CLACS Blog

Armillas-Tiseyra_Magali_Argentina_05.25.09.2, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

I arrived in Buenos Aires a week ago, and will be here until June 11. My project is to conduct research on references to Facundo, o civilización y barbarie (1845) in the letters of Domingo F. Sarmiento, president of Argentina 1868-1874. Sarmiento wrote Facundo while in exile in Chile from the regime of Juan Manuel Rosas.
Ostensibly the biography of a provincial caudillo, Juan Facundo Quiroga, the text is also a denunciation of the dictator. Through its biographical description of Quiroga, his context, and rise to power, Facundo presents an archaeology of despotism as a political and cultural phenomenon. It provides a foundational binary paradigm—civilización o barbarie—for much subsequent political and cultural thought in Latin America. My research interest is in tracing the (competitive) tension between the author and his subject(s), and I am particularly interested in the correspondence because it is here that Sarmiento occasionally addressed his motivations. While as a literary scholar, the primary component of my work is close attention to the text itself, my hope is that this archival work will enrich my reading and provide new entrances into a (and much written about) canonical text.
I have spent the my first week in Buenos Aires learning how to get around the city and doing preliminary work at my primary research site: the archives at the Museo Histórico Sarmiento in the Belgrano section of the city.
Thus far, I have been fortunate to find that most of the clusters of correspondence I was interested in reading have been edited and published as volumes, often with limited distribution and almost impossible to find elsewhere. These, however, are held by the Museo and I should be able to gather copies (photocopy or photograph) of most of the relevant material to have on hand when I return to New York. Among the useful material I have viewed this week are Valentín Alsina’s notes to Sarmiento for the second edition of the Facundo (microfiche) and an edited volume (1936) of Sarmiento’s letters of Mary Mann, wife of Horace Mann, who translated the Facundo into English in 1868; I had thought I would need to access this material in the Archivo General de la Nación and was happy to find it in a more workable form. I have also found a digital archive of Sarmiento’s work available online which provides keyword-searchable PDFs of several of Sarmiento’s works—a wonderful time-saver.
In the coming week I will be making my way through the large amount of material I have located thus far; once the archive’s catalogue is back up and running I will be using it to make a wider search of the correspondence. I will also visit and register with the Biblioteca Nacional. Finally, in the coming week I will also be meeting with local scholars who work on nineteenth century literature in Argentina, with whom my professors at NYU helped me get in touch. I am looking forward to the conversation and new leads.

VanderJagt_Costa Rica_05_09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Quepos, Costa Rica! I arrived in Costa Rica 2 weeks ago, first participating in a language immersion program and home stay, while conducting preliminary fieldwork components. This week marks the true beginning of my interview and surveying process.
My research question concerns environmental consciousness of Costa Ricans, specifically focusing on the opinions of residents of the adjacent towns of Manuel Antonio (home of the second most visited national park in Costa Rica) and Quepos. I am most interested in the disconnect between extreme environmental ethic apparent within the programs in Manuel Antonio National Park, versus the everyday actions of residents which live around its borders.
I am happy to report that preliminary interviews and discussions have revealed an almost unanimous belief that, in accordance with my hypothesis, the majority of Costa Rican citizens do not have an embedded environmental consciousness. Most respondents feel that the level of environmental consciousness is on the rise, many attributing this growth to the steady rise of the tourism industry. One respondent explained that the large numbers of ¨ecologically conscious¨ tourists who visit Costa Rica have had a direct impact on the growth of Costa Rican environmental awareness. She explained that hotels cater to ecotourism standards expected by the clientele, and as a result, educate their employees with environmentally conscious information. I have set up an appointment with the Director of ecological programs in Quepos to discuss the following situation: Since my last visit in November, new disposal bins have been set up throughout town. These sets of bins include one for trash, one or recycling, and one for organic waste. However, upon looking into each bin, there is no separation; each contains all types of garbage. While it is apparent that town officials are moving toward more environmentally friendly practices, what can be done to successfully translate this into everyday behavior of town residents? I look forward to an upcoming meeting with the Mayor of Quepos, the Director of Environmental Education at Manuel Antonio National Park and a visit to a local school for a National Park sponsored environmental education presentation. Reporting back soon!

Weible_Christine_Argentina_06.01.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

It has been almost two weeks since I got to Buenos Aires. After spending the first few days familiarizing myself with the city and the transportation system – a work in progress – I began to contact and meet with various people involved in the creation of the memorial in the ESMA. As a former clandestine detention center (CDC), the use of the site is the subject of much contention and debate.

One of the first meetings that we had was with Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky and Argentine Historian/Archivist Horacio Tarcus. The meeting took place at NYU Buenos Aires. It was a great introduction to my investigation here in Argentina, with both speakers addressing the issues of information, scholarship, the archive and memory of the most recent dictatorship, although from very different angles.

Tarcus' explanation of the “Argentine Paradox” helped me to understand, and to brace myself, for the challenges associated with collecting information in Argentina. The perceived modernity of Argentina is attractive to many scholars, but the residual effects of an authoritarian government have made information highly valuable, and its distribution almost impossible.

This optimistic observation has not impeded my ability to speak with people thus far, however. It seems that when it comes to human rights activists here in Buenos Aires, they idea is to spread information in any way, to anyone who will listen. The eagerness of people such as Carmen Lapaco, of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora, to tell their personal stories and to discuss the state of memory and justice in Argentina today is encouraging.

A tour of the ESMA last Friday also helped to consolidate the various explanations of the state that the site is in that I had gathered online before arriving. The proximity of the former CDC to the street and surrounding neighborhood came as a shock. Tom Abercrombie observed that when he had passed by in the early 80's (when the ESMA was still being used by the dictatorship) there had been signs posted threatening to shoot anyone who stopped in front of the gates. But nonetheless the site is visible and there is little doubt that most people knew what it was being used for.

The tour itself traced the desaparecidos' experiences. From entering at the gates, through passing the security checkpoint, being taken into the basement where the torture sessions occurred, and walking through the spaces where prisoners where kept between being forced to do labor for the navy and being tortured, the guide narrated the experience using the testimonies of survivors to give us an idea of their thoughts and feelings, and the conditions they were forced to live through.

I have started to consider the performative aspects of the ESMA tour experience and am looking at Diana Taylor's work to try and frame it out. It's a work in progress, which will require me to return at least once or twice more to the ESMA while continuing my investigatory interviews. I am really interested in finding out whether the guides allow the narratives they give to be influenced by the people on their tours, how the testimonies of the survivors were selected, and the progress of the commission in charge of the memorial.

Hayman_Uruguay_06.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello all! I’ve been in Montevideo, Uruguay since May 9th, not including a week in Argentina attending activities with local scholars and fellow grad students at NYU’s Buenos Aires campus. My first week in Montevideo was spent conducting preliminary fieldwork and setting up interviews with members of a long list of organizations to discuss the political and social dimensions of the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law), a controversial 1986 law that extends legal immunity to the Uruguayan armed forces for crimes committed during the country’s 1973-85 civic-military dictatorship. Thanks to wonderful help from activist Andrea Caraballo and journalist/professor Lawrence Weschler in New York, I have been able to contact members of a number of groups that form the Coordinadora Nacional por la Anulación de la Ley de Caducidad, the umbrella coalition that is campaigning to annul the law via national referendum on October 25th. So far, I have interviewed the secretary of Amnesty International Uruguay and will speak to the last AI president about the organization’s role in the political mobilization to collect signatures. I also plan to speak to the PIT-CNT, the national labor union that helped initiate the campaign for signatures, the Latin America Coordinator at SERPAJ (Servicio Paz y Justicia Uruguay), active in a prior unsuccessful 1989 campaign to repeal the Ley de Caducidad, academic experts like Marcelo Viñar, Alvaro Rico, Hugo Achugar, and journalists Natalia Castelgrande, Alberto Silva, Roger Rodriguez, and Eduardo Galeano. Interviews with smaller and lesser-known activist groups that are active in the current campaign have yielded very interesting conversations about the nature of political change in Uruguay and national identity. Two groups, Conbronca, a collective of digital artists and filmmakers, and Contraimpunidad, a small organization of activists interested in human rights in Mexico, are made up primarily of young Uruguayans who have no personal memory of the dictatorship themselves, but are actively trying to preserve and transmit the memory of state repression to their own generation. On May 20, I participated in the annual Marcha de Silencio, held every year in homage to Uruguay’s disappeared. There I had the chance to interview younger members of the PVP (Partido por la Victoria del Pueblo), one of the political parties most harshly repressed during the dictatorship, as well as two former political prisoners who I hope to speak to more in depth. In the next two weeks, I hope to visit important memory sites in Montevideo, develop a specific questionnaire to be completed by my interview subjects, and make contact with politicians and military figures on the other side of the debate. I’ve also created an experimental research blog for my project – it’s informal and I’m still figuring out how it should function (travel journal/news/analytical/hybrid?), but it would be great to have feedback from other students as my research progresses and inevitable challenges present themselves: http://memoryinmontevideo.blogspot.com/ Thanks!

Lasater_Amy_Peru_0604, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Lima, Peru! I’ve been here for two weeks now, and I’m pleased to report that I’m finally starting to get a sense of the city and the people who live here. I should begin by saying that one of my goals for the summer was to sort out my initial thoughts about my dissertation research (which is still a couple of years in the future), and one of the ideas I’ve been interested in exploring is how perceptions of national and regional identity are reflected in Peruvian food corporations’ advertising practices and research and development plans. Accordingly, I’ve been trying not only to familiarize myself with food and ads here but also to get a sense of what, exactly, Lima’s identity might be and how that fits into consumption practices.

To that end, last Saturday (May 30) I found myself in Lima’s Plaza de Armas to celebrate one of Peru’s newest holidays, National Potato Day. The program included a parade, a speech from the Minister of Culture, a play about the benefits of potatoes for Peru’s economy, statements from representatives from private corporations, and a surprise visit from an actress from Ayacucho. (The picture I’ve included is from the parade; the potato-shaped vendors carts are actually used in Lima’s downtown.)

In large part, the speakers discussed the need to reinvigorate a sense of national pride in the potato. Although the potato originated in Peru, its consumption in many parts of the country (including Lima) has been decreasing in favor of imported rice and noodles. This decrease in consumption is in turn catastrophic for the mountain communities who rely on potato farming for their survival. Accordingly, National Potato Day exists as a means of trying to promote potato consumption throughout the country – largely (as far as I can tell) through the device of marketing to the rich rather than reaching out specifically to the poor. Speakers throughout the day emphasized the fact that Andean potatoes’ exotic qualities could attract tourists and provoke new gastronomic delights. Furthermore, they suggested that farmers would be able to earn more money for their crops if their potatoes were packaged in plastic and sold in value-added forms like potato chips. The overall effect was to cast the consumption of potatoes as something that was not only patriotic but also clever; the speakers encouraged the audience not only to eat Peruvian potatoes but also to do new, creative things with them.

