UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

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"Foreboding Circumstances": U.S. Labor Intervention and the Chilean Labor Movement during the Cold War, 1964-1973
(2024) Gutmann Fuentes, Andrea Nicole; Rosemblatt, Karin A.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Recent scholarship in Cold War and transnational labor history has examined the role played by U.S. organized labor in neutralizing left-wing labor movements around the world, contributing to U.S. State Department goals of anti-communist containment in the Third World. Research from both within and outside the academy has examined how the AFL-CIO, operating primary through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), acted to undermine the socialist Unidad Popular government in Chile, helping to set the stage for the U.S.-backed coup d’etat on September 11, 1973. However, this scholarship has suffered from a relative lack of Chilean primary source material and a failure to ground historical analyses in the local Chilean context. This has impeded a full view of how the AFL-CIO’s labor intervention project unfolded in Chile, how it was perceived and responded to by Chileans, and the extent to which it was ultimately successful. This thesis makes use of Chilean national press, books, and trade union and left-wing media, in addition to new source material pulled from the U.S. State Department and the AFL-CIO archives, to assess the successes and failures of the AFL-CIO’s labor intervention project in Chile. The thesis demonstrates that while the AFL-CIO failed to accomplish many of its concrete goals in Chile due to overwhelming opposition to its project among Chilean labor, the AFL-CIO’s relationship with particular sectors of the Chilean labor movement effectively advanced a more general political goal of fomenting labor opposition from labor in strategic sectors of the economy to undermine the Unidad Popular government, thereby contributing to the success of the 1973 coup. By examining AFL-CIO’s complicated and paradoxical relationship with the centrist Christian Democratic Party, this thesis argues that the vast majority of Chilean workers from a broad array of ideological tendencies rejected the AFL-CIO’s promotion of “free trade unionism,” an explicitly anti-communist ideology advocating that workers reject a politics of class struggle in favor of class harmony between labor and management. This thesis then demonstrates that the AFL-CIO encouraged and validated the decision of some conservative labor leaders in the stevedore labor movement to ultimately join the anti-Allende opposition. Under the intensely polarized political context of early 1970s Chile, in which conservative labor leaders faced social and political pressures to move leftward with the majority of the labor movement and to support the Unidad Popular, the decision of these labor leaders to join the right-wing opposition with support from the AFL-CIO was a significant event contributing to the 1973 coup.
GENDER AND SEXUAL DISSIDENCE IN REGGAETÓN: THE POLITICS OF CUIR PERFORMANCE IN THE HISPANIC CARIBBEAN
(2023) Farnell, Lauren; Marshall, Caitlin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Global reggaetón superstar Bad Bunny has performed in traditionally “female” clothes, worn nail polish, and kissed men on the international stage, but has never named his identity explicitly. Many have taken to the internet to call him, among many other celebrities a “queer baiter .” With US representational politics and queer people in the spotlight – this thesis wonders how homonormativity and neo-imperial respectability politics fueled these queer-baiting discourses. This thesis aims to tackle the contemporary debates surrounding racialized minoritarian subjects in reggaetón who are constantly caught in discourses of “too queer” or “not queer enough.” These queers frequently under colonial or neo-imperial rule, negotiate the boundaries of American homonormativity and obsession with “outness.” This thesis takes up the idea of “queerbaiting” and questions, “what happens when people outside the homo-“norms” perform their queerness in a way that is not necessarily legible to other global queers?” Utilizing methods from performance, queer, and Latine and Caribbean studies, I argue that we need new understandings of what it means to be queer. Using case studies from the reggaetón genre of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, I argue that performances by Bad Bunny, Tokischa, and Ivy Queen negotiate, performances of queerness that exceed those of US imperial homonormativity. Intervention statement: this redefines how we come to understand our own queerness and futures and how we understand the most popular global music genre.
