Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
14 results
Search Results
Item "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.Item THE ROLE OF THE SOCIAL PROTECTION SYSTEM “CHILE CRECE CONTIGO” ON CHILDREN’S DEVELOPMENT(2022) Echenique, Juan Agustin; Bhargava, Alok; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In April 2007, the Government of Chile established a comprehensive support system for early childhood named ”Chile Crece Contigo” (ChCC). This social protection system was the first one of its class in Latin America. However, ten years later, the empirical evidence about the benefits of this policy is still scarce. This dissertation looks to fill that knowledge gap and answer broader questions about promoting skills formation in the first years of life. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the complex structure of the comprehensive support system Chile Crece Contigo, revises the literature that argues the need for this program, and finally revises the existing evidence about this policy. In Chapter 2, I study a novel service offered as part of the comprehensive early childhood support system Chile Crece Contigo: the stimulation workshops. This service consists of workshops for children and their parents designed to foster and accelerate the learning process of those lagging in their developmental benchmarks based on psycho-motor evaluation. The paper exploits variations in the provision of the service (only children with lags in development are offered the referral to sensory rooms) and non-compliance in treatment attendance to test if the treatment can meet their target of closing the gap in human capital formation between children who received help for enhancing their development trajectory and those who followed the usual path of development. Based on information from Electronic Health Records from an urban district in Santiago, Chile, I document in first place take-up rate behavior based on observable characteristics and baseline evaluations indicating positive sorting into the treatment. Second, I show how the stimulation services offered by Chile Crece Contigo have a higher rate of effectiveness in reducing developmental lags in children with lower test scores at baseline. The average difference for children diagnosed with developmental lags at baseline ranges between 0.7-0.4 standard deviations between 8mo-18mo and 1.0-0.5 standard deviations for 18-36mo. These results suggest that the effectiveness indicator used by policy-makers underestimates the returns of the intervention due to its heterogeneity. Second, efforts to increase the take-up rates for children close to the cutoff values are needed to improve the overall returns of the intervention. Chapter 3 studies the effects of a comprehensive early childhood support system on human capital accumulation. Specifically, we explore differences in educational achievement of the first generations of children exposed to the comprehensive child development support system ”Chile Crece Contigo.” To study this, we exploit the gradual implementation of the policy and the age eligibility requirements to estimate the returns of availability of the policy on data from seven cohorts (2012-2018) of fourth-grade students in Chile. We find sizable positive effects in mathematics (0.21 of a standard deviation) and language (0.23 of astandard deviation) test scores for municipalities that started the program during or before their prenatal stage compared to children that the program began when they were older than sixty months. Estimates from an event-study design show that the exposure returns dissipated for children thirty-six months old or older when the policy started. This result is consistent with the schedule of interventions and early detection instruments established. When we look at the difference in the returns to exposure across gender and socioeconomic status, we find evidence that (i) a comprehensive child support system has higher returns on boys, which could be explained partially by differences in access to need-based services, (ii) these differences across gender differences occur in children with higher levels of exposure, and (iii) we do not find relevant differences between students classified as low-socioeconomic background and not classified in this category.Item Reading Analyses with Chilean Children(2021) Cubillos Guzman, Montserrat; Turner, Jennifer; Galindo, Claudia; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chilean data show that a large reading-proficiency gap exists between students with high and low socioeconomic status (SES), that most children do not see themselves as readers, and that half of adolescents read below grade level (Agencia de Calidad de la Educación, 2019; Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, 2014). To understand the reasons behind these phenomena, I conducted three complementary studies on reading comprehension, motivation, and literacy-related home practices with over 800,000 Chilean students, using nation-wide secondary data analysis.In the first study, I examined the association between the frequency of early literacy parent-children interactions (e.g., reading together, reading labels and signs, singing songs, etc.) before they entered first grade and students’ reading scores in fourth