Overall, the ceremony articulated Peruvian identity as an amalgamation of unique historical and natural resources and modern ingenuity. But I was intrigued by the way that it also hinted at a tension between the ways that Peruvian identity is often articulated (through the evocation of Andean indigeneity) and the relative lack of indigenous cultural displays in Lima itself. For instance, the play included an unflattering and stereotyped pair of bumbling altiplano characters, and the actress chided the audience for not speaking Quechua, Peru’s indigenous language. These are the sorts of things that I’m hoping to look at further during the rest of my stay in Lima; with luck, maybe I’ll have material with which to address them in my next post!

Armillas-Tiseyra_Magali_Argentina_06-07-2009, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello all,

As I near the end of my time in Buenos Aires, I am both a little overwhelmed and overwhelming pleased with the amount of material and information I have been able to gather in the last few weeks. It has been a productive trip, and I am looking forward to returning to New York to begin carefully analyzing and writing about this material.
I have focused my research in the Archive and the library of the Museo Histórico Sarmiento, where I have been fortunate to find a lot of the what I was looking for in edited—as opposed to the original document or on microfilm—form, although in vary rare editions I would have been unlikely to have access to elsewhere. This means I have also been able to photocopy some of the material, which will be of much help when I begin writing. In addition, the staff at the Museo has been immensely helpful and welcoming, which has made my work easy. I had expected to spend much more time running around Buenos Aires, but have instead found that the Museo could provide me with most of the material I was seeking.
In my time here, one of the most useful pieces of material I have looked at has been the physical (paper) catalogue of the Archive. When I arrived, the electronic database, which is keyword-searchable, was down and I was initially disappointed by the technical challenge. However, combing through the entire catalogue—which includes keywords and summaries for each of the pieces in the Archive’s collective—proved to be immensely productive, as it drew my attention to documents and keywords I would not otherwise have thought to look at or for. Challenges this such as this have helped me broaden my search and open my thinking to more innovative angles and approaches.
The greatest pleasure of my time in Buenos Aires has been meeting with local scholars, which I mentioned in my last post, to discuss my research. Conversation with experts in the field and the difference of perspective has been immensely refreshing. For example, Adriana Amante, a Sarmiento scholar who teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires as well as NYU Buenos Aires, was particularly helpful in (re)opening my thinking and my search toward Sarmiento’s other published texts as potential resources for my research project.
In the remaining week I will be looking at a final selection of letters I’ve made from my reading of the catalogue and also hope to take a look at the original edition(s) of the Facundo, which are held in the library of the Museo. Finally, I will be spending some time in several of Buenos Aires’s many bookstores, browsing for hard-to-get and unexpected finds.

Attached to this post is a photograph of the main room of the Archive at the Museo, where I have done most of my work. Over the desk hangs a late portrait of Sarmiento in military uniform, one of many that are scattered around the offices of the Museo.

VanderJact_CostaRica_06_09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Nearing the end of my time in Quepos, Costa Rica I reflect on the changes in my thought processes, obstacles encountered and adaptations made throughout my research here. An initial obstacle coming into the experience was my language level. I hoped, rather fool-heartedly, to remedy this problem to a sufficient extent during my first two weeks in a language immersion and home stay program. However, as all who have undergone the process of learning a second language know, two weeks is far from enough! While my knowledge of the language has improved by leaps and bounds, the process of face to face interviewing has been a continual struggle throughout my time in the field. During my interview with the Mayor of Quepos, Oscar Monge, I realized that I needed to make a change in my approach. Originally, I had planned to base the majority of my field research on formal interviews and participant observation with a modest number of supplementary surveys. However, realizing the language barrier’s effect on my investigation, I shifted toward privileging the collection of surveys over my original intention to gather the majority of my information through formal interviews. I was at first hesitant to make this switch, realizing the complications that accompany the use of surveys, including loaded questions, leading answers, and the contrast between qualitative and quantitative data that results from this research method. But, what other way to determine its usefulness, than to try?
With renewed inspiration I hit the streets of Quepos and Manuel Antonio daily, walking from shop to shop, street to street, introducing myself and my research to anyone who would listen. With all of my initial hesitations at the forefront of my mind, I was met with a completely unexpected enthusiasm and support from local residents. After spending 3 weeks gathering surveys, I am still amazed at the level of acceptance and cooperation that I encountered; of approximately 230 potential participants, a total of 200 surveys were collected. Throughout the surveying process I was able to meet an enormous subsection of people who, if I had proceeded with my original strategy, would have been unfortunately absent from my work. In addition to collecting a huge amount of data from local residents, the survey acted as an entry point to further conversation about environmental consciousness in the area, as well as resident’s perceptions of tourism’s role in their daily lives. In hindsight, I realize that every cloud does have a silver lining: the obstacles that I encountered led to a more fruitful method of immersing myself in the local community, an absolutely essential element for my particular line of questioning.
In addition to my survey collection, I altered my in-depth interview method as well. The majority of interviews I conducted after the first two weeks have been via e-mail, a process which each participant has kindly agreed to. Finally, as pictured above, the Director of the Environmental Education Program at Manuel Antonio National Park, Javier Herrera, allowed me to attend his presentations on the importance of environmental preservation and protection at two local schools. The presentation pictured above was targeted at primary school children in Quepos, complete with interactive question and answering as well as a natural habitat activity shown in the above photo. I look forward to my time back in the states to compile my survey data, connect already visible and interesting patterns in responses, and solidify connections between conversation and observation. Pura Vida!

Armillas-Tiseyra_Argentina_06.15.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello all,

After spending almost a month in Buenos Aires, researching in the archive, I am back in New York, and beginning to pull together the information and material I gathered in my time away.
Reflecting on my work, I am surprised by how different my experience was from what I had expected. In preparing for my departure—pulling together bibliographies, beginning to identify documents I wanted to look at in the archive, etc.—I had thought I would get as much writing as investigation done while I was away. However, once in Buenos Aires, I found that my focus quickly shifted to gathering as much material as possible and to taking advantage of my time in there by meeting with professors, exploring bookstores, etc. Over the course of my time there, I increasingly made an effort to allow my research and my thinking to “wander,” so to speak. I found that I had vastly underestimated the importance of this intellectual “wandering” that time in the archive (or the field) researching allows. I found quite a bit of material pertaining to my initial questions, but I also encountered unexpected details that, while perhaps not immediately useful to the topic(s) on which I am working, gave me a more textured understanding of Sarmiento in general.
When I initially formulated my project, I wanted to find and analyze Sarmiento’s discussion of the Facundo in his correspondence, as a means for beginning to think about the particular tension between the various “protagonists” (Facundo Quiroga, the biographical subject, but also Juan Manuel de Rosas and Sarmiento himself, both of whom lurk in the background) of the text. This had roughly two components: (1) the discussion of the Facundo as an important social/political “tool”—i.e. as an integral part of Sarmiento’s broader political and cultural program, for which, for example, the translations of the Facundo in Sarmiento’s lifetime were important starting points, and (2) the discussion of the internal dynamics of the text itself, particularly in terms of Sarmiento’s aggressive focus on Quiroga versus Rosas. I, perhaps predictably, found much more of the former than the latter. What became increasingly clear to me as I was working, however, was that the Facundo (the text) is itself the most valuable resource for exploring my questions—close and critical reading being central to my work as a literary scholar. In the coming weeks, I look forward to developing my close reading of the tension between the various “protagonists” of the Facundo in conjunction with the material I gathered on the trip, and to presenting this research in October.

Attached to this post is a photograph of the first publication of the Facundo—it was originally serialized in the Chilean newspaper El Progreso; it appears in the bottom third of the page—one of the many documents I was able to look at in archives and library of the Museo Histórico Sarmiento.

Vazquez-Rojas_Mexico061609, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Today it has been exactly two weeks since I arrived in Pátzcuaro to start my field research about the interpretation of plurals in P’urhépecha, also known as Tarascan. P’urhépecha is a language isolate -it has no known linguistic relatives, and it is spoken in the state of Michoacán, in Western Mexico, by approximately 100.000 speakers.

The first days of my stay here were devoted to find speakers of the language that would have the patience and time to help me out with my research. Some people kindly agreed to work with me. Two of them are from the village of Ihuatzio, and three others from the small town of Puácuaro. The two locations are approximately 50km (31 miles) from each other, but the variants of P’urhépecha spoken in each of them vary, sometimes in aspects that turn out to be of comparative importance to my research.

My research is about how Tarascan plural nouns are interpreted, in comparison to Spanish plural nouns, and this involves a survey of the contexts in which plural morphemes can and cannot occur in this language. The hypothesis that I am trying to test is that plural nouns in P’urhépecha have a different interpretation and syntactic behaviour from their Spanish and English counterparts. Tarascan plurals have a more limited occurrence than Spanish plurals. Many of the nouns that in Spanish could bear a plural morpheme –s without a problem, (say calabazas, ‘pumpkins’) in Tarascan can only bear the plural affix –icha under very particular conditions. One of those conditions is that the noun (without the plural) refers to a collection of countable things. And many of the things that in Spanish (or English) are considered countable, in P’urhépecha are not seen as such. For instance, the nouns for pumpkins, beans, avocados, flowers, tortillas, onions, and fruits and vegetables in general are not necessarily considered countable in P’urhépecha, and they are seen as a non-delimited collection of things: a mass, so to speak. These nouns can be used in their non-plural form and refer to a non-delimited collection of things that can contain one or more than one element, more or less in the same way in which English treats nouns like sand, or rice.

However, in some contexts the plural morpheme –icha can occur with one of these nouns, but then necessarily the resulting noun refers to a collection of more than one element: a strictly plural entity. For instance, we can say that John harvests avocadoes for a living using any of the sentences in (1) or in (2):

(1) Jwanu pikwá-sïn-ti kupánda
Juan harvest-HAB-3IND avocado
‘Juan harvests avocadoes’ (lit: Juan harvests avocado)

(2) Jwanu pikwá-sïn-ti kupánda-icha-ni
Juan harvest-HAB-3IND avocado-PL-ACC
‘Juan harvests avocadoes’

This use of the plural stands in contrast to languages like English, where one can say “dogs have tails” without entailing that each dog has more than one tail. In Tarascan it is infelicitous to utter (3), since it entails that each dog has a plurality of tails. The only right way to convey that general statement is by means of (4), where the noun ‘tail’ is in its non-plural form:

(3) # wíchu-icha chéeti-icha juká-s-ti
dog-PL tail-PL have-ASP-3IND
‘Dogs have tails’

(4) wíchu-icha chéeti juká-s-ti
dog-PL tail have-ASP-3IND
‘Dogs have tails’ (lit: dogs have tail)

So far, I have been able to test that in Tarascan some nouns that are considered non- countable can only take plural forms when they really involve more than one individualized element. The non-plural marked forms, however, are not necessarily interpreted as ‘singular’, since they can make reference to sets of one or more element (like in sentence1). The plural marker in Tarascan is thus not the exact correspondent of Spanish –s or English –z.

