Caribbean Cities Research Articles

Chinese Business in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Historical Overview.

This article provides a historical background of Chinese presence in Latin America and the Caribbean from the arrival of the first Chinese workers in the 1850s until the Great Depression. The objective is to demonstrate that Chinese businesses and investment in the region is far for being a recent phenomenon. Methodologically, this article explores an extensive bibliographic corpus and analyzes the International Chinese Business Directory of the World of 1913, one of the most important sources on Chinese businesses in the region. By focusing on the early migration patterns, the establishment of Chinese businesses and transnational economic networks, this article reveals how Chinese businesses were part of the urban landscapes of several Latin American and Caribbean cities, establishing historical commercial ties which continue, if in different forms, to this day.

Revisión bibliográfica sobre la circulación de ideas urbanas en América Latina y el Caribe

Latin American and Caribbean cities share a common history regarding the influence of foreign urban ideas. These ideas, categorized as pioneering or avant-garde, in most cases were conceived in relation to European and North American experiences, and implemented even simultaneously in several cities across the region. Adrian Gorelik, Arturo Almandoz, Alicia Novick and Guillermo Jajamovich, are the authors whose works have been taken to start building a bibliographic reference able to guide the flow of urban ideas studies in the region.

Cities of the Dead: Performing Life in the Caribbean

Life and death defined the historical and temporal dimensions of the plantation. Many of these material, affective and ritualistic views on life and death haunt contemporary Caribbean cities. This essay will analyze the narrative script of Juan de los muertos (Juan of the Dead) and Eduardo Lalo’s documentary La ciudad perdida (2005) along with the funeral rites performed by Funeraria Marín in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, whose ‘performative funerals’ or collages, have circulated in journals and the Internet, creating what appear to be ‘living tableaus’ or original wakes since 2010. I believe that zombies, the living dead, and the performative dead – are all part of the same process, as they reflect sites of melancholia where social action – be it individual or collective, is required. I will be cautious to read these actions merely as forms of agency against the state or neoliberal economies. These necropolitics to use Achille Mbembe’s term are more than forms of agency. They ‘frame’ forms of precarious subjectivity, survival, and existence in contemporary Caribbean societies where melancholia, is pretty much related to the present.

Dynamiques urbaines communes et spécificités des villes des Antilles françaises (Guadeloupe, Martinique) des origines de la colonisation (1635) à nos jours

Au travers de l’evolution des villes francaises aux Antilles, depuis leurs origines jusqu’a la fin du XXe siecle, il s’agit de comprendre quelles ont ete les specificites de ces villes par rapport a celles de metropole, et d’analyser quelles ont ete les dynamiques urbaines communes observees entre celles etablies dans l’archipel de Guadeloupe et l’ile de la Martinique. La decouverte de l’Amerique, le phenomene de l’insularite, le monde des plantations, la traite negriere et l’esclavage, les abolitions, les catastrophes naturelles servent de denominateur commun a l’histoire des villes que les Francais ont fondees aux Antilles. Elles partagent un heritage historique commun avec les autres villes etablies dans la region par les Europeens lors des premiers siecles de la colonisation en Amerique. L’evolution des villes francaises aux Antilles depuis les origines de la colonisation jusqu’a nos jours, a donne naissance a des espaces urbains ayant une morphologie, une identite particuliere dans un contexte ou s’entremelent la ville planifiee et la ville spontanee. A travers l’exemple de ces villes fondees par les Francais en Amerique, il s’agit de determiner quelles sont les specificites des villes francaises aux Antilles et les dynamiques urbaines communes observees, en tenant compte de leurs differentes composantes et en s’interrogeant sur ce qui fait leur singularite.

