Latin American Experience Research Articles

Traumatic States: Gendered Violence, Suffering, and Care in Chile by Nia Parson (review)

Reviewed by: Traumatic States: Gendered Violence, Suffering, and Care in Chile by Nia Parson Barbara Sutton (bio) Nia Parson, Traumatic States: Gendered Violence, Suffering, and Care in Chile (Vanderbilt University Press 2013), ISBN 978-0-8265-1895-8, 204 pages. In Traumatic States, Nia Parson offers an insightful and ethnographically rich exploration of the experiences of women who have suffered gender-based violence in Chile. More pointedly, the book illuminates in detail the different paths to care, healing, and recovery enabled or [End Page 496] blocked by shifting institutional and state approaches to violence against women. The book relates women’s individual biographies to broad social and political processes—from a military dictatorship that ruled Chile for nearly two decades since 1973, to the country’s transition to democracy beginning in 1990, to political and economic developments in the new millennium. The study situates women’s personal experiences of violence and care-seeking in relation to the state, neoliberalism, and feminism. From a human rights perspective, the book squarely locates violence against women, including domestic violence, in the realm of human rights violations. Drawing on the theoretical and political contributions of feminist scholars and activists, the notion that “women’s rights are human rights” and that violence against women violates such rights is illustrated in the book. Parson analyzes the role of the state as discursively and practically enabling violence against women, showing how individual perpetrators’ power is bolstered through state-sponsored ideologies, dysfunctional bureaucracies, and governmental unwillingness to prioritize women’s needs and aspirations. Traumatic States examines how the interaction between individual and institutional layers of power results in women’s preventable suffering, ill health, and stunted potentialities. At the same time, one of the book’s strengths is its emphasis on women’s agency—individual and collective—while still not losing sight of the contextual factors that constrain choice and action. Traumatic States is based on research that combines life histories of women who experienced gender-based violence, ethnographic observations of two organizations assisting such women (Safe Space and Family Care), group interviews with women who looked for support in one of these agencies, as well as conversations and interviews with other relevant social actors such as staff members of the organizations. Parson also pays attention to changes in legislation, institutional responses in the juridical and medical fields, and campaigns to raise awareness of and prevent violence against women. While the study is focused on Chile, Parson notes important connections to broader contexts, including how traveling global feminist discourses on violence against women are translated, adapted, and circulated at the local level through the work of key social players (e.g. policy makers, state officials, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), women survivors, and activists). While Parson gathers life histories from eighteen women, for the purpose of this book, she analyzes in depth the narratives and experiences of three individuals: Luz, Marisol, and Josefina. She examines these women’s subjective, affective experiences as they interact in dialogic relationship over time with the novel state structures—juridical, medical, nongovermental, and discursive—recently built up around domestic violence; and with women’s rights organizations and feminist frameworks. Their intimate narratives tell more than the stories of their individual lives. They show how these women’s health, their overall well-being, is affected by various forms of violence that constitute, sustain, and perpetuate what we call domestic violence. And through this analysis it becomes clear that their health is at stake.1 Even though the interviews and ethnographic fieldwork took place during the [End Page 497] first decade of the twenty-first century, the book situates the study participants’ stories in a longer historical framework, and in doing so, it illuminates the connections between state-perpetrated human rights abuses and gendered forms of interpersonal violence. Indeed, one contribution that specifically relates to the history of Chile, but that resonates with other Latin American experiences, is the examination of “private” violence in light of the legacies of state atrocities, such as torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial executions committed during the military regime led by General Augusto Pinochet. Traumatic States delves into how the norms promoted by the dictatorship, which asserted the unity of the (heteronormative) family...

Turismo comunitário a partir de experiências brasileiras, chilenas e costarriquenha

O turismo comunitário é uma estratégia para que populações tradicionais, independente do grau de descaracterização frente à hegemonia das sociedades urbanas industriais, sejam protagonistas de seus modos de vida próprios, tornando-se uma alternativa possível ao modo de vida materialista-consumista. O objetivo deste artigo é refinar ou, melhor, justificar o conceito de turismo comunitário a partir de experiências latinoamericanas. Estas, por sua vez, se enquadram num contexto de desvantagens históricas, principalmente de populações tradicionais. Como resultado da pesquisa, essas experimentações não se resumem em uma nova alternativa heterodoxa de turismo, e sim de experimentações que possibilitam pensar uma nova economia, ou seja, a ecossocioeconomia, por via de uma outra racionalidade e que vem acontecendo nos domicílios, nos grupos produtivos e nas comunidades, onde os problemas e suas soluções acontecem, e raramente são devidamente qualificados. Conclui-se que o turismo comunitário é uma teoria pensada a partir das experimentações, das complexidades do cotidiano, das contradições inerentes à mudança paradigmática que se deseja quando se pensa nas limitações do utilitarismo econômico e que, muitas vezes, não se dá infelizmente na velocidade que se deseja. O desafio se coloca, como preservar a lógica comunitária dessas experiências de turismo comunitário sem perder sua dinâmica própria na ocasião que se inserem na economia de mercado.

