Political Scientist Sarah Daly discusses the legacies of Latin American civil wars tracing them to the current levels of high criminality and voters’ preference for security even at the expenses of civil liberties. She discusses the impact of violence in Colombia, including this year presidential election, and the power concentration by President Bukele in El Salvador as examples of these processes.
Lawyer and philosopher Silvio Almeida discusses structural racism in Brazil in comparison with the US emphasizing the role of social movements in mobilization and production of knowledge within racialized state institutions, such as the judiciary, the legislature, and the police.
Caterina Pizzigoni delves into the Spanish Conquest's effects on indigenous communities, highlighting the initial demographic catastrophe and subsequent daily life continuity for sedentary groups, contrasting with major disruption for others. She explains the complex caste system, gender role resistance, the adaptation of religion, and the new challenges faced by indigenous populations after Latin American independence. The discussion underscores their enduring resilience and adaptive strategies throughout centuries of change.
In this episode Marcelo Medeiros discusses conditional cash transfer programs addressing the role of conditionality on their political support and their positive effects on reducing poverty. He also elaborates on the limits of their technocratic design around 3 areas: First, he emphasizes how their fiscal conservatism made them shrink in the face of negative shocks that increased their need. Second, he points on the insufficiency of technocratic support and technical evaluations to avoid the dis...
In this episode, Mauricio Cardenas discusses the impact of climate change and policies to reduce emissions in Latin America, based on his recent book on Climate Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean. He discussed the costs of climate change to countries in the region as well as the lessons on areas where different countries have move forward. He points to different opportunities, such as the electricity sector, as well as challenges, such as weak state capacity to monitor regulatory goals,...
Nicholas Limerick discusses in this episode the dramatic effects of lack of schooling in Latin America during the pandemic as well as the role of indigenous organizations, especially CONAIE, in providing information in indigenous languages to fight Covid-19. He emphasizes how indigenous organization was crucial for the establishment of bilingual education and the teaching of Kitchwa in Ecuador. He further discusses how the teaching of Kitchwa in Ecuador has involved its standardization in a way ...
Graciela Montaldo discusses the strength of the feminist movement in Argentina and its political impact on the legalization of abortion, emphasizing its cultural dimensions and the strength of its diversity and intersectionality. She reflects on gender domination as a crucial political construction and its cultural interpretations from a domestic understanding of gender violence, questioned by the feminist social movement #NiUnaMenos, as well as the constraints on female voice in the public spac...
Julissa Reynoso , chief of staff of the future First Lady Jill Biden, discusses here the impact of the Latino vote on the election and new directions for the new administration in Latin America. She emphasizes the diversity of the Latino vote and, on foreign policy, points to changes on immigration policies, the need to foster economic options for the population in the region, to tackle climate change, and to foster hemispheric cooperation....
Claudio Lomnitz discusses in this episode the plight of the more than 70,000 disappeared or missing people in Mexico and their search by family members. This search does not confront a strategic plan but a complicit and weak state, which contributes both willingly and unwillingly. He further talks about Mexico’s violence as a symptom of government incapacity and its links to the militarization of security, which has continued under the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
In this episode, Frances will draw connections between Puerto Rico and Latin America based on a common history of hierarchies and coloniality and will discuss how the Puerto Rican society both in the island and in the Diaspora learned to self-organize in response to catastrophes seeking to replace the absence of by the federal state. She will also discuss how the current discussion on race and ethnicity highlights the hierarchies embedded in the Latinx and Latin American population and will tell...
Jose Antonio Ocampo discussed the economic consequences of COVID19 in Latin America, the new epicenter of the pandemic. He described the dramatic effect of quarantine on employment and production, which are heightened by uncertainty on the future of trade and commodity prices. He also pointed to the emergence of new social policies reaching not only the poor, but also the vulnerable population as an important consequence. In his view, the pandemic will force Latin American countries to invest mo...
Dr. Silvia S. Martins talks about the different patterns of COVID19 spread across the countries of Latin America and the importance of timely responses in shaping its pace while emphasizing the challenges for the large vulnerable population of the region. Based on the experience of Brazil, she discusses the importance of faster and more coordinated health responses to the pandemic while highlighting the impact of unified as opposed to contradictory messages to the population. The density and ine...
Eduardo Moncada is the son of two parents that escape from violence in Latin America and immigrated to the US. That trajectory has marked his work including the study of violence with the risk and difficulties it implies and his choice for ethnographic methods to unearth data where it doesn’t exist. He discusses here his book on urban violence in Colombia as well as his recent work on extortion, a pervasive phenomenon emerging as a result of state weakness that deprives citizens of basic public ...
Miguel Urquiola talks about the role of competition on educational outcomes in a region where education coverage is larger than expected for the income level of Latin American countries, but where performance, as measured by an international standardized test, is lower than expected using that same metric. In evaluating the experiences with competition and choice at different educational levels, based on data from Chile, Colombia, and the US, Urquiola highlights that education markets do not nec...
Nara Milanich talks about the shift from cultural to biological definitions of paternity thanks to DNA testing and how such testing could either be used to recover kids stolen by military dictatorships or to halt migration at the US-Mexico border. She also explains age-based violence suffered by migrant children in Central America. Family is a crucial lens to understand inequality, she says as she discusses how family law was used in nineteenth century Chile to preserve social hierarchies. Civil...
Daniel Alarcon talks about how growing in a Peruvian household in Birmingham (Alabama) shaped his work in radio journalism and his written pieces in both Spanish and English. We talk about doing radio in Spanish and writing novels in English as well as about the origins of Radio Ambulante. He described the type of stories he and his wife and co-producer wanted to tell and how it is easier to tell Latin American stories from a global city like New York than from a country in the region. We also c...
Ana Maria Ochoa talks about ethnomusicology and the connection between nature, sounds, and humans in defining what is music. Ana Maria talked about how humanity and sound are defined contextually and she described how she worked with written archives of sounds from the colonial era in Colombia and how the way we ‘record’ sound shapes our listening. Additionally, we talked about her work with Colombian indigenous film makers and the inter-disciplinary collective she convened to work on politics, ...
