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
11 results
Search Results
Item Effects of a Mexican Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Health and Demography(2022) Ryu, Soomin; Parker, Susan W.; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Progresa, a Mexican conditional cash transfer program (CCT), was introduced in 1997 to alleviate poverty. The program provided cash payments to low-income households conditional on the children’s regular attendance at school and household members’ regularly visits to health clinics. Progresa also offered nutritional supplements, principally to young children and pregnant women. This anti-poverty program was one of the oldest and best-known CCT programs, supporting 7 million low-income families. However, in Spring 2019, the Mexican government officially dismantled Progresa. This dissertation evaluated the impacts of implementing and terminating of Progresa on Mexican health and demographic outcomes using nationwide vital statistics. As vital events were frequently under-reported in rural areas of Mexico where Progresa was mainly implemented, the first chapter examined the validity of vital statistics using the Brass method. I found that births and child deaths were under-reported in Mexico, and under-reporting was more severe in poorer areas. However, for births, there was little evidence of under-reporting once late-registered births were taken into account. The second chapter evaluated the effects of Progresa on fertility, child mortality, and maternal health. Using variations in the beneficiaries of Progresa across municipalities and time, I found that Progresa significantly reduced 0.4-0.5 births during a woman’s lifetime, while adolescent pregnancy was decreased by 13-18%. The program reduced child mortality by 19%, but the effect was temporary. Progresa also enhanced maternal health: it significantly increased institutional deliveries and birth attendance by physician, while decreasing childbirth at home and birth attendance by nurse or midwife. The third chapter assessed the effects of the recent sudden termination of Progresa: it immediately increased in infant mortality due to infectious and parasitic diseases, whereas it reduced deliveries at private clinic and marginally increased deliveries with midwives’ attendance. This dissertation makes significant contributions to social policy and public health by estimating the effects of the CCT program on understudied demographic and health outcomes and the effects of its sudden termination on maternal and child health. This research has crucial public health and policy implications, particularly for several middle- and low-income countries where similar CCT programs are implementedItem ENMENDAR EL ZOCALO: AMENDING THE PLINTH(2021) Belmonte, Jocelyn Elizabeth; Burke, Juan L; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A community with the lacks school, resources, and food supplies creates a difficult living situation. General Francisco Paz, a neighborhood located in the central part of the state of Veracruz, Mexico is dealing with these conditions. This neighborhood of 886 individuals contains only and elementary school for education. For students to receive further education, a 40-minute walk South will get the student to the nearest middle or high school. Due to the high rate of drop out students and unfinished education, illiteracy within the town is rising. This thesis will explore a design for a middle and high school, to provide the students the education needed to care, grow, and sustain agricultural land. Vernacular architecture and sustainability for the neighborhoods of General Francisco Paz and General Alatriste for the students who are soon to be tending for this land. This project is in hope of improving the quality of education and sources in opposition of current conditions to motivate families towards wanting to create and expand their futures and families within this community.Item 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.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 Faucets and Fertilizers: Interpreting Technological Change in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico, 1946-1988(2015) Walker, Joshua Charles; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Faucets and Fertilizers: Interpreting Technological Change in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico, 1946-1988 argues that peasant farmers in Oaxaca were key actors who helped to oversee the technological modernization of their villages in the twentieth century. From the 1940s to the 1980s, federal and state development programs sought to introduce new tools like chemical fertilizers, water faucets, roads, and mechanical corn grinders to villages in the countryside. These programs were often unevenly distributed and poorly designed, forcing peasants to rely on old skills and customs in order to acquire and use the technologies they wanted. As peasants learned about the benefits of the technologies, they also learned to use them to challenge the power of family patriarchs, village elders, and federal leaders. Far from being the passive victims of modernization described in the historiography of rural Mexico, Oaxacan peasants participated in technological change and used new tools in an attempt to overcome problems with low crop production and restricted mobility.Item THE CRUCIBLE OF YOUTH: JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND THE MAKING OF MODERN MEXICO CITY, 1938-1968(2013) Orisich, Shari; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In "The Crucible of Youth," I examine the socialization of youth as