Anciano con Diabetes y factores asociados

Objetivo: Conocer el Auto-reporte de Diabetes en la población de adultos mayores de la ciudad de Bogotá y su asociación con variables sociodemográficas, del estado de salud y medidas antropométricas.
 Diseño: Estudio observacional y poblacional de corte transversal
 Marco de referencia: Datos del estudio SABE (Encuesta de Salud, Bienestar y Envejecimiento) Bogotá, Colombia.
 Participantes: 1999 personas de 60 años o más de Bogotá, Colombia.
 Mediciones: Variables sociodemográficas, enfermedades, hábitos, actividad física, tratamiento, evaluación cognitiva y afectiva, estado funcional y medidas antropométricas. Se realizaron análisis bi-variados y multivariados con el paquete estadístico SAS (versión 9.4). 
 Resultados: Las personas tenían edad promedio de 71.2 ±8.0 y 62% eran mujeres; el 17.5% auto-reportó diagnóstico de Diabetes. En análisis multivariados, Diabetes estuvo asociada con la Hipertensión (OR = 1,62 95% intervalos de confianza IC = 1,20-1,18), Catarata (OR = 1,71 95% IC = 1,24-2,36) y con el aumento de perímetro abdominal (OR = 1,03 95% IC = 1,02-1,04). También estuvo asociada con una menor fuerza de agarre (OR = 0,98 95% IC = 0,96-0,99) y en menor medida con aquellos mayores de 85 años (OR 0.34, 95% IC = 0.16-0.72)
 Conclusión: La prevalencia de DM en Bogotá se encuentra presente en casi un quinto de la población encuestada y representa una de las prevalencias más altas dentro de las ciudades Latinoamericanas y del Caribe en donde se llevó a cabo el Estudio SABE.

Exploración y explotación de hidrocarburos aguas afuera (offshore). Estrategia logística para Barranquilla, una ciudad en transformación

La industria de hidrocarburos en Colombia ha sido fuertemente afectada por la volatilidad internacional en los precios y la ausencia de nuevos campos de exploración/explotación. Ante la escasez del recurso y como fuente de ingresos para el territorio se ve como una alternativa la exploración/explotación aguas afuera (offshore). Para ello se deben dar transformaciones desde lo normativo hasta lo técnico, y hay ciudades como Barranquilla (Colombia) que ya están apostando por esa transformación local. El propósito del artículo es reflexionar, a partir del estado del arte de la experiencia offshore internacional, sobre brechas técnicas, normativas y académicas con Colombia, además plantear una estrategia logística que se derive en beneficios y en el reconocimiento de los aspectos críticos del tipo de explotación y de la transformación de la ciudad para acogerla. Se concluye que, a pesar de las brechas, las ciudades del Caribe, y en particular Barranquilla, están allanando el terreno para convertirse en una plataforma offshore de desarrollo logístico.

Timbering and Turtling: The Maritime Hinterlands of Early Modern British Caribbean Cities

In the early modern era, the hinterland of a Caribbean island encompassed more than the land sequestered by its sandy shorelines. This article uses the loggers of Barbados and the turtlers of Jamaica to explore how Caribbean colonists forged and maintained maritime hinterlands in order to supply island residents and feed urban populations. In timbering nearby islands and harvesting adjacent waterscapes, loggers and turtlers forged an interisland web of ecological and economic relationships that inextricably linked proximate islands to one another. Barbadians, for example, depended on timber from St. Lucia, and Jamaicans provisioned Port Royal with turtles from the Cayman Islands. In both instances, colonists and local officials claimed these nearby islands as “dependencies” of the larger colony and sought to defend them. By reorienting our understanding of hinterlands from interior lands to neighboring islands and seascapes, this article offers a new way of thinking about port cities, sufficiency, and industry, especially in plantation America. Rather than peripheral trades with little economic value, ventures such as timbering and turtling promoted vernacular industries, which in turn reduced reliance on imported goods, thereby enabling the islands of Barbados and Jamaica to become efficient, populous colonies within a profitable Atlantic empire.

Latin American and Caribbean Urban Development

The new development agendas confirmed in the year 2015 evidence an increased global interest in cities and urban challenges. In Latin America and the Caribbean, cities have long been an established topic of study and debate. This exploration gives a brief overview of current research on urban development in the region and suggests fruitful avenues for future research. Following different ideological trends in twentieth-century urban studies, we currently see more pragmatic frameworks and a belief in technocratic solutions. Some scholars consider Latin American and Caribbean cities to be the world’s new signposts in urban development, given their role as sites of innovations in politics, architecture and urban design; we see potential here for urban scholars of the region to move beyond technocratic language. In addition, we argue for an area studies approach to these cities that uses the framework of the region as a heuristic device to unsettle global urbanist epistemologies that privilege North-to-South mobilities in both policy and theory.