In order to make this inquiry, I have designed questionnaires and asked the speakers to translate some sentences from Spanish to Tarascan and vice-versa. But translations are not enough as semantic data. Hence, I have also designed some interviews where I show pictures and ask the informants to describe what they see. In order to collect negative evidence as well (that is, not only what can be said in a context in P’urhépecha, but also judgments about what cannot be said), I make some minor modifications on the sentences they provide me, adding or deleting plural morphemes in the scenarios at hand.

So far, my stay in the P’urhépecha area has let me attest directly that common place that says that different languages partition the surrounding world in different ways. The most interesting part of this statement is of course, to find out how that different semantic partitioning helps us understand how language in general is structured, which universal principles are observed cross-linguistically, and in which aspects languages like Spanish and Tarascan vary. Needless to say, this field trip has been an extremely enriching experience, not only in my academic formation, but also in my understanding of a different culture through the language they use.

Abbreviations used:
PL- plural
ASP – aspect
HAB – habitual
IND – indicative
3- third person
ACC- accusative case

Hayman_Uruguay_06.09-1, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Greetings from Uruguay! I have now been in Montevideo for over a month and am attempting to take stock of what is and is not working well as I reach the halfway point of my research in the field. In the past two weeks, I have had the opportunity to carry out more in-depth interviews with important political and social actors in the campaign to annul the Expiry Law (mentioned in my previous blog post, below), including Marisa Ruiz, the former president of Amnesty International Uruguay, Oscar Urtazún from Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos, several members of the national labor union PIT-CNT, a member of the Partido Comunista Uruguay active in the campaign, and academic experts Marcelo Viñar and Maren Ulriksen, all of whom were incredibly generous with their time and resources.
Perhaps my most fruitful conversation in the last two weeks was with Elbio Ferrario, the current director of MUME (Central Cultural Museo de la Memoria), which opened in 2007 and receives funding through the Intendencia Municipal de Montevideo. Unlike ESMA in Buenos Aires, MUME does not occupy a former detention and torture site. Also unlike ESMA, it is open to organized school groups of children younger than 16, so there are lots of very young children from the neighborhood at the site, engaged in art classes and workshops or playing on the extensive museum grounds. The neighborhood where MUME is located is extremely distant from downtown Montevideo and is both socially and economically marginalized – in fact, the museum has implemented a breakfast program for the local children who visit because they haven’t eaten at home. Ferrario told me, memorably, that the children with whom he discusses human rights often ask him why their human rights are being violated.
I will discuss my visit to the museum more on my blog, but Ferrario has motivated me to think about how memory and human rights discourses intersect with contemporary social problems like violence, insecurity, and economic marginalization on the periphery of Montevideo.

Some of the major challenges of my research include:

1) Focusing my project. I attribute part of this challenge to the fact that I’m simultaneously conducting a reporting assignment for the Journalism Department while I’m researching for CLACS – I am more comfortable using reporting techniques to approach my subjects because I’m not trained as an anthropologist/sociologist, but I’m not sure if this will yield the results I need for both projects.

2) Conducting better-targeted interviews. To optimize the time I have, I tend to ask people two sets of questions – one for the reporting assignment, one for CLACS, but this makes everything feel very diffuse. I now explain both projects to my subjects, but I think I need to start separating the people I want to talk to for one project from the other, and to narrow down the information I specifically need from each person.

3) Getting a broad sense of the variety of opinions on the Expiry Law. Professional survey results are published periodically online, but I need to conduct my own surveys, and still haven’t put together a set of questions that will be useful for BOTH of my projects. I still need to talk to the Ministry of Defense and members of the armed forces – I’m planning to do this at an event on Friday.

4) Balancing interview time and independent archival research. I still haven’t determined how critical archival research will ultimately be in this project – thus far, I’ve left it on the back burner, which may come back to haunt me.

Any feedback or advice would me much appreciated!

Lasater_Amy_Peru_June23, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello again from Peru! I’ve now been here for about a month and have just finished my work in Lima. (I’m changing locations for the last two weeks of research.)

One of the most interesting and intellectually productive events that I attended in Lima since I last wrote was a series of lectures at the Catholic university (PUCP), which dealt with the phenomenon of “lovemarks,” commercial brands that inspire a high degree of consumer loyalty and affection. PUCP had identified several Peruvian brands that they considered lovemarks, including Gloria (a dairy brand), Inca Kola (a ubiquitous and frequently maligned yellow cola), Sublime (chocolate bars with peanuts), and Crystal (beer); representatives from each of the brands spoke about the ways that the companies have worked to strengthen consumer “love” for their products. Each of the brands emphasized that they were capitalizing on the consumer’s sense of being Peruvian and on the sense that consuming these products was a way of expressing that Peruvianness. The woman from Crystal spoke particularly passionately about the ways that certain brands can unite a country; she felt that Peruvians were always told that they were a nation too diverse to unite under any common cause or way of thinking, but she thought that particular brands had the potential to bridge those divides. All of the speakers agreed that this moment in Peru’s history is a particularly fruitful one for “lovemarks” because it is a time of optimism; the years of terrorism have ended, and Peruvians are succeeding economically.

Weible_Christine_Argentina_061309, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

My time spent in Cordoba Capital last weekend provided me with an interesting pair of memory sites to contrast with those that I've been learning about here in Buenos Aires. I toured both Paseo Buen Pastor, and the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria de Cordoba.

Paseo Buen Pastor is an ex-CCD/ women's prison. (Paseo Buen Pastor). It was inaugurated as a cultural space in 2007. Situated in the middle of the busy zone of Nueva Cordoba, one really would not guess that it was the site of an ex-CCD. Some of the original architecture remains, but it has been renovated and added to in a very modern style. The paseo contains upscale shops, expensive restaurants, art galleries, and venues for music and theater. There is also green space where people congregate to drink mate and watch the aguas danzantes, a fountain that is programmed to perform a nightly show with music and lights.

There is very little indication of Paseo Buen Pastor's prior use as an ex-CCD. There is an information desk that provides information about the history of the site as well as about other cultural and touristic excursions in the city and in the surrounding province. The emphasis is on creating a gathering space for people, however, not exploring the recent violent past.

At Plaza San Martin there is a former clandestine detention center that functioned in the Cabildo, the center of municipal affairs in the city. It was fairly typical in its usage as a secret place for interrogation and torture during the dictatorship. The interesting part of its recent inauguration as a memory site is the emphasis on the personalities, histories, and families of the victims. The organization in charge of the site is the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria.

Various family members have put together albums dedicated to their missing children to put on display in one of the rooms of the site. These albums look like scrapbooks that any family might have, and include things such as newspaper clippings, baby photos, report cards and drawings. I met Americo Losada, the father of one of the desaparecidos held at the Cabildo, while checking out the site. He showed me his son's album, proudly pointing out that his son had been very tall, had never failed a class, and had been a dedicated activist in various social causes. The conversation that we had about his son was very similar to any conversation that one might have with a proud father. He didn't really speak about his son's disappearance or its effect on his family. The emphasis was on his life. The photo posted above is of Americo displaying the album.

Zeichner_Brazil_062409, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

I arrived in Brazil on June 2, 2009. And, even though this would not be my first in the country, I have a clear recollection of feeling a strong sense of anxiety upon arrival, likely caused by my awareness of the difficulty one experiences in Brazil when trying to plan a research routine in advance. Remembering my previous experiences, I already knew that life in Brazil tends to be full of unforeseen contingencies that are often the result of unpredictable happenings.

My project in Brazil aims to explore the formation of alternative gender constructions in the industrial suburbs surrounding Sao Paulo during Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). During the military regime, many left-wing political organizations, among which university student activists were the dominant participants, embraced the belief that the true revolutionary “vanguard” could only be found among popular sectors. This ideological approach motivated several leftist groups to send members into factories in the Greater Sao Paulo Area to effectively become factory workers. For those that went into factories, this meant not only a rethinking of class identities, but also of appropriate ways to perform masculinity and femininity. While their inspiration to engage in this type of political and social organizing was, ultimately, based on a romanticized and essentialized understanding of what they considered to be the “working class,” these individuals toiled and marched side-by-side with rank-and-file workers and union leaders, and ultimately contributed to shaping the identity of a new age in labor-oriented activism.

kirchner, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Argentina just had elections this past Sunday, which resulted in a significant loss of power for the Kirchners. This is significant for my project because, as I have been realizing over these past few weeks, human rights projects here are tied to politics in a way that makes them vulnerable to shifts in popularity and power experienced by their political allies. The Kirchners have used human rights as a main component of their platform since assuming power six years ago. Since then various groups, such as the Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, have accepted both their money and support. This has proven both beneficial and complicated. Some members of Argentine society perceive alliances between politicians and human rights organizations as merely a strategy to gain sympathy and/or popularity while pursuing a less heartwarming agenda behind the scenes. Others see a partnership between the Kirchners and various human rights organizations as natural and beneficial to the causes promoted by these organizations. Either way, a shift in power to politicians who are less inclined to support a human rights agenda raises the issue of how these organizations will fare without the benefit of political allies.

As I wrap up my time here in Buenos Aires I am both grateful to all of the people who have been so generous with their time and resources and sad to be leaving with so many questions left to explore. I have been lucky enough to have spent time with a variety of people, from representatives of human rights organizations such as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and HIJOS, to the Defensora del Pueblo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. I've even had some extremely interesting conversations with several taxi drivers.

One challenging aspect of studying collective memory is trying to define what comprises the actual collectivity, and how to measure or gauge its various memories. This challenge has also opened up various new ways of thinking about the human rights movement here in Argentina, and the impulse to memorialize the violence of the last dictatorship. Who the repression of that era affected, or continues to affect, is in and of itself, a tricky question to answer. I have struggled to understand how so many Argentines exclude themselves from memory of the dictatorship based on their sense that it has no bearing on their lives, or that of their loved ones. I've only begun to explore this aspect of collective memory, and will sadly not be able to pursue it in person, but I know that it has important implications for my project as a whole.

Lasater_Amy_Peru_June30, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Today is my last full day in Cuzco (and Peru, for that matter) and I’m trying to piece together everything that I’ve seen over the past month and a half. One of the objectives that I had had going into these six weeks was to get a better sense of the ways that Peru’s coast and mountain regions interact with each other in the articulation of national identity, and going from Lima to Cuzco with that specific goal in mind was definitely an eye-opening experience, although I’m still trying to determine to what extent I’m seeing only the contrasts that I want to see.

One of the highlights of my trip has been the festival of Inti Raymi, which I attended on June 24. I had read a lot about Inti Raymi (the “Fiesta del Sol” -- or “Sun Party!” -- as it is translated on a poster attempting to attract tourists to a rave), but I had never actually seen it. It’s an invented tradition, a supposed Inca ritual that actually started in the 1950s, but now tourists from all over the country and world come to see the “traditional” Inca dances and ceremonies, accompanied by a narration entirely in Quechua. (To my disappointment, this narration was not very well amplified and thus hardly intelligible, but since most of the audience doesn’t speak Quechua anyway, I suspect that the referential content of the words was not really the point.)