part of the Mexican welfare state's larger project to modernize the nation and the family in the post-revolutionary era, from 1938-1968. My dissertation demonstrates how youth were the focus of new public institutions, such as schools, gymnasia, and reformatories designed to educate, regenerate, and moralize. A showpiece of these projects was the Juvenile Court, which opened its doors in 1927. The Court was designed as a totalizing institution with a revolutionary mission to initially protect and assist orphaned and abandoned youth. I trace the Court's evolution in the decades following its inauguration and document its expansion that included numerous clinics for testing minors' mental and physical health, a network of correctional facilities with work and sports programs, and special police units to monitor youth behavior in the capital. As a consequence of the attempts to socialize wayward adolescents and unruly children, I discover how these minors unwittingly became major players in state formation and in turn, tested the limits of the Mexican welfare state. Their contestation of social mores and notions of what constituted `normal' and `deviant' behavior for young people in Mexico City, shaped social relations in the capital along class and gender lines. My research draws from official documents and individual case files from the Juvenile Court in Mexico City, academic literature from criminology, psychology, and sociology, and sources from visual culture such as films and sensationalist press. I observe the scientific underpinnings of juvenile crime theory and the social role that science, particularly eugenics, came to play in assessing the traits of the popular classes writ large. I also examine how social workers' reports shaped the discussion on delinquency, revealing the power relationships between these agents of the state and the most vulnerable population of the city, poor and working class youth. Lastly, I analyze narratives about juvenile crime represented by popular press which showcase public anxieties about the maintenance of gender and class roles in society, and the challenges of modernity, like "rebels without a cause" to stabilizing the modern urban family.Item In Black and Brown: Intellectuals, Blackness, and Inter-Americanism in Mexico after 1910(2013) Cohen, Theodore; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"In Black and Brown" examines how blackness and Africanness became constituent elements of Mexican culture after the Revolution of 1910. In refuting the common claim that black cultures and identities were erased or ignored in the post-revolutionary era, it argues that anthropologists, historians, (ethno)musicologists, and local intellectuals integrated black and, after 1940, African-descended peoples and cultures into a democratic concept of national identity. Although multiple historical actors contributed to this nationalist project, three intellectuals--composer and ethnomusicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster (1898-1967), anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1908-1996), and city of Veracruz poet Francisco Rivera (1908-1994)--most coherently identified Africanness in Mexican history and culture. As these state and local intellectuals read ethnographic texts about African cultural retentions throughout the Western Hemisphere, they situated these cultural practices in specific Mexican communities and regional spaces. By tracing the inter-American networks that shaped these identities, "In Black and Brown" asserts that the classification of blackness and Africanness as Mexican was in conversation with the refashioning of blackness, Africanness, and indigeneity across the Americas and was part of the construction of the Western Hemisphere as a historical, cultural, and racial entity. More broadly, it questions the commonplace assumption that certain nations of the Americas are part of the African Diaspora while others are defined as indigenous.Item An evaluation of Active Labor Market Policies in Developing Economies: The Mexican Case(2007-08-03) Cruz Aguayo, Yyannú; Reuter, Peter; Smith, Jeffrey; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the major problems in developing countries is that of unemployment and underemployment. Thus the use of active labor market policies constitutes a very significant part of the policy debate. This dissertation analyzes the training component of one such policies in Mexico: PROBECAT-SICAT (P/S). First, we provide an overview of some of the institutional elements that are likely to have a bearing in the design, functioning and effects of P/S - in particular those related to the decentralized operation and funding of the program. We find that there is some room for a more explicit definition of the mechanisms that establish the checks and controls to reduce misuse of resources. We suggest the inclusion of indicators of job quality as a concrete objective of the program. In the second part of the dissertation, using semi-parametric techniques, we obtain the average treatment effect of the program on its participants. We use a set of variables that capture characteristics of job formality, and find evidence that male and female trainees do increase their probabilities of employment and of employment with health benefits. In addition, we find that, on average, female trainees tend to find employment in more informal jobs than their male counterparts. The last part of the dissertation consists of an impact evaluation of P/S by training type. We find evidence that participating in mixed training in medium increases the trainees' probability of employment per se