Development of a Model for Evaluating the Npd Process in Smes: A Latin American Experience

This article presents the findings resulting from a research project carried out in Medellin, Colombia, that was aimed at developing a model of diagnosis for the NPD process in manufacturing SMEs, adapted to the Latin American context. Four aspects were considered to develop the model: (i) Rational logic for problem solving based on the paradigm that a problem can be solved through systematic application of general principles and standardized knowledge, (ii) The Grounded Theory research approach, (iii) Integration of learning processes based on reflective and, (iv) Kolb's learning cycle as basic premises for the generation of a prescriptive model considering that the diagnosis process involves a learning process. Results obtained from the four companies selected for the study helped to validate an initial version. The model has proven to have great potential to improve the NPD process, as well as an opportunity to develop future comparative studies. Findings in the discussion and further reflection generated by the application of the four tools that encompasses the model within the companies, proved to be appropriated as a reflective practice and also a continuing learning process for SMEs.

The role of government social responsibility initiatives in creating national competitiveness: comparing the Latin American and European experiences

The role of government social responsibility initiatives in creating national competitiveness: comparing the Latin American and European experiences

Exodio / Exordium: For an Aesthetics of Liberation out of Latin American Experience

Exodio / Exordium: For an Aesthetics of Liberation out of Latin American Experience

Becoming Part of the Moving Story: Jews on the Latin American Screen

Jews were among the pioneers of film and television in most of Latin America. The historiography of cinema, however, does not usually mention the ethnicity or religion of the filmmakers since Latin American intellectuals tend to reject ethnicity as an important analytical category, unless it relates to indigenous groups or people of African descent. This approach is shared by many intellectuals identified with specific ethnic backgrounds, such as Jewish Latin Americans, Arab Latin Americans, and Asian Latin Americans.Most of the meager information about Jewish contributions to filmmaking in the past can be found in the publications of community institutions, which endeavor to highlight Jewish contributions to various facets of life in Latin America. They are also available in personal memoirs and on websites. Moreover, several authors writing about the Jewish achievement in Latin America have not considered cinema as a worthy enough activity to be mentioned among their accomplishments. In his 1960s book on the Jews of Argentina, for example, Jose Liberman recounted the history of Jewish agricultural settlement in the country, discussed the establishment of community institutions, and added a long list of Jews active in politics, the economy, and culture, 1 but he did not mention Jews active in popular culture, such as movies, television, music, or sports. More than forty years later, Ricardo Feierstein, in his history of Argentinian Jews, devoted only five pages out of 459 to mentioning Jews who were prominent in these fields.2 In both cases, it is impossible to know whether the characterization of certain people as Jewish relied on research in archives or was merely based on pinpointing names that sounded Jewish or simply on personal acquaintance.In the past decade methodological and theoretical discussions, however, have encouraged new studies of Jewish Latin American experiences.3 Recent studies are less focused on political aspects, giving more weight to cultural and social facets. Scholars nowadays are less concerned with Jews as victims of anti- Semitism, xenophobia, or racism and more with their place and role as integral parts of society at large. Research is no longer based so much on communal and institutional sources as on testimonies produced by nonaffiliated ethnics, focusing on history from below and on oral testimonies rather than on official stories. Many authors currently favor comparative perspectives, both across ethnic divides within the nation and from a transnational viewpoint regarding the Diaspora links to its real or imagined homeland.4 The present issue of Jewish Film & New Media reflects the vitality and innovativeness of Jewish Latin American studies.When it comes to the bibliography on Latin American cinema, the challenges are no less significant. Since Jews are often identified with the hegemonic white population, the research focused on the Jewish contribution to film and television, or on the representation of Jewish experiences in movies, has been minimal or conspicuously absent until the rise of multicultural perceptions in the late twentieth century. Thus a dictionary of filmmakers published in the late 1990s includes four hundred entries for Latin American directors without mentioning their ethnic identity or religious faith. On the other hand, the dictionary includes special chapters on foreign directors who visited the Latin American continent, and on exiled Spanish filmmakers who found refuge in Argentina and Mexico following the victory of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).5 Similarly, a book of interviews with seventy well-known filmmakers from all over Latin America casually mentioned the Jewishness of only one of them, and ignored that of at least one other.6Moreover, before the upsurge of democratization in the eighties, and the integration of national economies into globalized markets from the early 1990s onward, very few films featured Jewish characters. …

No better way to be Latin American: European science and thought, Latin American theory?

