CIPR | Center For Inter-American Policy & Research

Tulane University

Central America & the Circum-Caribbean

Central America & the Circum-Caribbean

The Central American and circum-Caribbean region is an ecological, human, and material corridor of great relevance to hemispheric exchanges, both historically and contemporarily. A point of transition between north and south, the region literally bridges the two parts of the continent, allowing for their distinctive characters, while establishing its own. The implications are multiple, biological as well as political, social as well as economic.
For Tulane University, Central America and the circum-Caribbean have long held historical relevance. It was in this area that the University first established Latin American expertise through archaeological and anthropological research and exploration dating back to the early part of the twentieth century. This in turn reflected the region’s connection to New Orleans and its port, a natural gateway for the region thanks to its strategic location at the mouth of the Mississippi. Trade and transportation routes have long generated flows of goods and people from the region, contributing to the development of business and the establishment of migrant communities with significant transnational ties.

To the U.S. as a whole Central America and the circum-Caribbean have also had longstanding historical relevance. In the nineteenth century the region was seen as coextensive with national interests, not merely as a part of the U.S.’s sphere of influence, but perhaps even as a frontier for the fulfillment of its “manifest destiny” of continental expansion. This led to unfortunate incidents of filibustering, most notoriously under William Walker, who lived briefly in New Orleans, and later, intervention in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the Spanish American War. The U.S. continued to assert its preeminence in the region throughout the twentieth century, starting with the 1903 intervention that led to the independence of Panama, followed a year later by the takeover of the transoceanic canal project, a global strategic asset that it developed and then controlled until the end of the century. The U.S. intervened militarily throughout the region over the ensuing decades, including in Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, and Haiti, with covert operations also occurring in Guatemala and Cuba, and later in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Such a level and kind of intervention has had longstanding implications for how the region views the United States.

U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America in general, and Central America and the circum-Caribbean in particular, has consistently posited the strategic relevance of the area on the basis of its location and proximity to the U.S.. The Monroe Doctrine claimed the area as its exclusive sphere of interest, and its subsequent restatements–the Platt Amendment, the Roosevelt Corollary, the Truman and Johnson Doctrines–served as justifications for intervention, military or otherwise, to protect the U.S. from external threats, perceived or real. U.S. leaders constantly reasserted the strategic significance of the region, including President Johnson, who justified intervention in the Dominican Republic by referring to it as “our doorstep”, and President Reagan, who did the same by labeling Central America as “our own backyard”. More positive policy responses, like Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, or Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative, were premised on the notion that the U.S. would benefit by addressing the structural causes of regional social and political unrest, fostering economic and political development.
Regional conflicts receded at the end of the 1980s and countries completed their transitions to democracy and market economies as the Cold War and the economic shocks of the 1970s retreated and finally ended. This created new opportunities and challenges. Economic growth increased with trade and investment, driving improvements in general wellbeing. But poverty and inequality levels remained high and state capabilities low. Crime rates and violence surged to some of the highest levels in the world with the proliferation of gangs and the arrival of drug cartels. The challenges emerging from the region were now of a different nature, characterized by having domestic as well as international dimensions, with the implication that they could not be solved by a single party, not even the regional hegemon, instead requiring a multilateral approach. This was the case of immigration, transnational crime, and environmental degradation.

U.S. interest in the region waned in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As the focus shifted to the War on Terror, policy towards the region was dominated by security concerns, particularly with regard to drugs and immigration. The framework of a “war” on drugs set the policy onus on the supply side–eradication and interdiction–doing little to prevent demand, relying mostly on the use of repressive and militaristic tactics. At the same time, domestic political pressures to “secure the border” drove policies towards erecting physical and technological barriers to prevent border crossings, while a comprehensive immigration reform could not garner sufficient political support to pass in a polarized political climate. Regional engagement otherwise focused mostly on trade and investment, with the signing of a free trade agreement with Central America and the Dominican Republic, and later with Panama.
As the U.S. fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, attempted to mediate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and, subsequently, “pivoted” to Asia, Central America and the circum-Caribbean appeared to fade out of focus. Extra regional powers benefitted from the area’s opening, with China developing strong economic and political ties throughout the region, and Russia and Iran doing the same with Venezuela and its ALBA partners. Battered by the Great Recession, American regional predominance, let alone hegemony, was seriously questioned as Russia conducted joint military maneuvers with Venezuela and Chinese investors announced their intention to build a new transoceanic canal through Nicaragua. Countries in the region, buoyed by strong commodity prices, also asserted greater autonomy from the U.S. forming new regional institutions that excluded it and distancing themselves from American foreign policy objectives. This became particularly poignant in the case of Cuba where U.S. efforts to isolate the country economically through its longstanding embargo while excluding it from regional and diplomatic fora have faced continued and growing regional opposition.

