El Instituto announces the establishment of a Puerto Rican Crisis Research Group. This initiative aims to channel information within and beyond the UConn community about the background to the PROMESA/Hurricane María crisis, its nature and magnitude, and the prospects and initiatives for recovery.

Our first priority at this stage is gathering and sharing information: Are you, your UConn colleagues or Connecticut neighbors providing or planning to provide support for civil society initiatives, scholarly partners, government planning or other reconstruction efforts? Please let us know if you would like us to share word of your UConn-related initiatives through the Instituto mailing list or social media.

The research group will also be organizing a series of public lectures and scholarly workshops all the way through spring 2018 and possibly beyond.

Our first speaker is human rights lawyer and community activist Ariadna Godreau, who will present a public lecture on Monday 27 November, 4:30PM, Class of ‘47 Room, “The Politics of Disaster Relief: Austerity and Human Rights in Puerto Rico Post-María.”

Godreau will also workshop a paper in progress, Tuesday, 28 November, 12:30-2:00PM, Dodd 162, “Whose Rights? Whose Debris?  Access to Justice and Shared Responsibility in Puerto Rico Post-María.”

The speaker series will be multidisciplinary and your suggestions for future speakers are welcome.

Another research group initiative is a faculty/grad reading group, “Theorizing Catastrophes,” co-sponsored with the UCONN Humanities Institute. Once more details are set, we will reach out again with word of this reading group’s agenda and schedule.

Please feel free to contact any of the research group’s co-organizers, Rob Venator (charles.venator@uconn.edu), Guillermo Irizarry (Guillermo.irizarry@uconn.edu) or Samuel Martínez (Samuel.martinez@uconn.edu).

University of Connecticut anthropology professor Dr. Chrystal Smith has been granted $174,000 from the National Science Foundation to study the effects of academic climate and social networks on sexual and gender minority undergraduates who are in STEM fields. To read full article, go to https://innovation.uconn.edu/news/234/Understanding%20the%20STEM%20Climate%20and%20Social%20Networks%20effects%20on%20the%20Persistence%20of%20sexual%20and%20gender%20minorities%20in%20STEM%20fields

The UConn Migrant Farm Worker Clinic fellowship is a competitive award that allows students with an interest in migration studies and/or medicine to spend part of the summer working with a team of UConn medical professionals to provide services to migrant farmworkers. Students will be working with two teams: practitioners providing services and researchers examining data from last summer’s clinics. Honors students whose career trajectory would be enhanced by such an opportunity will be given preference. Spanish-speaking ability a plus. Must have reliable transportation.

This fellowship will provide the student with the opportunity to participate in a research study at the medical school that is investigating the prevalence of depression, anxiety and alcohol abuse among migrant farm workers in Connecticut. The co-investigators will be reviewing patient charts and data collected during the 2016 clinics. The team will be coding, logging, and analyzing data using organizational and statistical tools such as Excel and SPSS or SAS, to better understand mental illness in migrant populations.

The fellowship is complemented by an internship that allows the fellow to train for the clinic in the spring. Students will help coordinate other student volunteers, visit area farms, and assist AHEC with clinic tasks. In the fall, fellows will contribute to the honors core course LLAS/HIST 1570 by training and coordinating student volunteers as well as by working with the professor to present on summer research and write a reflection for El Instituto’s newsletter. The internship will carry 2 credits, assigned in the fall; fellows sign up for LLAS 4212 with Dr. Gebelein of El Instituto.

The fellowship during the summer comes with a stipend of $1,000 to cover traveling expenses. Responsibilities begin in April with training for the clinics and end in early October when the clinics end.  For more detailed information, please see here.

Deadline for letter of interest: Friday, March 31st, 2017 to anne.gebelein@uconn.edu

Sponsored by the UConn Honor’s Program, El Instituto: Latina/o, Caribbean & Latin American Studies Institute, CT Area Health Education Center & the UConn Migrant Farm Worker Clinic

Read the full article here.

• A 100 años de la ciudanaía de EE.UU.: Más dudas que repuestas

• Conferencia: La Base Constitucional de la Ciudanía Estadounidense de los Puertorriqueños

•  Are Puerto Ricans really American citizens?

Op-ed: Are Puerto Ricans Really American Citizens?

We, members of the core faculty and affiliate advisory board members of UConn’s El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, & Latin American Studies, write to express our commitment to advocating for the rights and freedoms of our students and co-workers at the university and fostering a welcoming intellectual community of critically engaged scholars. President Trump’s administration has exacerbated a wide range of discriminatory, nativist, racist, misogynist, and heterosexist actions and targeted Latinx populations and undocumented immigrants in particular. Our research and teaching emerges from and is sustained by a long history of struggles for social justice in Latinx, Caribbean & Latin American communities. As such, we reaffirm our commitment to fight discrimination and division and to support diversity, equity, social justice and human rights. We stand in solidarity with all our UConn colleagues and students who are feeling vulnerable at this time and pledge to actively work to protect their rights and freedoms.

The UConn Migrant Farm Worker Clinic fellowship is a competitive award that allows students with an interest in migration studies and/or medicine to participate part-time in working with a team of UConn medical professionals to provide services to migrant farmworkers during the growing season. Honors students whose career trajectory would be enhanced by such an opportunity will be given preference. Spanish-speaking skills a plus.

This fellowship is complemented by an internship that allows the fellow to train for the clinic in the late spring, and contribute to the fall course LLAS/HIST 1570 Migrant Workers. The fellowship during the summer comes with a stipend of $1,000 to cover traveling expenses.

Deadline for letter of interest: Friday, March 30th, 2018 to anne.gebelein@uconn.edu

Sponsored by the UConn Honor’s Program, El Instituto: Latina/o, Caribbean & Latin American Studies Institute, CT Area Health Education Center & the UConn Migrant Farm Worker Clinic

Puerto Rico and the origins of the U.S. Global Empire: The Disembodied Shadow

Drawing on a postcolonial legal history of the United States’ territorial expansionism, this book provides an analysis of the foundations of its global empire. Charles R. Venator-Santiago argues that the United States has developed three traditions of territorial expansionism with corresponding constitutional interpretations, namely colonialist, imperialist, and global expansionist. This book offers an alternative interpretation of the origins of US global expansion, suggesting it began with the tradition of territorial expansionism following the 1898 Spanish–American War to legitimate the annexation of Puerto Rico and other non-contiguous territories. The relating constitutional interpretation grew out of the 1901 Insular Cases in which the Supreme Court coined the notion of an unincorporated territory to describe the 1900 Foraker Act’s normalization of the prevailing military territorial policies. Since then the United States has invoked the ensuing precedents to legitimate a wide array of global policies, including the ‘war on terror’.

Puerto Rico and the Origins of US Global Empire: The Disembodied Shade combines a unique study of Puerto Rican legal history with a new interpretation of contemporary US policy. As such, it provides a valuable resource for students and scholars of the legal and historical disciplines, especially those with a specific interest in American and postcolonial studies.