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.

Contributed by Nina Vázquez

La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción of Puerto Rico will be visiting El Instituto from March 23rd through March 27th 2020. El Instituto will be hosting a series of events with la Colectiva’s leaders, Zoan Tanís Dávila Roldán and Shariana Ferrer-Núñez. The purpose of these events is to promote community outreach and to better understand these important issues that impact the Puerto Rican community and the Caribbean on a larger scale. La Colectiva will cover a series of topics such as black feminism, LGBTQIA rights, Women’s rights and the intersections of race, capitalism, and patriarchy. Their visit includes a community facing event in the Hartford Public Library (Tuesday, 24 March, 5-7PM), a student activism how-to session (Konover Auditorium, Wednesday, 25 March, 6-8PM), a Women’s panel at UConn’s Storrs campus (Thursday, 26 March, 6-8PM) and more.
La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción is a grassroots feminist movement that brings together the student, anti-colonialism and LGBTTIQ struggle to oppose the racist and patriarchal colonial system and works towards achieving structural change. They are building a grassroots feminist movement which recognizes that the different manifestations of oppression (including sexism, cis-sexism machismo, racism, xenophobia and capitalism) are interrelated and need to be opposed collectively. Their political project comes from the tradition of black feminism, articulating the fight against hetero-patriarchy, anti-black violence and capitalism.

Zoan Tanís Dávila Roldán is a black feminist activist and lawyer from Puerto Rico, member and spokesperson of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción. An activist lawyer, Zoán has represented protesters affected by state and police repression, impoverished communities at risk of displacement and advocacy initiatives defending civil rights.

Shariana Ferrer-Núñez is a Black queer feminist Puerto Rican activist, scholar and organizer, co-founder of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción. Her political practice centers intersectionality as the forefront for dismantling systems of oppression, building movements for social justice through collective and popular power.

Contributed by Samuel Martínez

The contributory volume, Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization, edited by Music Assistant Professor in Residence and El Instituto Affiliate faculty member, Jesús Ramos-Kittrell, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in December 2019. El Instituto is proudly included among the UConn units whose co-sponsorship made it possible for Dr. Ramos to convene the distinguished panel of musicologists and ethnomusicologists who contributed chapters to this book. Chela Sandoval wrote a foreword to the book, and Mexican studies luminaries, Claudio Lomnitz and Roger Bartra, wrote book jacket endorsements. Leading ethnomusicologist Alejandro de la Madrid wrote the book’s concluding chapter. Queer, indigenous, Afro-descendant, borderlands, and diasporic artistic genealogies, political projects and embodied perspectives are included among the varied organizing principles of the books’ ten chapters. We congratulate Dr. Ramos on this achievement.