and employment with desirable 'formal' characteristics, such as health and housing benefits, a written contract, etc., with respect to any other training type. Secondly, the mixed training in micro and small enterprises is superior to the training for self-employment and in-classroom training. Moreover, we find evidence that female participants increase their chances of obtaining jobs with informal characteristics if they choose to participate in training for self-employment with respect to participation in-classroom training. We conclude that even with institutional shortcomings, the program seems to have positive effects that justify its original creation and permanency.Item The Body in Pieces: Representations of Organ Trafficking in the Literatures and Film of the Americas(2007-04-24) Dix, Jennifer; Peres, Phyllis; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the use of the trope of organ trafficking to critique neoliberal globalization in the Americas. Each chapter addresses a different genre and analyzes texts articulated in response to conditions grounded in different locations. The texts studied include print media from Guatemala and Brazil, Mexican popular film and detective fiction from the U.S. (Tony Chiu's Positive Match and Linda Howard's Cry No More) and Mexico (Miriam Laurini's Morena en rojo, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz's Loverboy, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II's La bicicleta de Leonardo). Comparative analyses also address Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. These analyses are linked by their critique of neoliberal globalization and their representation of the human body's commodification. Together, they outline the contradictions of a mobility-dependent regime and establish the inescapable scope of economic changes that alter the relationship between the nation-state and its inhabitants. Neoliberalism also causes changes in the representation of the body. Bodies are represented outside the social structures and institutions that previously gave them meaning. The body's economic value replaces socially ascribed identities. Representations of the commodified body in these texts selectively erase gender and race. This dissertation also explores the construction of a new set of identities grounded in the body. These competing identities of medical and corporeal citizenship demonstrate the problems of establishing identities in market-driven terms of production and consumption. This dissertation also engages in a investigation of the relation of literary genre to content. As my discussion of popular culture demonstrates, generic form partially constrains or shapes the content of these works. In contrast, when literary works are positioned outside of genre constraints, the scope of the meanings attributed to organ trafficking expands, accompanied by formal innovations. My dissertation produces an interrogation of American cultural spaces--understood in the broadest sense--that acknowledges the work of both spatial and cultural forces in the construction of this hemispheric imaginary.Item The Paradox of Local Empowerment: Decentralization and Democratic Governance in Mexico(2006-03-14) Selee, Andrew Dan; Crocker, David A; Destler, I M; Public Affairs; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines whether decentralization to municipal governments in Mexico has improved democratic governance. The research examines the effects of decentralization on democratic governance in three Mexican cities: Tijuana, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, and Chilpancingo and draws on key national indicators. The findings indicate that decentralization has significantly increased the authority and autonomy of Mexican municipalities, but that these changes have not necessarily led to local governments that are responsive and accountable to citizens or allow for citizens' active engagement in public affairs. Further analysis of these findings suggests that municipal political institutions create few incentives for public authorities to be responsive and accountable to citizens. The use of closed party lists, prohibitions on independent candidacies, guaranteed supermajorities for the leading party, and the prohibition on reelection all combine to undermine accountability and responsiveness. In this environment, public authorities tend to be more concerned about party leaders than citizens. As a result, citizens continue to be linked to local governments through political brokers within the principal political parties and there are few real opportunities for citizen engagement outside of these mediated channels despite the nominal existence of elaborate participatory planning processes. Nonetheless, the study also finds marked differences in the way that citizens are linked to the political system in different cities. Where strong social organizations existed prior to decentralization, citizens are more likely to have effective, albeit indirect, channels for voice in public affairs. Where these social organizations are linked closely to the principal political parties, they are even more likely to influence public policy than where these organizations are highly autonomous. Strong social organizations provide a necessary basis for ensuring citizen voice, but their linkages to the political process ultimately determine whether they are effective in influencing policy decisions. In other words, horizontal linkages in civil society--social capital--are a necessary precondition for good democratic governance, but vertical linkages between citizens and political actors are equally important.