Big Data for Better Urban Life? – An Exploratory Study of Critical Urban Issues in Two Caribbean Cities: Paramaribo (Suriname) and Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago)

Big Data is increasingly seen as important in studying the city. This pertains to both its methodological capacity and the societal implications it may have. In this article we draw on contemporary literature to discuss the potentials and challenges of Big Data for addressing pressing urban issues. In addition, we examine the potential of Big Data as a methodological tool for two Caribbean cities, Paramaribo and Port of Spain, for developing new knowledge on urban issues that matter in such cities, specifically water-related risks and security. We do so by interrogating Twitter data to uncover relevant geographical and social patterns of tweets pertaining to water-related risks (Paramaribo) and security/crime issues (Port of Spain) and confronting these with qualitative knowledge about these places. We argue that Big Data are a powerful resource for discovering interesting patterns, but one needs to be critical of the methodological caveats and consider the social-cultural specificities of ICT use.

The Relationship Between Body Mass Index and Cancer Screening Utilization Among Older Women in Latin American and Caribbean Cities

To examine the relationship between body mass index and cancer screening utilization, we analyzed data from six cities of the Health, Well-Being and Aging in Latin America and the Caribbean Study on 5,230 women aged 60 and older, from 1999 to 2000. We found that underweight women were less likely to have had a mammogram, a breast self-exam, and a Pap smear, relative to normal-weight women. However, overweight or obese women were more likely to have a breast self-exam and a Pap smear. Thus, being underweight had a role for decreased cancer screening utilization among older women in Latin American cities, but not being overweight or obese, which was associated with decreased cancer screening in most previous studies.

Lessons from urban risk assessments in Latin American and Caribbean cities

This paper draws on the results from a recent World Bank-funded project designed to inform policy-making and climate change adaptation planning in small and medium-sized cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The focus was on floods and landslides, which are the two most common climate-related risks in cities across the region. The project allowed the application of the Urban Risk Assessment (URA) tool developed by the World Bank and the drawing of valuable lessons which may also be applicable to the many methods and tools available for climate change adaptation planning in the rapidly urbanising cities of developing countries.

Tropical cities are diverse and deserve more social-ecological attention

When I visit cities in the tropics, I am always fascinated by their diversity, not only their cultural diversity but also the diversity of vegetation and cityscapes. While New York City has a constructed Central Park, Belem in Brazil has the Jardim Botânico da Amazonia Bosque Rodrigues Alves, a 16-ha patch of natural lowland rain forest. My hometown of San Juan has scattered natural patches of novel moist forests with unique combinations of native and introduced tree species. From high-rise downtown buildings in Kingston, Jamaica; San Juan, Puerto Rico; or Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, one can appreciate the diverse tree cover of Caribbean cities. In these cities as well as others such as Georgetown, Guyana; Caracas, Venezuela; BasseTerre, Guadeloupe; or Roseau, Dominica, human activity takes place at a torrid clip and provides multiple rewards to visiting tourists and those who enjoy watching people in action. However, the combined effects of tropical conditions and overuse usually strain the gray infrastructure of tropical cities. It is common to see declining neighborhoods, crowded conditions, and eutrophic waters, all of which can endanger human health and create social and ecological vulnerabilities for tropical cities. Both social and ecological systems of cities adapt to the rapidly changing conditions within tropical cities and in the process generate novelty and functioning that somehow sustain the cities temporally and spatially.

