El Instituto’s Associate Director and Associate Professor-in-Residence Anne Gebelein has been assisting the State Education Resource Center (SERC) in the development of a new high school course on African-American, Latino and Puerto Rican Studies. This new curricular mandate was passed by the Connecticut State Legislature in 2019; it requires all high schools to offer African-American and Latino history as a one-year elective starting in 2022. Gebelein leads SERC’s Syllabus Committee, which is one of a small number of committees getting the course ready to launch. The focus of the Syllabus Committee includes assessment, planning, teacher training, focus groups for both content areas, and surveys of teachers and students. Committee participants come from a variety of professions and perspectives, and the democratic process of deciding what should be in the course has been lively and invigorating. A principal challenge is having to decide what parts of African American and Latinx history can be included in under 90 days of class time, when people in both groups feel that their histories have not been addressed in meaningful ways in high school to date. There has been a lively debate about whether the two histories should be taught as a sequence of two courses or intertwined in one, two-semester course.

The SERC process has benefited from the voices of multiple UConn faculty and students. Africana Studies core faculty members Shayla Nunnally and Fiona Vernal are sharing their expertise with the Syllabus Committee, while Instituto undergraduate student Yadiel Rodríguez and Spanish Associate Professor Guillermo Irizarry have shared theirs with the Latino and Puerto Rican Content Committee.

On the basis of her leading role in the SERC initiative, Dr Gebelein has also gotten her 17 students in “Latino CT: Writing for the Community” actively participating in the process. Given that the state survey committees got a slow start, students in LLAS 2012 — a core course in UConn’s Latina/o and Latin American Studies major — decided to create their own survey and articulate what they, as Latinx students from across the state, would want in such a course. For example, LLAS 2012 student María Mejía Girón traveled to Waterbury High School where she interviewed teachers and students. The class combined this kind of external information with their internal research and deliberation as the basis for writing a report for the SERC Syllabus Committee. Students brainstormed essential questions for an introductory course and what content focus areas they found important as emerging Latinx studies scholars. They organized and prioritized critical sources and themes, and all this information was turned over to both the Syllabus and the Latino Content Focus Group for consideration in the shaping of the course objectives, essential questions, and content.

Inspired by their ability to contribute, while also responding creatively to the challenges of learning on-line while in COVID-19 sheltering-in-place, LLAS 2012 students switched gears halfway through the semester and began a web project to support teachers who will be teaching the course in 2022. Students divided into 8 teams, each of which researched a theme in Latinx studies that aligned with the new statewide mandate. Each team met regularly through live video conferencing with Gebelein. Justin Feliciano, a LLAS major with strong web design skills, led the way in reimagining El Instituto’s existing community-facing Website, La Plaza Virtual, as a platform for students to curate and upload tips for teachers on sources, content, key words and timelines for teaching Latinx history. Dr Gebelein aims to debut this teaching Latinx history section of the Plaza Virtual site sometime in the Fall.

The next steps in the SERC course design are as follows. A draft of the scope and sequence of the entire course is due to the state on June 5^th; the summer will be spent filling out the skeleton with content, unit objectives, and measures of assessment. The complete draft of the course is due in November, and will be presented to the state legislature in January.

By Emma Amador 

During the 2019-2020 academic year I was a Faculty Fellow at the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut (UCHI). The fellowship provides a year of funding to a cohort of fellows each year that includes UConn faculty and doctoral students, as well as external faculty in residence. It also provides a lively and collegial space to work on research projects while maintaining dialogue with a group of scholars working on diverse topics within the humanities. Fellows share their research and participate in a wide range of events sponsored by the institute. While in residence I had the opportunity to share my own work in progress on Puerto Rican history.

My work focused on revising my first book, The Politics of Care: Puerto Ricans, Citizenship, and Migration after 1918. This book explores how the U.S. welfare state has long been a site where Puerto Ricans have fought for social justice, labor reform, and decolonization.  Focusing largely on the lives and work of Puerto Rican activists, it reveals how welfare and social work became important spaces where Puerto Rican grassroots activists, community organizers, and civil rights leaders have envisioned social and economic justice in their communities. While a fellow, I gave a talk on January 29^th, 2020, titled “Demanding Dignity: Social Workers, Community Organizing, and Welfare Politics in the Puerto Rican Diaspora after 1948.” This presentation gave me the opportunity to share my ongoing research with my colleagues at UCHI as well as other visitors. This included faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from a variety of disciplines.  It was exciting to get feedback from my peers and get their suggestions for revisions.