Most recently, the appearance of thousands of Central American child migrants at the U.S. border fleeing the violence and despondency of their hometowns, brought the region’s relevance back into perspective. While geopolitical realities and the terms of engagement have changed, the United States and the circum-Caribbean are linked inextricably. The challenges the region faces are not solely its own, nor will the effects of success or failure confronting them be confined to it alone. These challenges are extremely complex, with deep historical roots, that defy simplistic solutions.

Some key general research questions in this area include the following:

  • How can Central America and the circum-Caribbean best confront the drug trade and transnational crime, including ways that focus on prevention and community engagement What are the terms for a more fruitful collaboration with the U.S. in this area? What are the potential costs and benefits for the region of drug legalization?
  • How may countries in the region foster state strength, enhancing their ability to confront crime and build strong economies, while ensuring the rule of law, transparency and accountability, and the respect for human rights?
  • How can countries in Central America and the circum-Caribbean develop greater resilience as they confront increasingly extreme weather events in a region greatly susceptible to the effects of global warming? What are the bases for building sustainable development in Central America and the circum Caribbean? What is the region’s potential for developing green economies? How may countries best take advantage of existent sources of renewable energy?
  • How may countries articulate the triple challenge of increasing economic growth, promoting social inclusion, and confronting climate change? How can countries reverse the loss of human capital and the social dislocation generated by migration? What are the regional implications of deepening social and political conflict in Mexico?
  • What are the challenges for democratic consolidation in the region and how might they be confronted? How do they affect the prospects for deeper regional integration? What would be the regional implications of a deepening internal conflict in Venezuela?
  • How likely is Cuba to follow a belated transition to democracy and the market? Will the economic changes adopted by Raúl Castro continue to deepen or will they backtrack? What alternatives exist for a more constructive U.S. engagement of Cuba and the opening of a post-embargo era?
  • What are the challenges posed by the potential development of a transoceanic canal in Nicaragua and how might they be confronted? More broadly, does the Chinese and Russian presence in the region imply potential risks in the case of a deeper strategic cleavage of those powers with the West?

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Dr. Erika Robb Larkins to present research in talk on Brazil's Private Security Sector

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Join the Stone Center for Latin American Studies in welcoming Dr. Erika Robb Larkins for a talk titled Mall Cops and Bodyguards: Civility, Expendability, and Racialized Labor in Brazil’s Private Security Sector on Wednesday, January 23, 2019.

Dr. Erika Robb Larkins is the Director of the J. Keith Behner and Catherine M. Stiefel Program on Brazil and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at San Diego State University. She received her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and also holds a M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching focus is on violence and inequality in urban settings. Her first book, The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil (U California Press 2015), explores the political economy of spectacular violence in one of Rio’s most famous favelas. Dr. Larkins is presently working on a second book examining the private security industry in Brazil.

Please direct any questions about the talk to Daniel Gough.

Sociology Colloquium Series to host talk by Javier Auyero on collusion and violence in Argentina

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Join the Sociology Department at Tulane University in welcoming Dr. Javier Auyero, for a talk titled The Ambivalent State: Collusion and Violence in Latin America on Thursday, January 24, at 3:30 PM.

Drawing upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a poor high-crime neighborhood of Argentina and documentary evidence from court cases involving drug traffickers and police officers, this talk examines the clandestine connections between participants in the illicit drug trade and members of the state security forces – and their impact on skyrocketing urban violence. The presentation unpacks the much-referred to (but seldom scrutinized) content of police-criminal collusion reconstructing the resources, relational practices, and processes at its core. The talk makes its three-fold argument by way of empirical demonstration: a) illicit relationships between police agents and traffickers serve the latter to achieve a quasi-monopoly in the use of force over a territory that is central to the prosecution of their illegal trade, b) clandestine relationships between police officers and traffickers feed the systemic violence that characterizes the market of illegal drugs and contributes to localized violence, and c) police-trafficker collusion fosters widespread skepticism about law-enforcement among residents of low-income violent neighborhoods.