Vazquez-Rojas_Mexico070509, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

My four-week stay in the Tarascan area is now over. I was able to find answers to some questions, but as in every productive investigation, I was left with more open puzzles than questions solved. For instance, I corroborated that a nominal phrase in the plural form is always interpreted independently on the interpretation of other operators in the sentence. In that respect, Tarascan plurals are different from English plurals and Spanish plurals. I also realized, as I posted before, that the Tarascan language categorizes differently certain aspects of the surrounding world. For instance, in Tarascan one cannot count things like avocadoes. The strict correlate of the English expression “three avocadoes” is not possible in this language. To express this concept, a Tarascan speaker would say something like “Three round-pieces-of avocado”. The expression corresponding to “round-pieces-of” (irhákwa) is called a Classifier.

Tarascan has at least two classifiers, expressions that divide a homogeneous mass into countable parts. The choice of the classifier depends on the form of the countable units that one wants to divide up from the mass concept. There is a classifier for round things, irhákwa and another one for elongated pieces (the one used to count thinks like ‘tortilla’ or ‘corn’): ichákwa. A good question now is if the similarity between these two words motivates partitioning them into different morphemes, which in turn would entail that irhakwa and ichakwa are complex expressions composed by multiple units of meaning.

Hayman_Uruguay_07.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

On June 26 and 27, the anniversary of the 1973 golpe de estado in Uruguay, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a conference held by the Asociación Psicoanalitica Uruguaya (APU). Entitled “Hacer Memoria”, the weekend-long event that included panel discussions and workshops by important Uruguayan memory scholars, historians, writers, and psychoanalysts such as Maren and Marcelo Viñar, Carina Blixen, Victor Guerra, Alvaro Rico and Daniel Gil. The conference opened with a showing of Mateo Gutiérrez’s documentary “D.F.” (Destino Final), which tells the story of his father’s kidnapping and murder in Buenos Aires in 1976 along with Senator Zelmar Michelini and the young Tupamaro couple William Whitelaw and Rosario Barredo (all Uruguayan citizens living in exile). Twenty years later, Madres y Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos held the first annual March of Memory in Montevideo to commemorate the deaths of the four Uruguayans and remember those who disappeared during the dictatorship. Filmmaker and historian Virginia Martinez, whose documentaries Por Esos Ojos and Memorias de Mujeres I greatly admire, helped facilitate the panel discussion afterward.

Mladic_Peru_071409, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Cusco. My name is Christine, and I will be in Cusco for 2 months to study the Quechua language. Along with three other classmates from New York, I am studying at Centro Tinku, a language school that is about a 5-minute walk from the Plaza de Armas. In addition to this intensive program, I am also planning to research photography in Peru for my master’s project. My intention is to explore the many ways that photography may be used in and around Calca, a small town about an hour drive outside of Cusco in the Sacred Valley.

While all four of us from NYU passed the evaluation into the intermediate level, all 10 of us in the class have had a different experience in learning the language. Even though our professor in New York is a native speaker from Cusco, it is incredibly challenging to attempt to converse with Quechua speakers outside of a classroom setting. One of the benefits of studying Quechua in Cusco is the countless opportunities we have to practice. Participating in a homestay, I have the advantage of chatting with my Señora in Quechua over a mate de coca or while learning a new recipe. Quechua speaking taxi drivers, waiters and sellers in the market have generally seemed willing to see how this gringa fares: I would say that I know that I have a lot of learning ahead of me, and I’m excited to have so many chances to actually use the language on a daily basis.

Salazar_Peru_071709, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Between the years of 1980 and 2000 more than 60,000 Peruvians were murdered and/or disappeared as a result of a bloody internal war started by the guerrilla movement Shining Path. My current research is focused on the testimonials collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission given by women affected by the conflict. The main objective of my research project is to explore the crossings between gender and violence in the personal narratives of Peruvian women after those years of terror.
Since my arrival to Lima, I have conducted research at the holdings of Centro de Documentación para la memoria colectiva (Lima, Peru) consulting the transcriptions of thousands of testimonials given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This Archive holds more than 16,000 testimonials and is organized by geographical location, so I decided to focus on the areas most affected by the conflict as Ayacucho, Apurimac and Huancavelica.

This part of my research has revealed some perverted gender relations during the conflict. The bodies of the Peruvian women were used as a battle camp not just by the Shining Path but also by the Peruvian Army which was supposed to protect the population. In my final report, I will present some of the techniques used by the Shining Path and the Army to develop a strategy of terror.

The next weeks I will continue the research at the Centro de Información, visit the photographic exhibition Yuyanapaq located at the National Museum, and also research some periodical publications at the National Library. The objective of this section will be to explore the configuration of the politics of memory in Peru.

Colijn_Peru_072009, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Cuzco, Peru! I´ve been here for a few weeks now and it´s been somewhat of an adjustment to life here, as it´s my first time in Peru. Along with working on research for my MA project, I´m in an intensive Quechua language course along with two other students from NYU. We take taxis or buses to school or do the hour-long walk when we´re not fighting off illness due to the variety of things that have befallen us here. Trying to get research done has also been somewhat challenging, due to periodic strikes, threatened strikes, or closing (public) school due to the H1N1 flu. My research focus involves bilingual education between Quechua and Spanish, so having the schools closed for two or three weeks doesn´t help, even though it´s certainly a good reason to close school.

This past Sunday the class from our Quechua program went to a small town called Combapata about two hours outside of Cuzco. We visited the two markets they had: the animal and the "stuff" market. The animal market pictured above had mostly cows left by the time we got there. The "stuff" market, on the other hand, was selling everything from fruits and vegetables, guinea pigs and baby chicks, hand-made sweaters and scarves, to cell phones and pirated dvds and cds. We walked through the animal market, drawing lots of stares, as the five of us walking together were quite definitely the only gringos anywhere nearby. We stopped to speak to two vendors selling grapes, and wound up getting to practice speaking some Quechua with them. They asked questions like where we were from, what we were doing in Peru and in Combapata, and were pretty interested in our relationship statuses. They seemed somewhat surprised that none of us had any kids, and asked the couple we had with us if they didn´t have kids because they couldn´t have kids. By the end of the conversation, a crowd of at least 15 or 20 people had gathered to watch the gringos trying to speak Quechua.

We also attended a Catholic mass conducted almost entirely in Quechua. Interestingly, the priest was originally from New Zealand, and had been taught Quechua by one of the teachers in our school in Cuzco. We drew some stares in mass as well, but managed to follow some of the service. It´s definitely not easy to pick out the few words you know from a running stream of religious-oriented speech. According to our Quechua teacher, the priest didn´t have a very good Quechua accent, but it was likely a little easier for us to understand, as it was closer to our own gringo-accented Quechua. Some of the church members and vendors in the market, like the two people selling grapes, were fairly willing to speak Quechua with us, though they spoke Spanish as well. Some of the vendors just shook their heads, said no, or said they didn´t speak Quechua if we asked if they would be willing to speak Quechua with us. That seems to be fairly common in the places that we´ve visited thus far. At least one member of the families that we live with speaks Quechua and is happy to practice with us, but some vendors have no interest whatsoever in speaking in or about Quechua, at least with foreigners.

Our Quechua professor from NYU arrived in Cuzco yesterday. He´s from Calca, a town about 45 minutes or an hour outside of Cuzco, and has invited his students that are here in Cuzco to have lunch with his family in Calca and plans to show us around town and introduce us to people. This should open some doors as far as research goes, and will afford some great opportunities to use Quechua with our professor, his family and other friends around town, so the rest of my time here in Cuzco should be pretty interesting. Good luck to all the rest of the summer travelers!

Zeichner_Brazil_072109, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

During my final weeks in Brazil, the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo, broke the story that retired coronel Sebastião Curió, the military official who was in charge of the campaign against the Araguaia guerilla movement from 1972-75, would now, after over 30 years of silence, allow a reporter to review his personal archives, as well as give his own public reflections on the barbarous role the military played during these events. In the days that followed the news story, interest in finding and reopening archival sources from the military dictatorship (1964-1985) became a hot political issue. As a historian, just the thought of gaining access to certain documents produced by certain branches was tantalizing, however, to be perfectly honest, somewhat difficult to imagine. The most useful documents I worked with this time, came from information compiled by the State Political Police divisions (DEOPS/DOPS) from 1964 to 1982. As one of the principal arms of state repression and executors of torture, the documents created by the DEOPS/DOPS forces are, in certain ways, treasure troves of useful information. However, the history behind the opening of DEOPS/DOPS collections is, sadly, one of very few victories. Today, thanks to the hard work and determination of several important activists, the Sao Paulo DEOPS/DOPS collection is almost completely open to the public. However, while the work in Sao Paulo has been successful, efforts in many other states were not.

Hello from Cusco, Peru! My name is Liz, I am a second year MA student in CLACS. I am here in Cusco studying intensive Quechua. In addition to studying Quechua during my first year at NYU, I have also been researching constitutional reform and indigenous activism in Ecuador. I am particularly interested in the acknowledgment of cultural and territorial rights of indigenous peoples in Ecuador’s 1998 and 2008 constitutions. My experience learning Quechua has inspired me to further explore the legal and philosophical debates surrounding the inclusion of cultural rights in recent Andean constitutions.

Even though I have been studying Quechua for a year, the first few weeks of class have been extremely challenging. Everyday we have grammar class for four hours and twice a week we have conversation class for two hours. While the intensity of the course has been extremely helpful, I found it slightly overwhelming at first. I´m finally feeling more comfortable with the pace of the class. I am also living with a family here in Cusco. Technically, there is only one Quechua speaker in the household, Maria Adelma, the grandmother. It has been interesting to observe the multiple levels of Quechua ´proficiency´ in Cusco. For example, Eloy, the father in my family, can understand everything in Quechua but has trouble speaking. Eskarleth, Eloy´s wife, is a science teacher in a local high school and often communicates with her students in Quechua but is reluctant to call herself a Quechua speaker. Maria Adelma, however, speaks proudly in Quechua and laments the fact that her children resisted learning the language. I have heard other people here in Cusco describe similar experiences with Quechua. In this sense, it´s been interesting to observe the range of reactions to my clumsy attempts to speak Quechua; everything from uncontrollable laughter, patient understanding, to outright resistance. But, as my favorite saying in Quechua goes ´pisi pisimanta´, with time I´m confident that my Quechua will improve little by little.

Liz Kelley
MA Candidate, CLACS

Photo: Actor Marçal Costa training for a Teatro da Vertigem production.

Hello from São Paulo! During the past two weeks, I have been researching the space of the body in the work of theater and dance companies here. My primary focus is the group Teatro da Vertigem, but I have also been able to meet and familiarize myself with the work of several other performing artists.

Vertigem is currently developing a new piece after The Castle by Franz Kafka. They view this project as an intervention in the city, as well as a theater piece. The company usually stages its performances in site-specific locations; in the past, these have included a church, prison, and hospital (all at least partly abandoned). This time around, The Castle will be performed on the outside of a glass building, about three stories up. The cast of seven will hang from rock-climbing ropes and harnesses, as well as move in three suspended boxes, such as those used by window cleaners. The audience will be inside the building, looking out at the performance through the glass. This staging is a direct response to the particularities of place of São Paulo and their psychophysical effect on its inhabitants. The glass wall separating those that are inside the bureaucratic “castle” from those who cannot gain access is a powerful one in here. Aware of this basic formulation, Vertigem is exploring more deeply the themes of work and control.