Twentieth-century Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui wanted to give a Peruvian and indigeneous face to socialism in his country. He embraced Marxism as a method, but its application meant challenging many of its temporal and spatial assumptions. The encounter of European ideas with the Latin American experience was itself theoretically productive. It is paradoxical then that when defending his project, he evoked the name of the unabashedly Euro-centric nineteenth century Argentine liberal Domingo Sarmiento, whose 1845 book Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism embraced European ideas a the source of progress in Argentine and associated all that is indigenous with barbarism and backwardness. However, in spite of Sarmiento's explicit celebration of European ideas, the text itself is filled with examples of how European ideas fail to take root in Argentine and thus illustrates how the local overwhelms the universal. In revealing the limits and inadequacy of European theory, its calls, albeit unintentionally, for a new theorizing that Mariátegui would later take up. Both theorists then suggest that the practice of theory be understood as emerging from and gaining autonomy from orthodoxy via sustained engagement with the local, which then leads to generalizing anew.

On the origins of the Triffin dilemma

Robert Triffin became famous with his trenchant analyses of the vulnerabilities of the Bretton Woods system. These are still at the centre of many discussions today. This article argues that there is a remarkable continuity in Triffin's work. From his earliest writings, Triffin developed a vision that the international adjustment process was not functioning according to the classical mechanisms. This view was based on thorough empirical analyses of the Belgian economy during the Great Depression and shaped by a business cycle perspective with an emphasis on the disequilibria and the transition period. His doctoral dissertation on imperfect competition theory and his Latin American experience further reinforced this basic view.

Globalization and the distribution of wealth: the Latin American experience, 1982-2008

Globalization and the distribution of wealth: the Latin American experience, 1982-2008

Educating cities in Latin America

This article considers the development of educating cities from a political perspective, illustrating in detail the diversity of organisations and individuals involved and the challenges they are facing. Bearing in mind that educating cities were established from the 1990s onwards in Europe and spread to other continents from there, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate how this proposal was adopted in Latin America. After discussing the basic aims of educating cities, the paper focuses on the Latin American experience, giving examples of existing projects within the educating cities initiative. The authors are particularly interested in the contrast between the political intentions of educating cities on the one hand and the social, economic, political and cultural world on the other hand. They observe that in this context there is a danger of the individual being forgotten, which contradicts the actual intention of the educating city concept. They also discuss the problem of who should carry out the realisation of educating cities and how the various stakeholders might coordinate their actions. Contemplating new directions at the end of their paper, the authors sum up a number of guidelines and offer recommendations for action in developing educating cities.

Austerity and the Global Crisis: Lessons from Latin America

One of the most surprising realities of the past four years of the global economic crisis has been the strong performance of many Latin American countries—in many cases exceeding the growth of the United States and Europe. The experiences of Latin American economies with austerity is described by declining performance followed by a decade of experimentation and increasing awareness and confidence about the role of national economic policies in managing crises and shielding national economies from global volatility. Record-level growth was interrupted by the effects of the global financial crisis after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008. The effects of the global economic crisis on the region led to the explicit decision by most Latin American governments not to follow austerity policies in order to sustain growth. This decision has largely been successful, although sound fiscal performance has been affected by monetary pressures that appreciated Latin American currencies. Latin American experience of more than 60 years strongly suggests that policies restricting spending can have major negative impacts on national economic growth and social welfare. Those promoting spending, on the other hand, have a greater likelihood of maintaining aggregate demand at the macroeconomic level while providing key services and infrastructure needed for minimal levels of well-being.

Sovereign debt in Latin America, 1820-1913

ABSTRACTThis paper examines sovereign lending to Latin America and the Caribbean from 1820 to 1913. We examine four waves of capital flows where defaults were followed by a return to market access. In spite of extended default, countries kept promising high returns that attracted international investors again and again: financial autarky thus gave way to eras of high integration to global markets as measured by sovereign risk pricing. We discuss imperfections of the sovereign debt institutional context in the region and discuss a menu of options that some countries used to seek funds in the global financial markets after defaults. The parallel with the modern Latin American and Caribbean sovereign bond market experience is striking.

Latin American Experience with Alzheimer's Disease Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarkers

Fil: Surace, Ezequiel Ignacio. Fundacion para la Lucha Contra las Enfermedades Neurologicas de la Infancia. Instituto de Investigaciones Neurologicas "Raul Carrea"; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina

Awareness, adoption and implementation of the water safety plan methodology: insights from five Latin American and Caribbean experiences.