One of the other exciting aspects of the UCHI fellowship was having a space to work at UConn’s Babbidge Library, as fellows are typically given an office in the Humanities Institute, which is located inside the library. While in residence, I began a new article exploring the history of welfare rights activism in Puerto Rican communities and as a part of this research I began exploring the collection’s at UConn’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. While I only began to scratch the surface of the wealth of resources available, this was a truly valuable part of the experience of being a fellow. Both the Library and Dodd Center have important collections on both Puerto Rican history and the history of Connecticut. Moving forward, I believe this experience will help me to better integrate these resources into my research and to share them with students through my teaching.

Overall, my experience at UCHI provided a great opportunity to work on advancing my research while also collaborating with other faculty and students in the humanities. Sadly, in the second semester of the fellowship the current health crisis (brought by Covid 19) resulted in the need to stop the normal functioning of Institute events. And while it was hard to say goodbye to the physical institute early, I believe this experience also underscored just how much support fellows receive. It clearly revealed how UCHI provides a truly nurturing space for research to the community of scholars that call it home.

By Samuel Martínez

Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola but are divided by a history of mutual conflict. It is often heard that the two countries have been adversaries since 1844, when the Dominicans won their independence from Haiti rather than a European colonizer (Haiti having brought both sides of the island under unified rule in 1822). Research soon to be published by two UConn professors, Samuel Martínez (Anthropology and El Instituto) and Thomas Craemer (Public Policy), confirms this common wisdom in some ways, while unsettling it in others. Specifically, they find evidence that the news media of the Dominican Republic regularly expresses anti-Haitian bias but does so in ways that sit uneasily with standard narratives about Haitian-Dominican relations. Martínez and Craemer were surprised to find that media stereotypes about Haiti and Haitian immigrants coincide strongly with globally prevalent anti-immigrant and anti-Black content but contain much less content that indexes the Dominican Republic’s past or present hostility with Haiti. The researchers first built a codebook containing more than 180 assertions about Haiti and Haitians found in three of the country’s leading daily newspapers. They then recruited teams of Spanish-speaking coders at UConn and in the city of Santo Domingo, to categorize each Haiti-related item in a large sample of news stories found with the search term “Haiti” in the online archives of three leading Dominican daily newspapers, for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015. During those years, a virtual storm of Haiti-related media coverage followed a controversial Dominican high court ruling, which effectively stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of Haitian-descendant Dominicans. In a paper to be published in the journal, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Martínez and Craemer warn that their findings apply only to the news and opinion page content of these leading dailies, and do not speak to questions relating to Dominicans’ feelings about Haitians, Blacks or immigrants outside of this journalistic context. Looking for both stereotype-confirming and counter-stereotypical assertions, Martínez and Craemer’s study team found surprisingly that neutral or counter-stereotypical ideas about Haiti-Dominican relations predominated numerically over “Haiti-phobic” nationalist story lines that position Haitian immigrants as alien “reconquerors” of Dominican territory. The most prevalent negative stereotypes and story lines instead fell within categories that Martínez and Craemer classify as examples of global anti-Blackness and anti-immigrant prejudice. Dominican reporting most strongly equates Haitians with criminals and Haiti with violence, a global anti-Black and anti-immigrant trope. Anti-Black prejudice is also conveyed tacitly through reporting that prefers to cite what non-Haitians say about Haiti/ans over what Haitians and Haitian descendants say. Also abundant were common anti-immigrant story lines relating to Haitian immigrants’ fraudulent use of Dominican social security and health care resources. In sum, the most respected Dominican news outlets write about Haiti and Haitians with disrespect but convey that in forms that sooner resemble racist and anti-immigrant discourse in other nations, rather than through island-specific nationalist fears about eroding sovereignty. For Martínez and Craemer, a highlight of the research experience was assembling and working with their team of Dominican coders. These advanced undergraduates and recent graduates in social communication from several Dominican universities brought important insights to the study on the basis of their native linguistic and cultural fluency. Hoping that their research is the beginning of a conversation about media bias, rather than the last word about it, both the study codebook and the universe of articles from which the study sample was drawn are accessible among the research documents at Professor Martínez’ UConn faculty Webpage. The possibilities for future research are abundant.