grade, while accounting for their second-grade proficiency. I observed that parents frequently engaged in literacy interactions with their children, that those interactions significantly predicted students’ later reading proficiency, and that the effect was steeper for families with high SES than for those with low SES. In the second study, I explored the association between parents’ reading motivation and frequency and their children’s. I examined data of students from sixth, eight, and tenth grade. I found that adolescents were more likely to be motivated and frequent readers if their parents were also keen readers. I also found that SES was a powerful predictor of the likelihood of being a keen reader, and that the effect of having a keen-reading parent was more positively pronounced for adolescents with low SES than for those with high SES. In the third study, I explored whether tenth graders’ reading motivation and frequency was associated to their reading scores. I observed that a large percentage of students who were proficient readers in fourth grade failed to achieve proficiency in tenth grade and that the odds of achieving proficiency in tenth grade increased when students were motivated and frequent readers. Furthermore, students’ odds of being proficient readers increased when their classmates reported high levels of reading motivation and frequency of reading. I discuss the implications of this and my other two studies.Item THE ROLE OF ROMANTIC PARTNERS IN THE PROCESS OF WOMEN'S REENTRY IN CHILE(2020) Larroulet Philippi, Pilar; Simpson, Sally S; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite the growth of reentry literature in recent decades, little is known regarding the role romantic partners play in the process of transition back into the community. There is a well-developed literature regarding the “good marriage” effect on desistance, but studies have been conducted mostly with male samples, in the United States, and in times and social contexts where being married is considered normative. For females, however, the feminist literature points to the romantic partner as a potential source of criminogenic influence. Whether being in a romantic relationship will have any positive impact on females’ reentry is still an open question, as is whether that impact would be conditional on the characteristics of those relationships and specific partners. Even more, until now, we know relatively little about who those partners are and how often women change partners after release. The present dissertation seeks to address these gaps using data from the study “Reinserción, Desistimiento y Reincidencia en Mujeres Privadas de Libertad en Chile” [Reintegration, Desistance, and Recidivism Among Female Inmates in Chile]. The study follows a cohort of 207 women released from prison in Santiago, Chile over one calendar year. The results confirm the prevalence of not-married relationships among female reentering society, and show a great deal of heterogeneity in the characteristics of those relationships and partners. The analyses also reflect an important level of change in partnership in the twelve months following release. Further, the type of partners to whom women have access varies significantly by different groups of female offenders, as defined by their pathways into prison. Regarding recidivism, the results show that being involved in a romantic relationship is not associated with the chances of recidivism. However, when the specific characteristics of the relationships and partners are considered, partners’ behaviors are a consistent correlate of recidivism. As a whole, the results challenge the generalizability of life course criminological theory and highlight the need to incorporate a feminist perspective into research on reentry and desistance.Item TOWARDS A TRANSANDEAN MAPUCHE POLITICS: RITUAL AND POWER IN CHILE AND ARGENTINA, 1792-1834(2017) Zarley, Jesse; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Towards a Transandean Mapuche Politics examines how unconquered indigenous groups in the Southern Cone of South America impacted the transition from colony to nation (1792-1834), a moment when European and indigenous sovereignties were thrown in to question. It focuses on the intersection of indigenous politics and Latin America’s Age of Revolution. This project intervenes in the growing debates over transnational history and borderlands studies to demonstrate how the transandean Mapuche-Spanish frontier was both a political and an epistemological space. Mapuche sovereignty resisted categorizations by empires and nations, impeded the political and economic projects articulated by Europeans and creoles, and compelled foreign actors to participate in Mapuche diplomatic rituals much longer than previously thought. It begins by looking at a late colonial treaty negotiation in 1793 to reconstruct diplomatic rituals developed by Mapuche leaders to defend their sovereignty. This project then extends these insights on both sides of the Andes mountain range until a military campaign led by Argentine President Juan Manuel de Rosas against Mapuche and other indigenous groups inhabiting the Pampas in 1833-1834. By looking at military, ecclesiastical, and Mapuche correspondence from Chile, Argentina, and Spain, it demonstrates that groups