I have been able to observe both the rehearsals at the company’s base/studio and the physical training with the ropes and harnesses, which occurs outside a nearby building. They are about halfway into their eight-month rehearsal process, and I am seeing what a struggle it is to try to adapt their bodies to the shifting ground they will be occupying.

Greetings from Santo Domingo! For the past weeks I have been in the Dominican Republic researching the constitutional reform that proposes to change the definition of Article 11 in the current constitution to state that the children of undocumented immigrants born in the Dominican Republic would not be considered Dominican nationals.

Currently, the majority of undocumented immigrants are Haitian and for many civil society groups this amendment to the constitution is just the last of many attempts to create laws that would legally exclude a population that has been historically marginalized. With this proposed reform the children of undocumented immigrants will never be considered Dominicans and never have the opportunity to exercise their rights as full citizens. This would mean limited access to basic services and a sense of belonging nowhere; in sum, statelessness.

I’ve been looking for answers to many questions over the past few weeks and I feel that those questions have generated even more questions. The fact of the matter is that while there are undocumented immigrants coming from countries other than Haiti, the data on these groups is non-existent making it difficult to see how these laws and constitutional changes are affecting groups other than Dominicans of Haitian descent. It is also public knowledge that many opinion leaders have explicitly stated that Dominicans of Haitian descent are just as Haitian as their parents. In a country where politics are so entrenched in the daily lives of all, the opinion of these individuals does matter and can effectively influence.

My interviews with several non-governmental organizations have revealed that their struggle for inclusiveness and the right to a name and nationality for Dominicans of Haitian descent has been an uphill battle and at times they have felt as if all of their recourses had been exhausted. However, there have been victories such as Yean y Bosico vs Republica Dominicana in which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights demanded that two young Dominican girls of Haitian descent be granted their birth certificates and publicly acknowledge and apologize. The Dominican Republic continues to reject this ruling and in many ways have negatively responded to the international attention this case received.

In a country where economic development has not directly translated into human development it is concerning to see how large sectors of the Dominican population are being excluded. I must add that citizenship rights are not only limited to Dominicans of Haitian descent but to many poor Dominicans who are not of Haitian descent that do not have access to their birth certificates. In a country where birth certificates equal Dominican nationality it remains to be seen how those who cannot prove their nationality can define the imagined nation.

Director Eliana Monteiro and assistant director Maria Emilia work with actor Bruna Freitag during a Teatro da Vertigem rehearsal

During one of my final weeks in Brazil, I was able to accompany Teatro da Vertigem to the Festival de Arte Serrinha, an arts festival in the interior of São Paulo state. Four company members led a workshop in developing theatrical pieces. They tried to condense their years-long processes into one week to teach students some techniques for collaboratively creating and presenting site-specific works.

The first day, company members discussed the history of Teatro da Vertigem with students. Though I had read about the group’s productions, this was a wonderful opportunity for me to hear them describe the processes of each piece and their personal experiences rehearsing and performing them. They traced how each piece had evolved from a theme and concept to a performance. To mirror this, they chose the themes of waiting and skin for the workshop in Serrinha. For each piece in Vertigem’s repertoire, they explained how each performance space had been selected. They emphasized the importance of a space’s history—the ghosts that stay in the walls of a room and how the space “contaminates” the actors, the play, and even the spectators. For example, during performances of O Livro de Jó (The Book of Job), which took place in a disused hospital, spectators would occasionally faint and comment on the smell of ether. However, company members explained that the space no longer had the smell of ether; it was the spectators’ associations with hospitals combined with performance that made them sensorially experience the memory of a smell as real. The company members’ use of the image of contamination to describe a particular kind of relationship between the internal space of the actors’ and spectators’ bodies and the external space surrounding them fascinates me. It emphasizes the porousness of the border between these two areas and stresses the dynamic exchange between interior and exterior of the body in Vertigem’s work.

In January 2009, led by a coalition of trade unions and community groups, a Lyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (Alliance Against Profiteering) began a general strike in Guadeloupe. Over 44 days they convened large community demonstrations, shut down schools and businesses, and brought activities on the island to a near halt. They were protesting la vie chère, or the high cost of goods and services that make life in Guadeloupe, a non-independent island of the French Caribbean, increasingly difficult for ordinarily people. Martinique shares the same political status as Guadeloupe, and the bone that strikers had to pick with the French state (and equally important, for Martinicans, with the white minority béké class that continues to control most of the commerce on their island) was shared by Martinican citizens. On 5 February that island, too, went on strike. Over 38 days cars were burned, businesses shuttered, and mobilized groups (both organized and not) clashed with the police in downtown Fort de France.

The unrest that rocked this island all of those months ago has left its traces both on the landscape and in the narratives that people tell me now, in the lull of this place’s summer quiet. In the streets of the city signs of political mobilization are everywhere visible: graffiti on the side of French mega-department store Galéries Lafayette calls for jistis kolonial (colonial justice); there are burn marks in the roads- traces of February’s garbage cans, cars, and barricades in flames; some businesses never re-opened their doors after incurring the losses of that time, and their windows remain broken and boarded up. Everyone I talk to is eager to tell me about the grève (strike)- about what they did during that time, about the iconic events and their conflicting experiences of them. Even corporate marketing bears the traces- billboards for a local supermarket sport a new tag line: Solidaires, Contre la Vie Chère! (In solidarity, against the expensive life).

This post comes nearly two weeks after my return to the United States from Montevideo, Uruguay. As I could have predicted, my last couple weeks in Uruguay were conducted at a feverish pace as I struggled to fit last-minute interviews, museum and archive visits, events, and political marches into my last days in the field. I think my efforts paid off, and I’m happy to report that I was able to interview over forty subjects about the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law), each representing a wide range of political, ideological, and social perspectives on the law. Highlights of my last two weeks in Uruguay include interviews with the former president of Uruguay, Julio Maria Sanguinetti, presidential candidate Pedro Bordaberry, Senator Rafael Michelini, and other members of the Uruguayan government who were astonishingly easy to gain access to, despite my somewhat questionable status as a graduate student with no real press credentials (yet!). I was struck by the receptiveness of all my subjects, and could literally walk into Colorado Party headquarters off the street, ask for the phone numbers of the list of politicians I’d written down, and immediately receive a detailed list of work, home, and cell phone numbers. One party secretary scheduled an interview for me on the spot with the former Defense Minister, who received me in his home in Carrasco. While I’ve never enjoyed this level of access in the United States, it also created problems I hadn’t anticipated. Looking back, I regret not beginning the process sooner during my research – I may have been able to interview Tabaré Vazquez, the president of Uruguay and an important subject since he initially withheld his public support of the referendum on the Expiry Law and his party, the Frente Amplio, never attempted to repeal the law despite holding a majority of seats in Parliament. I’m sure it would be difficult to achieve the same level of access as in any other country as a student, but conducting interviews in Uruguay, “el país de las cercanías”, was an incredibly rewarding and fascinating experience.

Cheers from Brazil! Two weeks ago I arrived in São Paulo to collect the data for my research on police corruption at the Police Ombudsman Office (Ouvidoria). Though I’ve lived 8 years in this city prior moving to NYC, it feels that coming here after exactly 1 year away has a different “taste”: maybe my experiences in NYC have exacerbated my critical look towards the city.

This exercise of alteridade begun right before my plane landed: the Brazilian air plane company I was flying with screened a promotional video about Sao Paulo emphasizing it’s multiculturalism, it’s dynamism and it’s “inner character” for both entertainment and business. Images of “the city that can never stop” were edited in accordance to this idea of movement and velocity. For a moment, it felt like we had returned to JFK! I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the next couple of weeks – it seems that Sao Paulo sees (and sells) itself as a sort of Brazilian New York; actually, more specifically as Manhattan.

Uno de los objetivos de mi viaje era seguir el rastro de los archivos de los procesos judiciales de reforma agraria que se llevaron a cabo después de 1953 en los departamentos de Cochabamba y La Paz, pues para mi tesis estoy interesada en estudiar los procesos de afectación y redistribución de tierras después de la reforma.

Para La Paz
Sabia de antemano que esa información no estaba en el Archivo histórico del Departamento de La Paz y tampoco se encontraba en el Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria. Uno de los retos de este viaje era encontrar donde había quedado esa información.

Encontré que los juicios de afectación de haciendas estaban guardados en el Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) a nivel departamental. El INRA departamental no es propiamente un archivo histórico sino más bien un archivo judicial que esta en el centro de la ciudad y al que deben asistir alrededor de 100 personas en promedio cada día. Es una oficina con gran afluencia de abogados, miembros de las comunidades campesinas y comunidades indígenas, dirigentes de cooperativas demandando a los mas o menos 5 abogados, y alrededor de 10 o 15 auxiliares que ahí trabajan copias de algunos de los documentos que requieren para proseguir algún trámite judicial (tales como consolidación de su títulos de propiedad a nivel personal o comunal, etc). No hablamos pues de un espacio apto para historiadores sino para abogados donde los litigios, enojos y estreses están a la orden del día.

Cheers from Sao Paulo, again! Today is my last day here – and Friday was my last day at the Ouvidoria. Since I came to Brazil, I’ve been researching denunciations of police corruption at the Police Ombudsman. As it usually happens in every field work, I had some minor problems that, at the end, opened some other opportunities to develop my research.
I was supposed to collect around 800 cases at the Ouvidoria and I thought I would have time to do so. Yet, due some changes at the office – the nomination of a new Chief Ombudsman and consequently the beginning of some rearrangements there – I ended up “losing” one week because they didn’t have time enough to select/separate the cases I needed to copy. When they did so, I (re)started my work, but this time, instead of being alone in a room like in the first two weeks, I worked at the attendance room (where they receive, classify and refer all denunciations). In other words, the delay gave me the opportunity to observe a little more how the institution works – thus, even though my research isn’t about the institution itself, it definitely helps me contextualize and further understand the denunciations I’m working with. For instance, in a conversation with what one could define as the” non-official chief of the attendance”, he told me: “Ouvidoria is lap”, which means, it’s a place where people can talk and complain about any kind of police misconduct; where those who feel their rights have been violated will be heard with attention and respect – maybe it’s not for grant the fact that most of those who do this work are social assistants. Even if their work isn’t effective – in the sense that the denunciations should develop into fair investigations and, whenever the case, the punishment of those convicted – the very fact that citizens have this space where they have the freedom to talk, to expose their ideas and fight for their rights is in itself a major feature of what many thinkers call Democracy. Finally, maybe it’s not for granted as well the fact that many insane people (which are called “official nuts” because they’re always the same ones) constantly call and/or go to the Ouvidoria to denounce and complain about all sorts of conspiracies against them, which poses another interesting question: how one can really know what is hallucination and what is reality? Well, I guess this would be a beautiful theme for another study…

Greetings from São Paulo.
Since I arrived here I’ve been researching and gathering material on police violence and prison rebellions as part of a larger project on the shortcomings of the Brazilian democratic regime as it exists since 1985. More specifically, I’m interested in exploring a legacy of torture and violence in the State security apparatuses inherited from the country’s military dictatorships, and the silence around this issue in Brazilian literary and cinematic production. Ultimately, I’d like to examine this symptomatic evasion in literature and film, and its subsequent displacement onto themes of gang and prison violence.