Contributed by Rodolfo Fernandez

El Instituto’s Assistant Professor in Residence Rodolfo Fernández finished a complete draft of a new book manuscript, titled Mexico’s Industrial Revolutions: Capitalism and the State in Monterrey, 1600-1915. This book is the culmination of a decade of work, begun while Fernández was a doctoral student in History at Georgetown University.  The book tells how an urban industrial political economy was built in the Mexican city of Monterrey, and how the construction of said political economy could not have existed without a functioning state or a social structure designed to negotiate the distribution of power.  The manuscript aims to explain two linked processes, one, Monterrey’s process of industrialization, the other, the city’s transformation during the Mexican Revolution.

The first part of the manuscript traces the evolution of politics in the northeast and the construction of the state structures that eventually led to industrial revolution.  In the first three centuries of its existence, Monterrey evolved from a diverse frontier trading post, to a node in the dynamic political economy of the north, to the economic engine of the northeastern U.S.-Mexico borderlands.  This first part culminates in an analysis of an environmental and political crisis that exposed the shortcomings of the industrial revolutions and contributed to the eruption of a social and political revolution in 1910.

Part II deals with a longer period of crisis that began just one year after the great loss of life and property suffered in Monterrey’s flood of 1909.  Because Monterrey was the richest and most productive city in Mexico before the Mexican revolution, it was the site of an early and unique, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to use urban industry as the economic base for a popular revolution.  Monterrey in 1910 provided textiles for regional markets, steel for expanding Mexican railroads, beer and the glass to contain it for Mexican consumers, and refined silver for export to the United States.  As the leading urban area of the north, as well as the capital of the state of Nuevo León, Monterrey was the political, strategic, and economic center of the Revolution in the borderlands.

Completing the book manuscript has led Fernández to contemplate how writing and researching is a both a solitary process and a collective endeavor.  Fernández credits the encouragement, help, and intellectual stimulation provided by his students, colleagues, friends, and family for the support he needed to get through uncounted solitary hours spent reading, thinking, and staring at the page.  We at El Instituto look forward to Fernández publishing his original vision of the Mexican Revolution as an urban and industrial project.

By Victoria Almodóvar

Over the past two years I have taken on the role of Graduate Assistant for UConn’s Center for Fraternity and Sorority Development and Teaching Assistant for El Instituto. These experiences, as well as my own identities as a Latina and a sorority member, sparked my interest in doing what I can to help support Latinx undergraduate students. My thesis project specifically explores undergraduate Latinx student experiences in fraternities and sororities.  In my paper I discuss what work has already been done surrounding Latinx membership in fraternities and sororities, and identify opportunities for further research.

Fraternities and sororities are student led social organizations that provide a “home-away-from-home” for many undergraduate students. There are many different kinds of social fraternities and sororities, which in racial/ethnic terms comprise four main groups:  predominantly white fraternities, predominantly white sororities, Black fraternities and sororities, and “culturally specific” fraternities and sororities. Though Latinx students are welcome to join organizations in any of these four categories, current research overwhelmingly focuses on the Latinx student experience in Latino/a fraternities and sororities.  In my thesis paper, I argue that more work needs to be done to understand the experiences of Latinx members of fraternities and sororities across all four of the groups they belong to. In my own experiences as a Latina member of a predominantly white sorority, I have been questioned and deemed a “sell-out” on occasion, and made to feel as though my chosen Greek affiliation makes me less Latina. If we ignore the experiences of Latinx students who join non-Latinx fraternities and sororities that may then perpetuate the notion that there is only one way to properly be Latinx.

The research done so far, though modest in scope, reveals the great importance of Latinx student involvement in fraternity and sorority life. In keeping with earlier researchers’ findings, I discuss a variety of benefits that students feel they obtain from their fraternity or sorority membership. The two most discussed areas of the student experience that membership positively affects are ethnic identity development and educational persistence. Fraternities and sororities provide students with the space and tools to learn, grow, and adjust to their campus settings. Attention to these positive effects of membership is essential to the cause of getting Latinx students through college. At the same time, I argue that more attention needs to be paid to the potentially harmful effects fraternity and sorority membership might have on students’ college and broader life experiences. Identifying both the positive and negative effects of membership in fraternities and sororities is a vital step that should be taken in order to help members be their best selves and succeed academically.

In all, my project centers the importance of examining the experiences of Latinx undergraduate students from a variety of angles and lenses. If higher education is truly to be the key to advancing in U.S. society, we then need to understand Latinx student experiences better, in order to provide them with campus environments that can help them thrive.