like the Mapuche, who inhabited the seemingly marginal frontiers of Spain’s American empire, were in fact central actors in its transformation. Analyzing Mapuche diplomacy in southern Chile and western Argentina from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century demonstrates how indigenous relations in a border region provide different genealogies for our understanding of sovereignty in the Age of Revolution. Mapuche sovereignty ran parallel too, but intersected with the fraught end of empire and formation of nation states. These interactions along the old Spanish/Mapuche frontier, which stretched across the continent from the Pacific Coast of Chile to the mouth of the River Plate, were but the tip of the iceberg in the broader, transandean Mapuche political world that confounded the spatial imaginaries of empires and nations.Item EN BUSCA DE UN PAÍS INTERIOR: LA NOVELA LÍRICA VANGUARDISTA EN GILBERTO OWEN, ROSAMEL DEL VALLE Y HUMBERTO SALVADOR(2015) Gonzalez, Norman Alberto; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have shown a tendency to analyze the so-called “historical avant-garde” from a perspective of "shock". This vanguardist gesture seeks to destabilize a mode of thinking and doing art in the early part of the twentieth century. If there is indeed an inevitable initial historical moment when the avant-garde becomes iconoclastic and distinguishes themselves in a patricidal gesture, there must exist another moment when the contributions of the avant-garde can be seen to challenge not only the formal aspects of the cultural tradition, but also its contents. Few authors have considered the avant-garde writings in dialogue with a tradition that began in the nineteenth century or with other contemporary aesthetics —often opposed in style and approach. One purpose of this work is to locate other aesthetic affinities with the avant-garde movement to better define how they differ and create their own genealogies as well as enter into dialogue with each other. In order to achieve this I propose a reading of the context in which one can see the necessity to seek a new expression for the spiritual demands of the time. One of these new spiritual demands is addressed by the so-called lyrical novel, which can be considered as a subgenre of the literary vanguards. Thus, by analyzing three Latin American writers: Gilberto Owen (Mexico, 1904-1952), Rosamel del Valle (Chile, 1901-1965) and Humberto Salvador (Ecuador, 1909-1982) and their avant-garde lyrical novels written between 1928 and 1931, I will identify what can be considered new, which elements characterize these novels, and how their content challenges the traditional narrative genre and creates new sensibilities. The avant-garde fundamentally breaks with the aesthetics of representation, leading to broader ontological, epistemological, and political ruptures. The aim of avant-garde literature is to regain the dynamic aspect of reality that was lost through the domination of rationalism. We are able to explore this re-appropriation through unique approaches to the elements of imagination, the occurrence (or not) of events, and experience and see how the authors were able to contribute to the radical critique of aesthetic beliefs and notions of reality at the beginning of the twentieth century.Item The Democratic Self: Gender, Memory, and Human Rights under the Augusto Pinochet Dictatorship and Transition to Democracy in Chile, 1973-2010(2015) Townsend, Brandi Ann; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Democratic Self asks how ideas about gender shaped the ways that Chileans reconstructed the affective, social, and political bonds the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) sought to destroy. It intervenes in debates about the degree to which right-wing military regimes in Latin America eroded social ties during the Cold War. Torture targeted gendered and sexual identities and compelled victims to re-assess their roles as men, women, militants, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers. This dissertation argues that to reconnect the individual to collective struggles for democracy, survivors and their allies drew on longstanding, heteronormative gender ideologies within the left. Those ideologies gradually changed over the course of the dictatorship, and in turn, influenced memories during the subsequent transition to democracy (1990-2010). The dissertation draws on government and non-governmental documents and oral interviews with survivors, their families, and human rights workers. Between 1978 and 1990, mental health professionals working within human rights organizations provided psychological therapy to approximately 32,000-42,000 Chileans to help them work through their traumatic experiences as part of a collective project to repair the social connections that state violence ripped apart. These professionals translated psychoanalytic concepts of “the self” into the language of pre-1973 frameworks of citizenship grounded in the heterosexual, male-headed nuclear family. By the mid-1980s, Chile’s feminist movement changed the terms of the debate by showing how gendered forms of everyday violence that pre-dated the dictatorship shaped political violence under the dictatorship, as well as the opposition’s response. Slowly, mental