Schools as Laboratories: Science, Children's Bodies, and School Reformers in the Making of Modern Argentina (1880-1930)
(2022) Gonzalez, Sabrina; Rosemblatt, Karin KR; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the influence of scientific ideas in the school to illuminate teachers’ participation in the production of scientific knowledge about pedagogy and childhood. I interrogate how scientific theories circulating transnationally —including positivism, Darwinism, neo-Lamarckianism, and eugenics—, impacted pedagogical theory and practice. I contribute to the historiographies on race and gender in Latin America by conceptualizing the schools as a laboratory, a site for the circulation and production of scientific knowledge. Between 1880 and 1930, Argentina experienced cultural, political, and economic transformations. Argentine elites promoted their nation’s insertion into the world economy through industrialization, urbanization, and European immigration. Drawing on scientific ideas that provided a language to diagnose and propose solutions to social problems, the government founded normal schools, secondary education institutions to train teachers. In 1884, the Congress passed a law that universalized primary education. Primary and normal schools became the means to incorporate children into the nation and the site where thousands of first-generation students —mostly women— continued their studies with the help of a state run system of national and provincial fellowships. I argue that in school laboratories teachers contributed to reproducing the positivist and racist ideologies that disciplined children while, at the same time, teaching prompted women to participate in science. Women became producers of knowledge within a local and transnational network that expanded beyond the classroom and connected their practice with magazines, congresses, and scientific journals. By observing children’s bodies and experimenting with pedagogical methods, teachers advanced pedagogy as a science and developed studies on children’s intelligence. Drawing on their teaching experiences and in scientific discourses circulating transnationally, many teachers used their position to challenge what they considered as disciplinary and authoritarian practices and organized to democratize the school. School reformers experimented with teaching methods, enacting alternative ways of schooling that centered on children’s freedom of movement and expression. By looking at the links between science and teaching, I contribute to highlighting the historical connections between the emergence of universal schooling in Latin America, the rise of eugenic thought, and the emergence of women’s participation in science and politics.
From Liberation Theology to Teología India: The Progressive Catholic Church in Southern Mexico, 1954-1994
(2021) Levey, Eben; Rosemblatt, Karin; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This project traces how the Mexican Catholic Church opened itself to tolerating and embracing indigenous catholicisms, how activists built a Catholic multiculturalism from the ground up (1960s-1990s), and how the Vatican recognized their decades of work by accepting Náhuatl as an official liturgical language in 2015. This history is inseparable from the Latin American experiences of Liberation Theology, its theological offshoot of Indigenous Theology, and the progressive Catholics who insisted that the Catholic Church could shed a reputation of serving the rich to instead opt for the poor, the marginalized, and the indigenous. A pair of questions guided this project. What impact did Liberation Theology and its practitioners have on rural, indigenous Mexico? How did the concrete actions and experiences of indigenous peoples shape the pastoral programs and cultural-political orientation of Mexico’s Catholic Church? Beginning in the mid-century, Church hierarchs vied over approaches to the “indigenous question.” Following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the Bishops of the Pacific South Region opened a regional seminary, SERESURE (1969-1990), in Tehuacán, Puebla to train priests to work in the indigenous realities of the region. I argue that the everyday interactions between progressive Catholics from SERESURE and indigenous Nahua villages created a multicultural pastoralism that tried to alleviate the economic crisis of neoliberal structural change and incorporated indigenous culture and religiosity into Mexican Catholicism. My dissertation challenges a historiographical focus on the conservative elements of Mexican Catholicism to reveal ideological struggle within the institution and show how progressives shaped the Church. I redirect the geographical focus of analysis on Mexican Liberation Theology away from Bishop Samuel Ruiz in Chiapas and toward a regional project of progressive Catholics centered in Tehuacán, Puebla. I innovate on studies of religion and social reform in late twentieth century Mexico by foregrounding how indigenous popular religiosity shaped liberationist activism. I also reassess the long term reverberations of Liberation Theology in Latin America and argue that the indigenous cultural activism of progressive Catholics in southern Mexico shaped the multiculturalism that emerged in the transition to neoliberalism at the end of the Cold War.
ME SABE A PERÚ: A HISTORY OF SALSA IN THE MANY LIMAS
(2020) Arellano, Alan Bryan; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This thesis analyses the history of salsa music’s reception and mediation in Lima, Peru from the 1960s to the 1990s. Considering local political, social, and economic changes, the multivalent understandings in its reception throughout the decades, adds nuance to notions of transnational cultural flows, Latin American identity, and the shift of mass media consumption from the public to the private sphere. Even in its most globally appealing form of the 1970s, salsa’s reception by a Limeño public was still informed by the national political situation and local class-based affinities. Amidst an ongoing intense urbanization in the late 1960s, salsa became a voice and the local musical identity of the working class yet cosmopolitan port of Callao in Lima. After its political turn in the late seventies, salsa gained the middle and upper classes' attention and was increasingly present in the national mass media. Finally, in the mid-eighties, this attention reached its peak during salsa’s most depoliticized form, a romantic iteration enjoyed across classes and groups in neo-liberal Lima.