Rethinking Microentrepreneurship and Business Development Programs: Vulnerability and Ambition in Low-income Urban Caribbean Households

Current development thinking and practice emphasize the potential of microentrepreneurship for poverty reduction. To effectuate this potential, many business development programs (BDPs), particularly focusing on microfinance and training, were implemented. This article questions the relevance of BDPs for microentrepreneurs through a comparative study on home-based economic activities (HBEAs) in two Caribbean cities. It shows that BDPs are relevant to only a minority of entrepreneurs. This can be explained by variations in household vulnerability and entrepreneurial ambition. The article therefore argues that analyzing microentrepreneurship’s relevance for poverty reduction requires an understanding of microenterprises in the broader context of household livelihood characteristics.

On The Role of the Extended Family in Helping to Pay for the Household Expenses of Unmarried Older Women (60+) in Latin Anerica and the Caribbean

This study helps document the important role of extended family living-considered in terms of both coresidence and child proximity-in helping to predict assistance with paying household expenses among elderly unmarried women in seven Latin American and Caribbean cities: Bridgetown, Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, Montevideo, Santiago (Chile) and Sao Paulo. It also looks into the idea that economic need helps predict family assistance to elderly unmarried women. Data come from special, comparable, surveys of elders aged 60 and over gathered in 2000. Using binomial logistic regression, study findings are consistent with the notion that extended family living is important for receiving help with basic household expenses among unmarried elderly women. However, study findings do not support the notion that economic need fosters help with household expenses among unmarried elderly women. While the effect of extended family living tended to be similar across the different urban areas, extended family living also had the additional quality of explaining the differences in the proportion of unmarried elderly women receiving help with paying household expenses in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Havana and Sao Paulo. However, the proportion remained low in Bridgetown and high in both Mexico City and Santiago.

Bipolar antagonism and multipolar coexistence: framing difference and shaping fear in two Caribbean cities

This article proposes a new approach to urban geographies of fear, focusing on the connection between fear and cultural understandings and representations of difference. Much of the existing work on the relationship between fear, urban space, and social difference tends to take social difference as more or less given. In this article, we argue that how differences (such as ethnic, political or class differences) are framed has strong implications for geographies of fear. The article suggests that dualistic and nondualistic framings of difference influence levels of fear and that this becomes visible in the use and perceptions of urban space, and in the built environment through the erection of physical barriers. These spatial factors, as they limit mobility and interaction, tend to reproduce the specific framing of difference. Two discursive modes of representing difference are discussed. The first, ‘bipolar antagonism’, is based on a dualist rhetoric of irreconcilable opposites. This is contrasted with ‘multipolar co-existence’, in which social categories are understood as multiple or hybrid, with flexible or fluid boundaries, and as not necessarily antagonistic. This argument is elaborated through a comparative analysis of social–cultural and spatial processes in two Caribbean cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and Paramaribo, Suriname.

Racial Ideologies, Racial-Group Boundaries, and Racial Identity in Veracruz, Mexico

Recent scholarly interest in the populations of African descent in Latin America has contributed to a growing body of literature. Although a number of studies have explored the issue of blackness in Afro-Latin American countries, much less attention has been paid to how blackness functions in mestizo American countries. Furthermore, in mestizo America, the theoretical emphasis has oftentimes been placed on the mestizo/Indian divide, leaving no conceptual room to explore the issue of blackness. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on blackness in the western Caribbean cities of Port of Veracruz and Boca del Río, which lie in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Specifically, it looks at the racial-based and color-based identification of individuals of African descent, societal construction of the ‘black’ category, and the relationship between national and racial identities. This article relies on data from participant observation conducted over the course of one year and 112 semi-structured interviews.

ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING AND URBAN FOOD ACCESS IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

The article describes how economic restructuring in the Dominican Republic during the 1980s and 1990s established the basis for urban food access challenges during the 2000s. Primarily based on research in Santiago, the second largest Dominican city, the article provides insights into how export‐oriented development strategies, expanding trade liberalization, domestic political struggles, and patriarchal relations influenced access to food for low‐income residents. During the early 2000s, many Santiago residents were engaged in an elaborate, androcentric exchange network that linked gendered income‐generating strategies to credit‐bearing food merchants who were, in turn, conjoined to a sequence of brokers all of whom were eventually linked to domestic and international producers by credit relations. Analysis of these findings illustrates how and why this exchange network existed, the importance of credit relations to its maintenance, and the ways in which government and U.S. food policies influenced urban provisioning patterns among the most economically and socially vulnerable population of Santiago. I argue that the rapidly changing social and spatial configurations of Latin American and Caribbean cities calls for innovative applied anthropological research into the processes that structure access to food resources by food insecure groups. By focusing on household food procurement in conjunction with exchange relations for a key staple, the article highlights practices and policies that enable and constrain food access for such groups. The article provides empirical data relevant to scholars and practitioners concerned with understanding the structural origins of the present‐day food crisis in developing countries.