Considerable effort has been made worldwide to disseminate information and provide technical assistance to encourage the adoption and implementation of the water safety plan (WSP) methodology. Described since the third edition of the World Health Organization (WHO) Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality, a WSP provides guidance for water utilities to ensure the delivery of safe drinking water and protect health. Attention is now being given to understand the success of efforts to advance adoption of the WSP methodology in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. More specifically, there is interest in knowing how early adopters developed strategies to implement the WSP methodology and what challenges exist for further implementation. To better understand adoption and implementation trends, key informants from five LAC countries were interviewed and case studies were developed to reveal the diversity of WSP approaches applied in the region. Results indicate that WSP implementation is more widespread than previously reported. Respondents affirmed that the WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality are routinely used as a model for country-level drinking-water regulations, which has led to uptake of the WSP methodology. Interview respondents also revealed innovative national strategic approaches for WSP implementation.

Politics, religion & society in Latin America

Long assumed to be an unchanging and unquestioned bulwark of established power and privilege, religion in Latin America has diversified and flourished, while taking on new social and political roles in more open societies. How did this change occur? Why did churches in the region embrace new ideas about rights, sponsor social movements, and become advocates for democracy? Are further changes on the horizon? Daniel Levine explores these issues, uniquely situating the Latin American experience in a rich theoretical and comparative context.

Transnationalism and Community Building

An emergent literature on transnationalism has been burgeoning since the 1990s to examine new patterns of immigrant settlement. Research to date has emphasized the effects of transnationalism on the development in sending countries rather than receiving countries, focused on immigrant groups from Latin America rather than Asia, and examined individuals rather than immigrant organizations as units of analysis. As a consequence, we do not have reliable knowledge about the impacts of transnationalism on immigrant communities in the host society and the extent and sources of intergroup variations. To fill this gap and to supplement knowledge gained from Latin American experiences, this article offers a conceptual framework for analyzing the relationship between transnationalism and community building by examining Chinese ethnic organizations in the United States. We show that immigrants often engage their ancestral homelands via organizations and that organizational transnationalism contributes to strengthening the infrastructure and symbolic systems of the ethnic community and enhancing the community’s capacity to generate resources conducive to immigrant incorporation.

Copland in Argentina

Abstract Perhaps more than any other US composer, Aaron Copland is associated with Pan Americanism, a contradictory and often unbalanced set of practices promoting North-South economic and affective ties since the nineteenth century. Copland visited Latin America on behalf of the US government four times over the course of his career. He also befriended and taught Latin American composers, wrote about Latin American music, and composed several Latin-American—themed works, including the well-known El salón México. Focusing on one such encounter—Copland's three visits to Argentina (1941, 1947, 1963)—this article examines in detail Latin American opinion on Copland's cultural diplomacy, thus challenging the prevalent one-sided and largely US perspective. My analysis of these Spanish-language sources yields new biographical data on Copland while questioning recent assessments of his Latin American experience. I also illuminate the composer's conflicted approach to modernism, intimately connected to his desire to communicate with a broad public and to assert national identity. The crisis of modernism not only played itself out in some surprising ways in Argentina but also informed Copland's profoundly antimodernist vision of Latin American music, one rooted in essentialism and folkloric nationalism and which ultimately prevailed in the United States throughout the late twentieth century.

The Economics of Railways Restructuring in South Korea

South Korea, like many countries, is engaged in a policy debate concerning possible railways reforms. However, unlike most countries, here the focus of discussion has been the government’s proposal to open high-speed passenger train lines to a second train company that would supply on-track competition to KTX trains. While such a policy may indeed lead to lower fares and greater efficiency, worldwide experience casts doubt on the government’s hope that it would lead to such dramatic increases in ridership that the level of subsidies to the overall rail system could be reduced. We argue that a more promising reform strategy may be to introduce competition into freight rail. Based on the Latin American experience, creating independent, vertically integrated, competing freight railway companies could be expected not only to lower shipper rates and increase efficiency but also to raise considerable revenues from the private sector in franchising fees and new investments.

Teaching history on the border: teachers voice their views

The overall objective of this investigation was to explore the views of border history teachers on a wide variety of issues that influence their instructional approaches, curricular content choices, and capacity to teach history more effectively. More specifically, the focus was on identifying factors that affect their ability to utilize culturally relevant pedagogy and to integrate into their classroom instruction elements of the local border community, and of the Latin American, Latino, and Mexican American experience. Findings confirmed that structural factors such as mandated curriculum standards, adopted textbooks, and high-stakes tests all serve to limit the teachers’ ability to integrate the Latino and minority experience into their classroom narrative. Although most teachers expressed support for the inclusion of Latino history, in actual practice they reported having insufficient time, training, or resources to adequately do so. The implications that Latino curricular exclusion has for students on the border are also discussed.

Educação face à mída: interacionismo e mediações

The author approaches the fundamental and the outcoines of some Latin-American experiences in the field of Education before the Media, especially theones from Chile, Peru and Uruguay. It's discussed, yet, a series of theoretical.epistemological and methodolocial questions related to the mediations of theprocess of mediai reception and to the interative paradigm in the Communication-Education.