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.

The 2020 Robert G. Mead Fellowship as UConn’s most outstanding first-year Latin Americanist graduate student has been awarded to Randy Torres, a student in El Instituto’s Master’s program in Latina/o and Latin American Studies. This award was created in memory of Professor Robert G Mead, Jr, the founder of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UConn. The Mead Fellowship will provide Torres with travel funding for research in Texas archives for his project, “The Southern Underground Railroad.”  The research that Torres is doing for his Instituto MA thesis paper focuses on the Southern Underground Railroad through Texas, into the Texas-Mexico borderlands, and further into Mexico. Extensive research has been conducted and published about the Underground Railroad originating in the Southern slaveholding states and going North in search of freedom. However, comparably little has been written about the enslaved people who sought freedom by fleeing South into Mexico. Torres’ research will look broadly at the history of these Southern-bound avenues of escape and more pointedly at the gaps in the historiography of these people and events. He aims to combine primary sources and vernacular histories from both sides of the porous U.S./Texas-Mexico border to find out more about what happened to the people who successfully escaped as well as those who did not. Afro-Mexican and Afro-Tejano communities along the border provide some evidence of the successes of the Southern Underground Railroad. Torres hopes that his research will further illuminate the stories of the people who lived and died in this place and time, and elucidate their influence on the region’s history for the following two hundred years.

 

 

Contribution by Jorge M. Agüero

In Latin America, the poor are heavily underrepresented in their access to higher education. Less than ten percent of adolescents from low-income families are enrolled in college, while for their most affluent counterparts, the enrollment rate is close to 70%. To address these disparities, many countries in the region have implemented inclusive policies providing financial aid to talented but disadvantaged high school students. Yet, in a region where low socioeconomic status is often intertwined with ethnicity, it is unclear how the labor market would react to such policies. In an ongoing study, with Peruvian colleagues at the Universidad del Pacífico, and sponsored in part by a faculty seed grant from El Instituto. El Instituto/Economics core faculty member Jorge Agüero explores what sort of signal a merit-based scholarship conveys to the labor market for recent college graduates. They focus on Beca 18, the largest Peruvian scholarship targeting poor adolescents who excelled in public high schools. Beca 18 is sponsored by the central government and covers all college related expenses, including tuition, room and board, laptop, and tutoring.

Beca 18 could provide an advantage in the labor market if it sends a “productivity signal.” Employers could recognize that applicants with Beca 18 have better skills than similar applicants without the scholarship. These skills could reflect cognitive gains (e.g., good grades in high school and while in college) as well as soft skills (e.g., perseverance, grit, and the ability to overcome poverty). But this is not the only signal employers can infer from Beca 18. The inclusive nature of the scholarship could reinforce negative stereotypes. Beneficiaries are poor and tend to be indigenous. The scholarship could hurt job applicants if the labor market discriminates against indigenous candidates, as has been documented by previous studies in Peru. Indeed, when they reviewed more than 130 resumes from actual Beca 18 beneficiaries, only a handful of them mentioned the scholarship. Those who did, included it at the bottom of their resume and without making it salient. Such behavior would be consistent with a fear that the market would not respond positively to the scholarship. Do such trepidations reflect the true behavior of the market? To understand the labor market reaction, we conducted a field experiment.

Agüero and his Universidad del Pacífico collaborators managed a correspondence audit study, where they sent fictitious resumes in response to more than 800 job ads in Lima, Peru’s capital. They focused on jobs targeting recent graduates from 3- and 5-year colleges. Resumes were identical to each other except that, in some, a sentence was randomly added stating that the job applicant was a recipient of Beca 18. Our preliminary results are encouraging. Resumes including the Beca 18 statement are 17 percent more likely than those that do not to receive a callback. This premium seems large. It represents up to 50% of the callback that graduates from prestigious colleges receive. There are many more issues to unpack in our study. However, this preliminary finding suggest that, contrary to the fears of some Beca 18 recipients, the productivity signal of inclusive education programs could reduce socioeconomic disparities.

Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Professor in History and El Instituto and Director of UConn’s Hartford regional campus, is completing a revised and expanded version of his book Beyond la Frontera: The History of Mexico-US Migration (Oxford UP, 2011) for Spanish translation with the Editoriales del Colegio de San Luis and Colegio de la Frontera del Norte. Among other revisions, Professor Velázquez has recruited former El Instituto graduate students, Dr. Jennifer Cook and Luisa Arrieta, to help him update the introductory chapter to bring the work’s theme up to the current year. Cook researched and contributed a section on developments in migratory trends since the volume’s original 2011 publication. Similarly, Arrieta updated the work’s annotated chronology.

Mexican migration to the United States has comprised the world’s largest sustained movement of migratory workers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As part of the post-World War II massive wave of migrants from across Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, in recent decades Mexicans have comprised by far the largest migrant group in the United States. Although frequently cast as peripheral to projects of nation-state formation and consolidation, over the past 170 years Mexican migrants and migration have played central roles in the economic and political development of both countries.

Given the vital role migration plays for so many Mexicans, Velázquez sees the need for a Spanish-language study that offers an expansive, binational historical perspective on migratory trends and practices as they developed in Mexico and the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. The interdisciplinary chapters in this volume provide that perspective. Construyendo el Gran México: La emigración mexicana a Estados Unidos will expand upon nation-bound historiographies by applying broad, transnational historical points of view to examine the impact of migratory trends as they developed in Mexico and the United States.

It is impossible to know how Mexicans have become a dominant demographic presence and growing political and economic power in the contemporary United States without examining the multiple historical paths past generations chose to take on their way to el Norte. Furthermore, it is equally important to examine how scholars, politicians, and others have thought about and framed the historical narrative of Mexican migration: its inclusion and exclusion in national histories, periodization, and causation. By offering broad historical overviews of the subject, Construyendo el Gran México will provide students, scholars, and general readers an important resource and points of departure for future in-depth translocal and transnational studies.

The Mexican American scholar Américo Paredes aptly named this space of historical transnational relationship, “Greater Mexico.” The longstanding demographic overlap and “intertwined notions of ethnic identity, political orientation, and national affiliation” are all fundamental elements of the mutually constitutive migratory histories of Gran México. The book’s chapters engage this history in both a chronological and a thematic manner with reference to mutually influential periods in Mexican and Mexican American history.
The volume’s final section turns to a discussion of Trump era debates. The President famously began his candidacy for president with the statement, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Since his inauguration, Trump has translated rhetoric to proposals, initiating hundreds of policy changes in support of a hardline nativist agenda, in the tradition of Samuel Huntington’s view that Mexicans and Mexican immigrants are an existential threat to the “the United States’ Anglo-Protestant culture and the creed.” Trump’s policy changes have been accomplished through a variety of strategies, including executive decisions, policy memos, regulatory and administrative changes, and other measures – all unilaterally, without approval by Congress. The damage to democracy is disturbing but more traumatic still was the separation of thousands of children from their family members, which followed Trump’s directive to jail all unauthorized border crossers for criminal prosecution.

In documenting the enduring transnational phenomenon of migration, the contributions to this volume teach us that such short-term, unilateral solutions for the sake of political expediency are doomed to failure. The damage added to the already destructive effects of America’s existing deportation regime adds urgency to an already long-deferred progressive agenda, which utilizes multilateral negotiations to remedy long-standing economic inequalities; corrects historically based legislation at the national level that positions Mexicans and other migrants as illegal, vulnerable, and racialized subjects; and promotes human and workplace rights at the local level.