disintegration, is rendered natural. Upon their arrival at Casa Asilio, a shelter for unaccompanied minors in transit, I observe the construction of surrogate families, or kinship ties. Through the testimonies of the teens’ experiences, I empower their memories of each other as they actively create meaning within undesired circumstances. To safeguard their stories, all identifiable information (such as names of those involved in this study and the geographic setting of the interviews) has been given a pseudonym.

This thesis examines the literary works of Fausto Reinaga and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, two prominent Indigenous writers, intellectuals and political activists from Bolivia, and their critiques of Bolivia’s 1952 National Revolution. Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui argue that the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) political party, which held office during the Bolivian post-revolutionary era, sought to assimilate Bolivia’s mostly Indigenous population in order to create a new, homogeneous Bolivia of campesinos estranged from their cultural Indigenous identities. Based on Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui’s findings, I argue that the 1952 revolution extended Bolivia’s colonial legacy through new codes that marketed the revolution as a “radical” break from the previous political order and as “liberatory” for the exploited Bolivian working-class. I identify three of these codes as the following government-led policies: the universal suffrage reform, agrarian reform and unionization. Ultimately, these three policies formed a part of the Bolivian state’s attempt to campesinizar and de-indigenize Indigenous groups. Through my discursive analysis, I find that Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui differ in their theorization of the racialization processes that occurred after the 1952 revolution. Nonetheless, Reinaga’s framework of indianismo and Rivera Cusicanqui’s conceptualization of the ch’ixi provide a critical analysis on the implementation of what they both interpret as a Westernizing political agenda in Bolivia following the 1952 revolution.

The number of Gen-Z and Millennial American expats who have relocated to Mexico has grown exponentially in the past five years. While a sizable amount of academic research on immigration focuses on forcibly displaced populations fleeing to the United States, the ethnographic research in this thesis analyzes the immigration of upper to middle class Gen-Z and Millennial American expats who have relocated from the United States to Tijuana, Baja California, México. I argue that the neoliberal urbanization of Tijuana creates opportunities for expats to reactivate the ideological schema of United States superiority over Mexico in the ways in which they pursue individualistic value in their lives in Tijuana. Ultimately, the freedom that expats seek living in Mexico relies on restriction and the creation of asymmetric borders between themselves and “others” in Tijuana.

My dissertation explores the historical and ideological origins of Central America’s communist parties, specifically in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, from 1920-1940. I chose this period precisely because it preludes the revolutionary war period of the late twentieth century in Central America (1960-1996), which has received an exceptional amount of attention from contemporary scholars. Through archival research, my dissertation makes three central arguments. First, I argue that both communism and fascism were ideological and political responses to the dual crisis of agrarian capitalism and liberal nation-building in Central America, albeit on opposing sides of the political spectrum. While Central American communists sought to carry out an agrarian socialist revolution, fascist sympathizers sought to consolidate state power for a growing predominantly Ladino and Mestizo upper- and middle-class capitalist elite by utilizing state terror and military violence. Second, I argue that Central America’s first communist parties began developing in the 1920s and 1930s as a direct response to the imminent threat and rise of Central American fascism, which scapegoated communists and working-class people, specifically Indigenous and Black communities, as well as women and migrant laborers, as enemies of the state, and manifested in the form of state-sponsored mass extrajudicial killings, including, but not limited to genocide and ethnocide. Third, I argue that Central American communist parties were inherently transnational, meaning that they functioned beyond the scope of each independent Central American nation-state and worked closely with other Latin American revolutionary movements, especially in Mexico and Cuba, thus upholding a practice of internationalism in their struggle against fascism, capitalism, and imperialism.

The dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) has left a prominent and polarizing mark on the national memory of Chile. Thirty-three years after the return to democracy, the nation has diverging ideas on how to remember this period. In 2023, as I am writing this thesis, an entire generation has grown up in democratic Chile and personal memories of the military government and the violent coup d’état have begun to fade. In this context, the system of national education becomes a key resource for younger generations to develop and understanding of the history that shapes their present-day lives. After Pinochet was removed from power via plebiscite in 1990 and the first civilian-President inherited the administration, the nation underwent a series of changes. Many of these changes focused on the denouncing of human rights violations which took place during the dictatorship and forging a way forward. There was a notable rise in activism and public interest in this period. Chileans were demanding both truth and justice for the abuses committed by the state during the dictatorship. In this atmosphere of activism and openness, a distinct memory movement is born in Chile, echoing similar conversations taking place across Latin America and in other “transitional” states. The memory movement in Chile specifically fights against the objective of oblivion surrounding the Pinochet years. Many of those fighting for the memory are those who will never be able to forget the traumatic cost of dictatorship; they are the family members and loved ones of those who were tortured, disappeared, or exiled during the dictatorship. These familiares-activistas were also incredibly influential in defeating Pinochet in the 1989 plebiscite. After decades of governments from the left (center) political coalition, La Concertación, the Chilean right gained political ground for the first time since the dictatorship with the presidential election of Sebastián Piñera in 2010 and again in 2018. Under the Piñera administration, I argue, the politics of memory shifted. From the memory narratives established by activists and the governments of Concertación leaders, Piñera’s ministers worked to promote a vague narrative of the dictatorship years. Such a narrative distances specific actors and removes some culpability of the military and right-wing politicians. Thirty some years after the return to democracy and after years of the state promoting ideals of compromiso y conviviencia, present-day memory politics in Chile highlight the continuing and deepening polarization of the country. This thesis will argue that the Chilean state uses the public education system to continually readjust the portrayal of the memory of the Pinochet dictatorship to match or combat political trends. During the alternating presidencies of Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010, 2014-2018) and Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014, 2018-2022), each administration used K-12 education to promote and promulgate a specific vision of the dictatorship that corresponded with their parties’ political and memorial goals.

From its conception as a nation, the U.S. pushed from east to west and north to south expanding and establishing new borders, a process reinforced by nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. landscape photography. By contrast, twentieth and twenty-first century Chicanx and Latinx artists addressed the border as a site of political turmoil, violence, and resistance as well as a metaphorical and transportable space of identity formation. My dissertation draws upon these two fields, landscape studies and Chicanx/Latinx visual culture, to addresses contemporary landscape photography at the U.S.-Mexico border. In doing so, I established a comparative analysis of nineteenth and twentieth century landscapes against the decolonizing potential of the contemporary works that expose, subvert, and expand traditional landscape vernaculars. My dissertation examines closely David Taylor and Marcos Ramirez ERRE’s DeLIMITations (2014), the Border Film Project (2005-2007), Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo’s Border Cantos (2016), and Delilah Montoya’s Sed: Trail of Thirst (2004-2008). Each of these projects delve into a critical set of questions around what is happening at the border and why, but also how the border crisis impacts migrants and migrant communities. To address these questions, I approach the photographs in search of narratives that are often omitted from history, art history, and contemporary discourse on the U.S.-Mexico border. I then use visual clues in the images to generate new narratives about who has existed in the border landscape, who is currently attempting to cross, and what these experiences might be like. I argue that their work transgresses old forms and pushes against the limiting nature of the border itself. In doing so they bring attention to the double erasure of Indigenous and migrant memory, history, and bodies from the landscape; expose the lasting colonial legacy of earlier landscape practices that contributed to the making of the border; and explore the possibility for innovative visions that deviate from those of territorial mastery, and instead attend to migrant subjectivities.