Initially, my plan had been to focus my research in the archives at NEV (Núcleo de Estudos da Violência), an institute connected to the University of São Paulo (USP). Yet as soon as I arrived and began talking to researchers and scholars, I found out about a special seminar on the thirty years of amnesty in Brazil, organized by Janaína Teles and Márcio Seligmann-Silva, which was going to discuss the amnesty law created immediately following Brazil’s last military dictatorship.

The other day I was walking by the library at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and noticed a series of tall, skeletal-like trees next to me. They were “spent” magueys; once the plant reaches sexual maturity it sends up a flowering stalk about the height of a small tree and then withers. It made me think more concretely about the incredible time investment that people in the pulque industry made in these plants. It can take between eight and twenty-five years for one plant to reach maturity and, if you don’t “castrate” the plant in time, it’s impossible to harvest it for agua miel (the unfermented precursor of pulque).

Photo by Amy Lasater in 2009 while in Peru on a summer research grant

CLACS is excited to announce the recipients of this year's Tinker Field Research Awards and the CLACS Summer Research Grant Awards.

Pending funding, the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies offers an annual competition for Tinker field research and CLACS summer research grants. Graduate students in all NYU schools and programs may apply for assistance with summer research in Latin America and the Caribbean for periods ranging from two to twelve weeks. M.A. candidates may research master’s theses or Major Projects; Ph.D. students may carry out preliminary research for dissertations.

The following students come from a range of departments across NYU, and we are pleased to be able to support their research projects in the countries listed. You can find more information on the CLACS website. Please stay tuned to the CLACS blog, as summer research grant winners will be contributing stories from the field. Congratulations!

Tinker Summer Research Grant Recipients

CLACS Summer Grant Recipients

Jen Lewis
Assistant Director, CLACS

Hello!
I’ve been in Santiago, Chile a couple of days now, and I am feeling
pretty good about things. I absolutely adore the lovely elderly couple
I am renting a room from, and that has been quite the serendipitous
blessing. They have invited me to share in their family meals, and I
have loved getting to know them and their grown children, who come to
the house for lunch. Part of living where they live (a distance from
the centro) means that I will be using public transportation
constantly, and while Santiago seems to do quite well in this regard
relative to many other cities, it is still a bit daunting. Today I
took a colectivo (a small group taxi type deal that runs on a set
route, like a bus) downtown, and walked through the Mercado Central
and down to La Moneda presidential palace (where Allende died.) From
there the adventure to get home began, as no one had heard of the
street where my house is, and beyond the name of the neighborhood, the
cross streets and the fact that there was a “shopping” down the street
with many hair salons in it, I didn’t have a whole lot to offer.

I’ve been in the Dominican Republic for two weeks now. The initial days were saturated by a political fever of sorts: debates, campaigns, arguments, rallies, and constant commentary surrounding the upcoming congressional and municipal elections. It seemed to be all that anyone was talking about, and in the town of Cabarete, where I am living, the race for mayor was the hottest topic. The two major candidates were a man from the nearby town of Islabón (Wilson Zapete) and another who now lives in a huge home in one of the poor barrios (Gabriel “Canoa” Mora). Zapete was known as the candidate for change, presented as a man of the people, while Canoa had been involved in politics for years and was described by some as being trujillista. Rumors swirled that Canoa was illiterate and corrupt, while others questioned Zapete’s character and political savvy. Multiple sources reported that representatives of Canoa were paying people 2,000 pesos (about $66 U.S.) to vote for him, as well as buying cédulas (the national identification card needed to vote) from people who were likely to vote for Zapete. These practices, according to many people, are not at all unusual in the poor neighborhoods come election time. In fact, they are expected; one woman explained to me how some people regard the voting process: “Si no me pagan, no voto”.

Greetings from Guatemala!
I suppose I´ll give a brief overview of what my research is about/ how everything is going.
Microfinance organizations, when run well, are heralded as a large reason for reducing poverty. Yet, looming questions remain. How can microfinance blossom into increased economic production and growth? How can economic development turn from dependent to endogenous? Is microfinance the answer? Literature and research are not capable of answering such basic questions at the moment.

After very fruitful meetings with the main office in Guatemala city, the next order of business was to meet with the local agency head in Solola. Of course, when I arrived last Wednesday he had already left the office, I waited until 2:00 when he supposedly would return but was informed he wouldn’t be back until the next day. Finally, we met on Friday and established a basic agenda for the next few days. Monday I would buy my motorcycle helmet and jacket so I could ride with the loan assistants on site visits. Tuesday through Wednesday I would go on rides and visits to understand the how the groups worked, get a sense for the relationship between FONDESOL and its clients, and to gauge the logistics of it all.

I have been here for several weeks now, and research continues to deepen and shift as I go. My original project involved extensive ethnographic research at a number of memory sites in Santiago, Chile. Having now visited a number of former detention centers, including Villa Grimaldi, where many Chileans were detained, tortured, and killed -- and which, after having been razed by the military as an attempt to hide the evidence of gross human rights violations, has now been turned into a Parque de la Paz. I've also been to the Cementerio General, where Salvador Allende is buried, Pablo Neruda's home (generally understood to have been the second-most-important communist figure after Allende, his house was raided and ransacked almost immediately after the coup. He died literally days after Allende, of both cancer, and, it is said, a broken heart, for when Allende fell Neruda lost the will to live), and many other memory sites. What I have found, however, is that I am often the only person there, or one of a sprinkling of tourists. While that is significant in and of itself, I am also interested in speaking to people about memory, human rights, and progress. Because of this, I have sought out a number of interviews with a broad swath of people, ranging across profession, age, class, and political party. This has been without a doubt the most meaningful part of my trip so far, as people have not only been incredibly generous with the sharing of their very personal, often painful pasts, but it has also helped me to really understand the extremely divergent interpretations of what happened and why.

For my Master´s Project or thesis, I am researching questions relating to indigenous education under Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940) in Chiapas, Mexico. As part of my research, I am spending three weeks in Mexico City and two weeks in Chiapas. During my first week in Mexico City I worked in both the National Archives (AGN) and the UNAM´s newspaper and magazine archive. It was interesting to visit the AGN because it originally served as the Lecumberri from 1900 to 1976 and was the prison from which Adolfo Gilly wrote his book, La revolucion interrumpida. It is still possible to see remnants of the prison in the architecture of the building.

I´m currently in an indigenous village called Arimae in eastern Panama, in the Darien province, a little under 100 kilometers from Colombia, but separated from it by the Darien Gap. The village I´m in was founded by 28 indigenous Colombian immigrant families in about 1960, and has since then grow to house (I believe) around 200 people - some from Colombia, some from other small towns in Panama, but all are either Embera or Wounaan. Arimae is directly off the south side of the Interamericana, and if you stant on the highway facing the town, the right side of the ¨main¨ street of Arimae is Wounaan, and the left is predominantly Embera.

Hello from Lima, Peru! I’m here conducting spadework for my dissertation research, which will start in 2011 and will deal with Peruvian identity as it relates to the commercialization of native potatoes. When I tell people here what I’m doing, they generally have one of two reactions. One is immediate enthusiasm: “Oh, how wonderful! The potato is a really important topic here.” The other is a little more disarming: “Well, the potato is really important to Peru, but I don’t understand why you’re in Lima… We don’t know anything about the potato here.” Both reactions give me confidence that I’ve found an interesting anthropological topic, but since I imagine readers of this blog don’t necessarily fall into either camp I’ll explain a bit about where I think this project is going.

I am writing this blog from Huancayo, Peru, a city with 330,000 inhabitants, located only 280 km south east of Lima (though the drive takes nearly 8 hours). Nestled in the Andes, Huancayo sits at an altitude of approximately 3,300 meters and is the center of commerce for the Mantaro Valley, which is know for its fertile agricultural lands. The many villages throughout the valley are almost entirely dedicated to farming, with the exception of a few that have artisanal traditions. Everyday people travel to Huancayo to sell their harvest in the many markets that can be found in each district of the city.

Two weeks have passed since my last post, and politics are no longer dominating the landscapes—both conversational and physical (all campaign signs and posters have been taken down). Thus, I’ve been able to focus more on other issues related to my project. One aspect of my research involves examining the evidence of anti-Haitian sentiment (“antihaitianismo”) among members of this community. I have witnessed several scathing anti-Haitian diatribes, in addition to some comments made in passing about how Haitian immigrants are causing problems and exacerbating the poverty that already exists in the Dominican Republic. Many of the arguments I’ve heard against Haitian immigration are similar to those aired recently in the U.S., such as that Haitians are depriving Dominicans of jobs because they will work for lower wages. Also similar to the debates in the U.S., the majority of those who have expressed such anti-Haitian sentiment here have assured me that they are not racist—race, they claim, has nothing to do with it.

As an anthropologist, I came to Catalunya to research questions about multilingualism in public administration and in the legal system. However working with public and legal institutions in Barcelona, I found that I needed to rethink my conceptions of multilingualism and zones of language contact. The local government offices I have visited – the Oficina per la no Discriminació, Oficina d’Acollida, Oficina d’Atenció Ciutadana – are dedicated to combating discrimination, registering and providing orientation and information to citizens and new citizens. They are often covered, as in the photo above, with signs and posters in Catalan, but within the offices one may hear as much Spanish as Catalan. The majority of the consultations that take place in these offices are conducted in Spanish, and office staff are often fluent in French, English and other European languages. More frequently than individuals from North Africa, Chinese and Indian clients require interpretation services. These municipal offices share a small number of interpreters, and also use interpretation services provided by local agencies. While a large percentage (42%) of the complaints received by the Office for the Prevention of Discrimination (Oficina per la No Discriminació) and the Office of Welcome (Oficina d’Acollida) (40%) were brought by immigrants, only a minority required interpretation.

I just returned from spending two weeks in Chiapas and I am once again in Mexico City. One of the highlights of the past two weeks was visiting an alternative high school, Bachillerato Technico Bivalente “Bartolome de las Casas,” located in Guaquitepec, which is about 4 hours from San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
The high school was formed as part of a community initiative 15 years ago due to the lack of local schools. What makes this high school unique is that while it was organized as an autonomous community effort, the high school was able to gain recognition from the Secretariat of Public Education. The high school seeks to attract indigenous students from surrounding communities who wish to apply their high school training to life within their community, rather than leaving to find work in the city. Half of the school curriculum is based on hands-on training while the other half of the curriculum is theoretical. Their practical training takes place within a secluded farming area that has cultivable plots, an area for pigs and chickens, a baño seco or composting toilet, and a greenhouse.