Paramaribo

Paramaribo, the largest and only significant urban area in Suriname, is a typical primate city. The majority of the countries’ population resides here and the majority of political, social and economic functions is clustered in the urban zone. In the course of the 20th century, the city changed dramatically. Its population grew enormously and the city expanded through conversion of agricultural lands. In addition, economic and political developments produced alternate functional divisions within the city. These developments have taken place in other Caribbean cities as well. However, where Caribbean cities, e.g. Kingston or Port-of-Spain, are known for high levels of ethnic and socio-economic segregation and inequality, Paramaribo is a city of more or less ethnically and socio-economically mixed neighbourhoods. This profile focuses on patterns of settlement in Paramaribo after 1950 and explains these from developments in the local economy and land market. It concludes that the economic crisis together with the structure of the land- and housing market have slowed down processes of moving and resettlement, encouraged the development of socio-economically mixed neighbourhoods and sustained the absence of no-go areas in the city. It concludes by posing the question whether this may change in the future and more clustering can be expected.

La dimensión económica de la pobreza y precariedad urbana en las ciudades latinoamericanas: Implicaciones para las políticas del habitat

En las ciudades de America Latina y el Caribe, los pobres urbanos viven una heterogeneidad de condiciones y carencias que expresan directamente e indirectamente su vulnerabilidad economica. Este articulo busca profundizar nuestra comprension de la dimension economica de la pobreza y precariedad urbana en las vidas de los pobres urbanos, y averiguar sobre sus implicancias en el diseno de estrategias de politica. El trabajo se basa en los enfoques conceptuales del desarrollo sostenible, y de la generacion de capacidades y oportunidades en las personas. Se parte de una hipotesis de trabajo de que la vulnerabilidad economica en los sectores de pobreza urbana no ha sido plenamente integrada en las politicas del habitat, limitando la contribucion de estas a la mejora en el acceso de los pobres urbanos al empleo e ingresos estables.

Explaining health differences between men and women in later life: A cross-city comparison in Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper describes differences in health and functional status among older men and women and attempts to anchor the explanations for these differences within a lifecourse perspective. Seven health outcomes for men and women 60 years and older from seven Latin American and Caribbean cities are examined, using data from the 2000 SABE survey ( Salud, Bienestar y Envejecimiento— n = 10,587). Age-adjusted as well as city- and sex-specific prevalence was estimated for poor self-rated health, comorbidity, mobility limitations, cognitive impairment, depressive symptoms and disability in basic and instrumental activities of daily living. Logistic regressions were fitted to determine if the differences between men and women in each outcome could be explained by differential exposures in childhood (hunger, poverty), adulthood (education, occupation) and old age (income) and/or by differential vulnerability of men and women to these exposures. Sao Paulo, Santiago and Mexico, cities in countries with a high level of income inequalities, presented the highest prevalence of disability, functional limitations and poor physical health for both women and men. Women showed poorer health outcomes as compared with men for all health indicators and in all cities. Controlling for lifecourse exposures in childhood, adulthood and old age did not attenuate these differences. Women's unadjusted and adjusted odds of reporting poor self-rated health, cognitive impairment and basic activities of daily living disability were approximately 50% higher than for men, twice as high for number of comorbidities, depressive symptoms and instrumental activities of daily living disability, and almost three times as high for mobility limitations. Higher vulnerability to lifecourse exposures in women as compared with men was not found, meaning that lifecourse exposures have similar odds of poor health outcomes for men and women. A more integrated understanding of how sex and gender act together to influence health and function in old age needs consideration of additional biological and social factors.