ENGENDERED EXPERIENCES OF FREEDOM: LIBERATED AFRICAN WOMEN IN RIO DE JANEIRO, 1834-1864
(2020) Nadalini Mendes, Ana Paula; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
“Engendered Experiences of Freedom: Liberated African Women in Rio de Janeiro (1834-1864)” investigates how gender differences in daily lives of liberated African women in Brazil shaped the way they experienced freedom. This research argues that gendered-based differences influenced their experiences of freedom in its various contexts, including their relationship to labor, their struggles for emancipation, and their approach to legal system. Moreover, this thesis follows the lives of particular liberated African women through their process of petitioning for emancipation twenty years after they got to Brazil. Although the first half of the nineteenth century was marked by legal efforts to bar importation of slaves from Africa to Brazil, many slave ships entered Brazilian ports successfully. The Rio da Prata, however, was an exception. In November 1834, the British marine intercepted the vessel, that was halfway between Africa and South America. The Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission judged the case as a transgression of the Treaty of 1826, that forbade Brazil to participate in the slave trade, condemned the vessel to be a good-prize and liberated more than two hundred Africans. These Africans worked for private houses and public works in a probation system for at least 20 years when the decree 1303 of 1853 allowed them to access the legal system and request their final emancipation. This process lasted for ten years, when in 1864 the Brazilian government declared emancipated all liberated Africans This thesis intervenes in debates about bondage and resistance by considering liberated Africans women inside the context of slavery in Brazil. It argues that these women had a particular way of fighting for freedom, due, first, to their own capacity of resistance, second to their conditions of labor, and, third, to specificities of the Brazilian set of laws. From legal petitions of emancipation, police records, guardians’ declarations, and newspapers advertisements the chapters follow lives of liberated African women from the Rio da Prata to show how they experienced freedom.
Caffeinated Development and Other Essays in Latin American Economic History
(2020) Uribe-Castro, Mateo; Wallis, John J; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation consists of three essays. The first one focuses on Colombia after 1850 and measures the impact of the expropriation of Church's assets on political violence. With yearly data on the number of battles per municipality, archival information on the reform, and difference-in-differences, the paper documents a reduction of political violence in places where the Church's assets were expropriated. The paper contests the traditional idea of the expropriation of Church's real estate as a source of political violence. It highlights changes in political competition after the alliance between Conservative factions and the Church was weakened. Specifically, it shows the reduction in political violence was concentrated in municipalities with high political competition and where the Conservative Party was relatively weak. The second essay studies the effect of the first wave of globalization on developing countries' structural transformation, using data from Colombia's expansion of coffee cultivation. Counties engaged in coffee cultivation in the 1920s developed a smaller manufacturing sector by 1973 than comparable counties, despite starting at a similar level in 1912. My empirical strategy exploits variation in potential coffee yields, and variations in the probability to grow coffee at different altitudes. This paper argues that coffee cultivation increased the opportunity cost of education, which reduced the supply of skilled workers, and slowed down structural transformation. Using exogenous exposure to coffee price shocks as instrument, I show that reductions in cohorts' educational attainment led to lower manufacturing activity in the long-run. The effect is driven by both a decrease in demand for education and reductions in public goods. Finally, coffee cultivation during the early 20th Century had negative long-run effects on both individual incomes and poverty rates. The third essay explores how changes in commodities’ prices can have differential effects on school enrollment according to characteristics of crop’s production functions. It compares schooling outcomes in counties that specialize in sugar (a land intensive crop with economies of scale) or coffee (mostly produced in small farms) in Puerto Rico between 1900 and 1930. Sugar price increases lead to increases in enrollment in sugar counties, while coffee price changes have a negative relationship with enrollment in coffee regions.