Last week, while pouring over pages of a newspaper published in 1831 in the Brazilian National Library in downtown Rio de Janeiro, an inquisitive group of high school students who were taking a tour of the library peered over my shoulders and bombarded me with questions like “How old of this newspaper?” and “Where are you from?” But the hardest question to answer is what and why is exactly are you, an American, doing here. I was not able to give a clear response.

I’ve met with 25 different microfinance groups and have formally interviewed 15 clients. All my visits so far have been around Lake Atitlan and the surrounding areas in Sololá. The process has been more or less 4 phases; 1. observation, 2. trial interviews, 3. formal interviews, and 4. data analysis. I'm now in the 3rd, but I'm also doing some initial data analysis too. More or less I wake up around 6:30AM, grab a coffee and pastry at a local bakery, then head up to Sololá. Sometimes we leave as early as 7:30, other times I’m up at the office by 8:00. Most days we’ll just stay out in the field and have a delicious lunch of chips and soda until we get back to the office around 5:30 or 6:00. Then I head back to Panajachel on a 20 minute roller coaster-of-fun chicken bus ride blaring some variety of latin techno, slicing along mountain roads overlooking Lake Atitlan.

Over the past two weeks, I have been spending most of my time making contacts and talking with scholars here in Lima about the potato. It has been an immensely rewarding experience because it has helped me to think a lot about my project and what I want to do here when I come back, but it is during times like this that I am particularly reminded that I’m doing preliminary research and not my eventual full-fledged fieldwork. Most of what I have been doing here consists of setting up the framework for later, and I’m not sure it makes for the most compelling reading!

This morning I thoroughly cleaned the Casa Cultural in Arimae, the place I´m staying. I was in Panama City for the week (I only intended to be gone a couple of days, but was unfortunately held up at gunpoint and lost my passport and my debit card, among other things, so getting cash was a bit of a headache), and while I was gone the collection of fruit I´d bought had all gone totally rank, was breeding a lovely collection of insects, and was releasing a weird brown discharge. Additionally, all the bats living in my roof had deposited countless bowel movements all over my bed, books, and clothing. So after breakfast today, which was coffee, rice, and salted fish left over from dinner, I went on a rampage with my broom, after which I felt much better.

Before I share some more recent news from Barcelona, I want to follow up on a comment I made in my previous post, which questioned how the legacies of monolingual and monocultural Franco-era policies might continue to influence public administration. While the opinions of linguists, lawyers and friends in Barcelona about the relevance of this period of history on language attitudes today are diverse, this post describes images of long-standing traditions of local governance and attempts to revitalize these institutions in Catalunya.

Argentines are known, perhaps unfairly to their neighbors of the Southern Cone, for a tremendous fidelity to yerba mate. My main research interest concerns the role this drink and its traditional consumption plays in everyday sociability. This concerns not only the practical uses of the drink, but also the consciously presented image or, more specifically, the recognition of yerba mate as a part of authentic Argentine culture. And so, as with Guinness in Ireland or Champagne in France, it has become obligatory for travelers to experience the tradition at least once while visiting the country. However, unlike the previous examples, yerba mate is not a copyrighted brad name with distinct geographic origins. How then can one approach yerba mate, which is most definitely being presented as a unique commodity in Argentina, that relies almost entirely on its cultural representation?

In my first two weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I’ve overcome some technological challenges, battled with a nasty cold, and witnessed first-hand a festive street performance by the murga troupe Cachengue y Sudor. The video above focuses on dancing and is only an excerpt; other segments of the performance feature singing or a dialogue to critique a political/social issue in present-day Argentina. The murgueros (the people who “do” murga) literally occupied 3 lanes of a major avenue (Avenida San Juan) – although this area was blocked off legally (with the use of a permit), taxis and other vehicles expressed their protest through honking. This tension with passing traffic, plus the cold and foggy weather (not to mention that it was already 1am by this time), did not faze the murgueros or audience members – the atmosphere had a joyful energy which seemed almost infectious. All around me, people – predominantly ages 20-40 is my guess – were enthusiastically clapping, spontaneously dancing, socializing and smiling, eating empanadas and choripán, sharing beverages (ie. beer) and cigarettes, and well, smoking a lot. The murga performance took place right outside of a bar/restaurant which hosted several other musical acts earlier that night in the neighborhood of Boedo. The history of this neighborhood is tied to the tango and working-class communities, however today it is home to largely middle-class inhabitants.

Aside from continuing my research in the villages of the Mantaro Valley, the past weeks have been filled with a number of social obligations that have included two weddings (one Evangelical and the other Catholic), a funeral and a baptism. Weddings, regardless of the religion seem to be open to anyone and everyone who may wish to attend. People show up on a whim, often times simply for the food, skipping the ceremonies entirely. The same goes for the baptisms. Both the weddings I attended adhered to traditions from the department of Huancavelica, which is a neighbour of the department of Junin where the city of Huancayo is located. One of the major distinguishing factors of weddings from Huancavelica are that huge gifts of decorated whole cooked pigs, whole raw sheep, chicken, cuy and copious amounts of beer (in the catholic case not in the evangelical one) are given to the padrinos.

My research on yerba mate in Buenos Aires continues to take many interesting twists. Talking with people here in the city about the ways in which the drink and its tradition are marketed to tourists and foreigners has provided some great insight. Whenever mate and tourism come up in the same sentence, many immediately mention the yerba mate bars which opened up in the last several years. These are places, designed specifically for tourists, where people go to share a mate. Many tend to emphasize the fact that Uruguayans drink more than Argentines, a great example being how the world cup team brought 150 kg (330 lb) of crude yerba mate with them to South Africa. Some players were even shown before the game carrying their thermoses. I am not really sure if it is ideal to have mate when you are going to be running for 90+ minutes, but it seemed to work for them as they advanced all they way to the semifinals. Maybe if the Argentines had drank more mate before their game, along with playing defense, they would not have been totally humbled by Germany in their quaterfinals match.

The Mantaro Valley phase of my research is now over. Before heading off to Lima I took a short break and ran off to the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu for 6 days, which was a nice reprieve from the long days I have been working. The time I spent in the Mantaro Valley was very successful and I have managed to accumulate a lot of very useful information that paints a pretty clear picture of the Vaso de Leche as it is in its current form. I will go into some of the details of my findings in my final blog in two weeks. The direction that my writing will take is becoming clearer and is very different from what I anticipated I would write about before coming to Peru. I now have some very specific holes that I hope to fill in during my time in Lima. This home stretch will be more of a challenge since I have fewer contacts in Lima and in general, less experience in this massive city of 8 million. Ten days is not a lot of time to figure things out.

I have spent almost two weeks in Colombia. Although I have encountered some obstacles—my luggage did not arrive with me and there was an episode of food poisoning that took me out of business for a few days—, it has been a very fruitful trip. My purpose for the month and a half that I will spend doing research here is primarily to collect bibliography for my dissertation proposal. I have previous research experience in autobiography and in literature. This is the first time that I work on Colombia, my native country, and the first time that I work with a textual corpus that is not exclusively literary. I want to study autobiographical narratives related to the experience of violence in Colombia. I am planning to analyze some novels, but I also want to include some pieces of testimony. That is what I have been looking for here. I am consulting the catalog at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango (BLAA) for written testimonies, critical bibliography about the literary pieces I will study, and general studies about the phenomenon of violence in Colombia. There, I found some very interesting texts that I expect to use during the elaboration of my proposal and later in the dissertation itself. I have also contacted some organizations aimed to provide aid to the victims of the armed conflict and to promote justice. So far, this has been the hardest part of my research. Either because they do not deal with the collection of testimonial materials or, I guess, because of fear, victims’ organizations have been rather reluctant to cooperate.

It’s hard to be a Latin Americanist without a hyperawareness of the systematic gutting Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced at the hands of Europe, and later the United States. The region has endured inconceivable losses in natural resources, wealth, cultural autonomy, and most tragically, life. Through 500 years of colonization and imperialism, both in war time and in “peace,” there have been countless attempts on the part of the oppressed to fight for their liberation. These represent some of the most exciting moments in Latin American history, when ordinary people gain a sense of confidence in what they can accomplish by organizing and uniting in collective action.

I came to the Granada for the Festival Internacional de Música y Danza with an interest in the intersections of place, history and music in the region and in representations of the region – especially those presented by female singers and dancers who modeled myths of Southern Spain in popular urban entertainment for audiences across Europe and North America during the 19th and early 20th centuries. But I also came with the less grandiose short-term goal of doing preliminary historical and ethnographic research to prepare for my dissertation proposal. At just over three weeks duration, this trip is shorter than is ideal – especially given the task of beginning some painstaking archival work – but it has nonetheless been immensely fruitful and provocative thus far.

Everyday I ruffle plastic overalls over my jeans when whisperings of rain saturate our senses and afternoon water darkens the clouds. Our rides can be long, bumpy and wonderfully gritty; occasionally I daydream I’ve made it to the final tryout for an international development/microfinance biker gang. Granted, I’m not actually driving, I wear the cheapest and therefore least-macho rain suit available, and internally complain when my lower half goes numb after 30 minutes, but John Fogerty seems to continually rasp me into bigger and bigger ideas as I realize coach has essentially put me in and I’m ready to play.

Over the past two weeks, I have developed a better understanding of contemporary divisions among murga troupes in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires based on interviews and interactions with murgueros in Cachengue y Sudor. One major point of differentiation is whether troupes participate in the “official” Carnival sponsored by the Comisión de Carnaval (Carnival Committee) of the government of Buenos Aires or the “unofficial” Carnival organized by the Movimiento de Murgas Independientes (Movement of Independent Murgas). The Comisión de Carnaval was created in 1997 when the city government declared Carnival activities and associations as cultural patrimony and passed an ordinance which committed financial resources to support murga troupes and Carnival festivities. This significant step forward in reviving Carnival was spurred in large part due to the mobilization – including protest marches calling for the re-establishment of Carnival as an official holiday (which was eliminated by the military dictatorship of 1978-1983) – of both younger and older murgueros in Buenos Aires.

Hours within landing in Puerto Rico I get an email from one of my contacts saying there is a panel on Puerto Rican Muslims happening that night close to where my cousin goes to school. Shocked at my luck I quickly got ready and made my way over there and met both of the contacts I had made while still in the states my first day here. I came during an interesting time to the island: the University of Puerto Rico student strike has affected many, even preventing high school students from completing this year due to their schools' affiliation with the University. Also going on are the Central American and Caribbean Games this year located in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. It is interesting to see the combination of festivities and strikes.

I have spent four weeks in Colombia, and my work is going well. I have collected some bibliography that I hope will be very useful for my dissertation proposal. It includes some literary criticism about the authors I intend to study, about literature and violence in Colombia, and about the Colombian armed conflict. After months of making contact with the organizations that work with victims, I have finally had a breakthrough. I was allowed to search an archive from the Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación, containing interviews with war victims. I started today and I hope to find some interesting testimonies and to get a broader picture of what the commission is doing. I had an interview with Ayda Martínez, a journalist that works for the CNRR and is in charge of “La hora de las víctimas”, a radio program dedicated to the victims and the process of justice and redress. It was very interesting talking to her, because she has traveled throughout the country with the CNRR, interviewing victims, and she says that despite the concerns for their security many victims are actually willing to be recognized and made visible. They don’t want to remain anonymous, as one might expect. Ayda Martínez told me today about two CNRR projects for collecting testimonies in Barranquilla, on the Atlantic Coast, and Bucaramanga, in the north-eastern region of Colombia. In Barranquilla, written testimonies are being collected, while in Bucaramanga, there is an exhibit of letters addressed by victims to their missing loved ones. I’m planning to contact the CNRR in those cities and, if my schedule and my budget allow it, I would like to visit those archives.