health professionals began to change how they deployed ideas about gender when helping survivors and their families talk about state violence. However, the narratives of violence that emerged with the end of the dictatorship in 1990 and that were enshrined in three separate truth commissions (1990, 2004, and 2010) only partially reflected that transformation. The democratic governments’ attempts to heal Chile’s painful past and move forward did not always recognize, much less dislodge, entrenched ideas that privileged men’s experiences of political militancy. This dissertation shows how Chileans grappled with their memories of state violence, which were refracted through gendered discourses in the human rights movement.Item Truancy and the onset of marijuana use: Testing the relationship among Chilean students(2014) Larroulet Philippi, Pilar; Thornberry, Terence P.; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous research conducted in the United States has shown that truancy increases the risk of marijuana use among adolescents. The current study examines this relationship in Chile. By using a longitudinal study conducted from 2008 to 2011 among school students in 7th grade in Santiago, Chile, I test the effect that truancy has on the onset of marijuana use, controlling for a number of potential confounders. The findings support the hypothesis that youths who reported having been truant were more likely to initiate marijuana use. However, I did not find enough support for the hypothesis that youths who reported have skipped schools more days were at a higher risk of initiating marijuana use.Item Reason and Faith: A Study of Interwar Chilean Eugenic Discourse, 1900-1950(2013) Walsh, Sarah; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how social reform discourse that rationalized gender difference allowed Chilean Catholics to play a critical role in the development of eugenic science between 1900 and 1950. Building on scholarship relating to the development of a modernized, patriarchal system during the 1920s and 1930s and the rise of eugenics among scientists during the same period, this dissertation posits that eugenic science in Chile was the result of a complex interaction between Catholic and secular intellectuals vying for dominance in the reconstruction of the modern Chilean social order. Political liberals characterized the Catholic Church as a dogmatic monolith that was antithetical to social progressivism and disconnected from the realities of modern life. At the same time, Chilean Catholics used the social disruptions caused by capitalist industrialization to assert their social, moral, and scientific superiority. The dissertation asserts that anti-clerical discourse popular among progressive actors served to obscure the scientific and social contributions, both conservative and progressive, of the Catholic Church and its supporters in Chile. Each chapter in this dissertation examines how Catholics responded to secular efforts to oust them from their traditional places of social influence - hospitals, orphanages, schools, charities, and family life - through the application of eugenic science. Secular reformers contrasted their own presumably rational, scientific responses to social problems while feminizing religious practice and Church or Catholic perspectives. Chilean Catholics responded by asserting the compatibility of science and religion, particularly in the field of eugenics. Catholic scholars suggested, for instance, that they had to be involved in eugenic practices to ensure the most ethical application of scientific principles.Item SCHOOL AND INDIVIDUAL FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS TESTS IN CHILE(2012) Perez Mejias, Paulina; Cabrera, Alberto F.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Chile, reports and research papers have shown that there is an achievement gap in college admissions tests mostly associated to students' gender, socioeconomic status and type of school attended. This gap represents a barrier for low-income and female students to access higher education, as well as for graduates of public schools. Prior studies have used descriptive analyses and single-level linear regression to study this gap, which do not take into account the nested structure of the data (students nested within schools). This study uses multilevel linear modeling to concurrently estimate the effect of student and school characteristics on individual performance in admissions tests in Chile. The findings revealed that more than half of the variation in college admissions test scores happens at the school level. This variation between schools is mostly explained by school sector (private, subsidized private, and public) and the average school socioeconomic status. At the individual level, the most influential factor is individual high school GPA. These findings have important implications for policy and practice, as publicly funded universities in Chile rely almost exclusively on test scores to select students and need-based financial aid requires students to score above a minimum threshold. The results of this study suggest that these admission and financial aid policies need to be reconsidered in order to increase opportunity of access to higher education for traditionally excluded students.