Dr. Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the author of Poor People’s Politics, Contentious Lives, Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina, and Patients of the State. Together with Débora Swistun, he co-authored Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. His new book, In Harm’s Way: The dynamics of urban violence, co-authored with María Fernanda Berti, was recently published by Princeton University Press. He is also the editor of Invisible City: Life and Labor in Austin, Texas (published this year by University of Texas Press), and co-editor – with Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes – of Violence at the Urban Margins (published this year by Oxford University Press).

Stone Center for Latin American Studies to host 11th annual Workshop on Field Research Methods

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Join us at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies for the 11th Annual Weekend Workshop on Field Research Methods on Saturday, January 26, 2019. The deadline to apply for the workshop is January 15, 2019.

How will you get the data you need for your thesis or dissertation? Do you envision immersing yourself for months in the local culture, or tromping the hills and farms seeking respondents? Sorting through dusty archives? Observing musicians at work in the plaza? Downloading and crunching numbers on a computer? For any of these approaches: How might you get there, from here?

This workshop aims to help you approach your data collection and analysis for your thesis or dissertation topic, and to adapt and refine your topic to be more feasible. You will take your research project ideas to the next stop—whatever that may be, include raising travel grants. Learn to:

  • Plan more efficiently, feasible, and rewarding fieldwork
  • Prepare more compelling and persuasive grant proposals
  • Navigate choices of research methods and course offerings on campus
  • Become a better research and fieldwork team-member

Format
This is an engaged, hands-on, informal workshop. Everyone shares ideas and participates. We will explore and compare research approaches, share experiences and brainstorm alternatives. You will be encouraged to think differently about your topic, questions, and study sites as well as language preparation, budgets, and logistics. The participatory format is intended to spark constructive new thinking, strategies, and student networks to continue learning about (and conducting) field research.

Who is leading this?
Laura Murphy, PhD, faculty in Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, and affiliate faculty to the Stone Center for Latin American Studies.

Who is this for?
This workshop is targeted to Stone Center graduate students as well as graduate students from other programs (GOHB, CCC, humanities, sciences, and others) if space is available. The workshop will be particularly helpful for those who envision research with human subjects.

Sign up
Sign up as soon as you can! Apply by January 15, 2019, at the latest to confirm your stop. Send an email with the following details:

  • Your name
  • Department and Degree program
  • Year at Tulane
  • Prior experience in research, especially field research
  • Academic training in research design and methods
  • Include a 1-paragraph statement of your current research interests and immediate plans/needs (i.e. organize summer field research)

Light breakfast and lunch will be provided. Not for credit.

For more information and/or to apply: Contact Laura Murphy or Jimmy Huck.

In the Shadows of Slavery and Colonialism: A Symposium on Intersectionality and the Law

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The Tulane and New Orleans communities are invited to join the Newcomb College Institute (NCI) for a day-long symposium In the Shadows of Slavery and Colonialism: A Symposium on Intersectionality and the Law, which provides an opportunity for researchers affiliated with NCI to engage with distinguished scholars in their field around the legal and political legacies of slavery and colonialism through an intersectional lens.

The researchers for the 2019 symposium are scholars who have been NCI postdoctoral fellows in the past two years. The Symposium theme was selected based on shared issues in the work of these researchers. They are Dr. Bonnie Lucero of the University of Houston and Dr. Emma Shakeshaft of the ACLU of Wisconsin, both of whom were Law & Society Fellows at NCI from 2017-2018, and Dr. Maria R. Montalvo, NCI’s 2018-2019 Bonquois Fellow in Women’s History in the Gulf South.

NCI has been awarded a Carol Lavin Bernick Faculty Grant from Tulane to host this inaugural symposium with the hope and intention that it will become a biennial event. In 2016 the Carol Lavin Bernick Family Foundation initiated this unique grant program to support the research and teaching of Tulane faculty.