Carlos Rojas, PhD Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese

After being in Colombia for two weeks and having some bad luck trying to find anything that resembles a bike race, I finally made it to local race on Sunday that ended in the town of La Union. The bike race, aptly named “The Second Annual, Let’s Eat Lunch in the Park”, ended in La Union’s main plaza with a sancocho lunch for 1,000 people. To be honest I’ve never seen a bike race quite like this one. It featured pro racers, men over the 60 and kids as young as 12 all racing on the same route. While there were different classifications for the riders, it was tough to tell who was who and who actually won what classification. Add to that the fact that roads the race was held on was open to traffic and things got a bit dicey.

Video clip #1

Video clip #2

During my last few weeks in Buenos Aires, I interacted with the murga troupe Cachengue y Sudor in various ways. I observed a rehearsal in Plaza 24 de Septiembre in Capital Federal (where the troupe has been rehearsing for almost 10 years), participated in several social gatherings at the homes of various murgueros, attended a party to raise funds for Cachengue y Sudor, sat in on a meeting of the Movimiento de Murgas Independientes (Movement of Independent Murgas), met with an Argentinian scholar who has studied murgas in Buenos Aires, and concluded my series of face-to-face interviews with murgueros in Cachengue y Sudor.

I’ve spent a month now in Cochabamba, doing what hundreds of others have done before me: asking questions about the Water War. I know some people are working from a script at this point, rattling off boilerplate answers when they hear key phrases. How could they not, it’s exhausting to discuss the same thing over and again.
And yet, most phone requests for interviews yield an immediate yes, and more often than not an interview the next day. People have been so incredibly generous since I arrived, with their time, their knowledge and have been beyond helpful in recommending other people I should speak with.

So meeting people here takes quite a bit of planning and working with their schedules. Unfortunately not everyone I need to speak with has weekly meetings I can conveniently attend. Basically a combination of calls, texts, emails and facebook messages have been utilized to try to organize individual get-togethers. I went to Loiza for the Santiago Festival on Saturday, which I heard would be the first day of the parade. As we were going around the town I realized nothing was happening so I asked a couple locals and a cop and they explained the first day of the parade was Monday and it would last until Wednesday. I go back to the car where a few friends were waiting for me and explained the lady at the travel office must have gotten the dates wrong. Anyway we decided to make the best of the situation and went to a store that sold vejigante masks which I soon realized was home to the Hermanos Ayala, a famous local bomba group. I found out they would be performing the next day at 4pm so we made plans to return.

Although El Salvador has thus far been less directly affected by mining projects than some neighboring countries in Central America, conflict over a proposed gold mine in El Salvador’s northern department of Cabañas has lately attracted international attention. In addition to widespread local resistance to mining in the region, environmental justice and human rights organizations have become increasing concerned with the ecological, social, and public health impacts of metallic mining projects on the country as a whole. Meanwhile, the government’s increasing antipathy toward the mining industry has resulted in two investor lawsuits by mining corporations (the Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining Corp. and a U.S. company by the name Commerce Group) against the Salvadoran state for a total of approximately $200 million, both of which cite the investment rules inscribed in the recently implemented Central American Free Trade Agreement.

About a month ago I had just finished bathing and was wearing nothing but a soggy sarong as I approached the casa cultural, and much to my surprise, five members of the US military were standing at the entrance. Turned out they wanted to pay a visit to the tienda upstairs, where the women sell handmade jewelry and ¨canastas¨ (woven baskets and plates), and the men sell animals carved from cocobolo, or rosewood. At any rate, as it turns out, the military is on some humanitarian mission based out of Metetí, a little ways east on the Interamericana. ¨Center Front¨ troupes of Panamanian police, who usually man the Colombian border in the Darien Gap, have been removed from their duties and assigned to the Americans, who are required to remain unarmed. As everything east of Agua Fria is technically considered a war zone, the Americans are supposed to have armed accompaniment at all times. So, apparently they wander form village to village, building clinics and schools, while Panamanian police with assault rifles look after them.

I have been in Caracas for a week now. I traveled with my two daughters last Sunday on July 11th, while following the final game of the FIFA World Cup on monitors located both at the Philadelphia and Miami International airports. My plan is to stay in Caracas until Thursday August the 12th, a week longer than what I had originally planned.
We are staying at my parent’s place located in the eastern part of the city in a neighborhood called “California Norte.” While Caracas is the city where I grew up, it is in constant change. The currency the “Bolívar-fuerte” for instances was devaluated after my last visit this past January, so I had to become familiar with the new exchange rate and values.

I have been in Cochabamba for just over 6 weeks now. There is a lot to recap, so I’ll try to be succinct. First, it has been difficult to be here doing two very time-consuming and mentally-challenging activities: taking an intensive Quechua course (every morning from 8-12:30) and conducting my master’s research on the National HIV/STI surveillance system for commercial sex workers. To just give a little background on my project, in Bolivia, sex work is regulated. I had read that it was legal, however after my research thus far, I have learned that it isn’t really legal or illegal, in fact there really isn’t anything about it in the penal code. What is true though is that it is regulated, and the police cannot arrest sex workers if they are registered. There are various mechanisms to regulate it; one is that the municipal governments process “locales” or brothels that have applied for registration. Apparently this process involves a lot of paperwork and probably quite a bit of money, so there are also “clandestine locales” which are not regulated officially and are subject to fines if they are discovered. The other aspect of the regulation is the HIV/STI surveillance system for sex workers. Basically this is an epidemiologic surveillance system run by the Ministry of Health. The workers who have chosen to register (there are also clandestine workers) must go for “control” where they receive various kinds of examinations, tests, and treatments (the kinds of examinations and tests, as well as the frequency with which they must go for control varies greatly and is affected by many factors).

The week of July 18th was a very busy one. Since I found out that the Archdiocese’s archive was about to close to move to another site in about ten days I decided to focus on their material which I had never explored before. Exploring this archive also gave me the opportunity to make a list of the type of index titles that could hold documents relevant to my research interests. This exploration expanded my understanding of the role the Catholic Church played during the colonial period. The Church in the Province of Caracas functioned not only as a mean to manage the spiritual development and the moral behavior of its parishioners, it also served as a secular court mediating payments dispute, and thefts. Not surprisingly, the ecclesiastical courts also served enslaved people’s claim for freedom. During this week I was able to take digital photos of several of these cases that took place at the Province of Caracas from 1780 to 1790. I will have to return to this archive to continue collecting more cases and exploring other types of documents that contains Afro-descendants’ claims of honor.

With my time in Argentina coming to an end, I decided to make a trip to the city of Posadas. Located about 13 hours to the northwest of Buenos Aires in the province of Misiones, Posadas may be considered the center of yerba mate production. In Argentina, yerba mate is only grown in a small portion of the country including the north of Corrientes province and Misiones. Thus Posadas, as the provincial capital of Misiones, depends in a large way on the success of the yerba industry as it is heavily involved in the commercial side of production. The National Institute of Yerba Mate (INYM) and the tourist organization Ruta de la Yerba Mate are both located here along with the headquarters of all the major producers and smaller collectives. Interestingly, the yerba producing group Amanda is all over the place, sponsoring several of the major bus lines and even has a prominent running advertisement in the main international airport. This company’s financial power and stake in the economic success of yerba should not be underestimated.

My research period in Colombia is soon coming to an end, and I still want to do so many things here. I have finished searching the catalog at the library, and I found several texts that might be helpful for my project. That part of my work has gone as planned and has been relatively uneventful. My work with organizations has proved more exciting, but also more difficult and some times frustrating. In my last entry I commented about two CNRR projects with testimonies from victims of the conflict that I found out about: One was a collection of letters addressed by the victims to their missing loved ones. I have had access to some of them and I think they are very interesting for the kind of analysis that I want to do. It has been hard to read those texts, because they are so full of pain and unresolved grief. There is a mother who tells her murdered son that she keeps the bullets that took his life. There is a woman that calls her love, who has being missing for several years, and tells him that she still dreams with him every night but he never speaks to her, and it is probably a sign of his death.

In my first blog I talked about the history of the Vaso de Leche program and the original intention that each child in Peru under the age of six have the right to one glass of milk a day. Since the inception of the program things have changed dramatically. One of the biggest things that I discovered through my research is that the women who participate in the program have to deal with numerous conditions and obligations in order to receive a meager ration of 4 cans of milk a month. A ration of this amount lasts less than a week and is a far cry from one glass of milk per day.

So I’ve been on the road for 11 days now, covering the Vuelta a Colombia for CyclingNews.com and I’ve seen a lot of Colombia. I’ve gone from the highs to the lows literally (3200 meters above sea level to 180 meters above sea level) and figuratively (along the route I’ve seen scenes of abject poverty and gross wealth within walking distance of each other). It has been hectic, frustrating, exciting, fun and an experience I wouldn’t trade for the world.

NOTE: Photograph that appears in the snapshot is by Hector López. “Catedral de Santiago: Homenaje a los Detenidos Desaparecidos.”

I came to Chile this summer to complete ethnographic research on the role that the photographic image plays in present day Chilean memory debates. More specifically, I came to Santiago to observe and document the many way in which Chile’s newly opened Memory & Human Rights Museum employs photographs – be it as a visual support, a didactic tool, or an archival document – to narrate and give voice to the country’s still recent and contentious violent past. The Museum itself aims to create a space, in which the human rights violations falling between the golpe de estado on September 11, 1973 and the return of democracy in 1989, can be carefully documented and displayed so that the national public can learn about a past that is often times forgotten as the country’s history moves forward. The opening of this institution is culturally, politically, and historically important as it marks the creation of the first national museum space dedicated to the dictatorship period. Of similar significance is the fact that the Museum’s initial inauguration happened only days before the right-leaning candidate, Sebastián Piñera won the presidential election. With the left-leaning political alliance, the Concertación, having governed the country since the 1989 democratic transition, the election of Piñera marks the first democratic election of a right-leaning candidate in post-dictatorship Chile. As a result, the election of Piñera has pushed memory debates back into the limelight of national disputes over not only how the past should be remembered, but also regarding how human rights should be protected.

During the last two weeks of my time in Santiago, my research on Chile’s Memory and Human Rights Museum has covered some exciting, new ground. Interviews with key Museum players – specifically those who have participated in the collection of Museum objects and images – have uncovered a new layer of political complexity, while informal meetings with local researchers has introduced me to a still-emerging set of public debates regarding both the functioning of this institution and its political significance in post-dictatorship Chile.