EL LUGAR DEL LECTOR: UN RECORRIDO A PARTIR DE TEXTOS DE OSVALDO LAMBORGHINI, MANUEL PUIG Y WASHINGTON CUCURTO
(2020) Bartis, Sebastian; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation stems from a challenge posed by Argentine writer and poet Osvaldo Lamborghini in a 1980 interview. He affirmed that instead of denouncing or lamenting oppressive practices and discourses, his job was to showcase the ways we are involved intrinsically in those practices, not as victims but as accomplices or tormentors. As readers we are accustomed to fictional representations of injustice and oppression; they scandalize or hurt while also comforting us with the idea that we’re fair and stand on the right side. What Lamborghini’s narrative cancels is the position of the reader as a witness who would learn about injustice to eventually amend it. With this in mind, this dissertation traces an arch spanning the 1920s and the five following decades, allowing us to read under a different light narratives on work, family, and state in Argentine writers Roberto Mariani, Leonidas Barletta, Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt. Lamborghini’s texts are not alone in affirming that violence is not outside the law but rather at its core. The dissertation compares how the novels of Manuel Puig, one of Lamborghini’s contemporaries, also insist on the same ethical task. Both Lamborghini and Puig present the desolation that arises from realizing that the violence present in our laws and discourses is experienced at the same time as absurdities, confusion, and ineludible fatalities. In the final section, the dissertation examines writer Washington Cucurto’s strategy to subvert the mainstream narrative about marginalization in Buenos Aires during the 1990’s. Expanding on Lamborghini’s ethical task, Cucurto subverts the middle-class reader's expectations with his novels. His works operate as a productive deviation both from the pathologization of the marginals and their depiction as defenseless doomed beings. Furthermore, they contest the symbolic and spatial demarcation between the center and the margins to show the centrality of those groups and spaces labeled as marginal.
Archives in the Attic: Exile, Activism, and Memory in the Washington Committee for Human Rights in Argentina
(2019) Pyle, Perri; Rosemblatt, Karin; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Spurred by the human rights violations committed by the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), exiled Argentines in Washington, D.C. formed the Washington Committee for Human Rights in Argentina (WCHRA) to facilitate the transnational exchange of information between those under threat in Argentina and political actors in the United States. This thesis outlines the story of the WCHRA through the records they created - kept for nearly forty years in an attic - and oral interviews with former members. The collection consists of letters, testimonies, petitions, and notes that reflect the group’s extensive network and provide insight into how Argentine exile groups inserted themselves into the larger human rights movement. By critically examining how one small group of activists came together, I explore how archival records enhance, challenge, and reveal new insights into the politics of exile, activism, and memory, as seen through the lens of the records they kept.
Cosmopolitanism, Mobility, and Royal Officials in the Making of the Spanish Empire (1580-1700)
(2017) Polo y La Borda, Adolfo; Cañeque, Alejandro; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation explores the worldwide mobility of seventeenth-century Spanish imperial officials who traveled around the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. My study focuses on the lower echelon of imperial officials in order to demonstrate how their experiences of service to the king in a variety of locales affected the the governance of the Spanish Empire and how such a polity was imagined by these officials as a global, yet connected and coherent unity. I argue that the officials’ circulation was central for the cohesion and stability of the empire. It allowed the actual and imagined overcoming of the far-flung geography of Spain’s empire and the incorporation, and sometimes exclusion, of diverse subjects across the globe. The intense and extensive mobility of the officials permitted the consolidation of certain imperial political practices, values, and patterns of rule and administration, which played a decisive role in the emergence of a common imperial identity built from the ground up. This imperial identity worked to give cohesion to a polity as heterogeneous as the Spanish Empire. Imperial official’s interactions with very different peoples and cultures spawned a cosmopolitan imperial culture that unified the many cultural, geographic, demographic, and social peculiarities of diverse societies under the umbrella of the imperial mission of enforcement, defense, and expansion of the crown’s rule and spread of Catholicism. This work departs from the traditional national and area models of study by emphasizing the utility of an analytical framework that takes the whole imperial system—and not just one of its component regions—as the unit of analysis, in order to show that the histories of Europe, America, Africa, and Asia were far more entangled than previously thought. Despite the empire’s enormous diversity, extension, discontinuous territoriality, and the near-autonomous status of many imperial outposts, a great number of Spanish imperial subjects saw the empire as an integrated and coherent political unit. I analyze some of the conditions and settings that made possible the global mobility of the officials, and some effects of such circulation in the ruling and political imagination of the empire.

UMD Theses and Dissertations

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