This year’s symposium will consist of three sessions, each of which includes a discussion between one NCI researcher, her chosen distinguished scholar, and the audience. The researchers will prepare papers in advance for these sessions. (RSVP below to receive copies of pre-circulated materials.)

The symposium will also include a Fridays at Newcomb lunchtime panel with all three invited scholars. The panel will be moderated by Tulane Professor Laura Rosanne Adderley and will explore the usefulness of intersectionality as a theoretical framework for revealing the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Fridays at Newcomb is a lecture series with speakers across disciplines that provides students with the opportunity to learn about subjects outside of their majors. Lunch is provided at every Fridays at Newcomb lecture and they are each free and open to the public.

The schedule will be as follows:

8:30 – 8:45 AM – Tulane President Michael Fitts has been invited to give opening remarks

8:45 – 10:00 AM – Bonnie Lucero and Deirdre Cooper Owens, a conversation about Dr. Lucero’s paper, “Reproducing Racial Hierarchy in Cuba’s Slave Society.” RSVP recommended.

10:15 – 11:30 AM – Emma Shakeshaft and Dorothy Roberts, a conversation about Dr. Shakeshaft’s paper, Race, Membership, and Sovereignty: the Benefits of Using a Comparative Approach When Analyzing Race in Transracial Adoption Cases. RSVP recommended.

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM – Fridays at Newcomb, In the Shadows of Slavery and Colonialism: The Uses of Intersectionality, Dorothy Roberts, Marisa Fuentes, and Deirdre Cooper Owens, moderated by Laura Rosanne Adderley, Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies at Tulane University

1:30 PM – 2:45 PM – Maria R. Montalvo and Marisa J. Fuentes, a conversation about Dr. Montalvo’s paper, The Burden of Proof: Race, Freedom, and Litigation in the 1800s. RSVP recommended.

RSVP Information

In order to ensure the highest quality of engagement with each scholar’s work, NCI will collect RSVPs and will make the research essays available in advance to those who plan to attend the symposium sessions. Note that no RSVP is necessary for attendance at the Fridays at Newcomb lunchtime panel.

RSVP HERE

City, Community, and Culture Symposium VOICES

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The City, Culture, and Community (CCC) program at Tulane University is now accepting submissions for the 2019 spring symposium to be held on February 9, 2019. The deadline to submit a proposal is December 21, 2018. The 2019 symposium, VOICES: Visibility, Orientation, Identity, Creativity, Environment, Spaces, seeks to understand creative approaches to how inequalities are negotiated: socially, culturally, and institutionally.

The symposium is looking for research that explores creative approaches to agency, institutional organization, and cultural production and consumption within complex social systems. What are the current issues facing our communities, institutions, and cities? How can we be creative and inclusive in our approach? We are interested in how scholars frame these questions in regards to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This symposium invites scholars to present work from a variety of disciplines, perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies. As the academy continues to evolve, interdisciplinarity proves more and more a necessity. This symposium intends to create an interdisciplinary space that can bring together scholars, practitioners, students, and community members to engage across lines and extend current conversations around agency, resilience, and social justice across the globe.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Ernesto Martinez, is an Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. In his keynote address Queer Arousals in Contexts of Racialized Harm, Dr. Martinez conducts an intersectional analysis of the ways that queer men of color negotiate epistemic injustice through the creation and consumption of film, literature, and art. His research interests include queer ethnic studies, women of color feminisms, US Latinx literature and culture, and literary theory. He is the author of On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility (Stanford UP, 2012) and The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education. (Palgrave, 2014). Along with his academic achievements, Dr. Martinez also writes bilingual Latinx children’s books, produces films (La Sarentata, 2017), and serves as a board member for the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), a queer Latinx grassroots organization dedicated to producing art and analyzing culture and politics in the context of activism.

Conference submissions are open to graduate students, outstanding undergraduates, educators, and practitioners. The symposium is a forum to showcase original research, theory expansion, innovative analysis, practical applications, and case studies. We welcome unpublished journal articles, area exam sections, dissertation chapters, working papers, and other forms of research analysis. As the space is intended to be for workshopping and dialoguing, literature reviews will not be considered. Presentations will be organized either in panels or individually.

The submission deadline is December 21, 2018. Any questions should be directed to tulaneccc@gmail.com.