On Christmas Day 1521, in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, the first recorded slave revolt in the Americas occurred. A group of African, likely Wolof, slaves came together with native Indians led by the Taino cacique Enriquillo to assert their independence. Beyond being the first slave revolt in the Americas, it was also one of the most important moments in Colonial American history because it was the first known instance when Africans and Indians united against their Spanish overlords in the Americas.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
45 p., Presents some of the key law enforcement and socioeconomic policy lessons from one type of response to urban slums controlled by non-state actors: namely, when the government resorts to physically retaking urban spaces that had been ruled by criminal or insurgent groups and where the state's presence had been inadequate or sometimes altogether nonexistent. Focuses specifically on Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Jamaica.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
213 p., A ollection of stories about the lives of 10 remarkable people in the region. From Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia and the Dominican Republic to Columbia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico, readers will come to know individuals whose lives reflect the history and immense changes underway in these countries.
83 p., Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become the main social assistance interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), reaching 129 million individuals in 18 countries in 2010. Programs shared key characteristics such as the payment of cash grants and the incorporation of co-responsibilities, but varied greatly in terms of coverage, infrastructure, routines, and even objectives. In this study, we analyze the experience of six countries (Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico and Peru) and attempt to identify important lessons for countries that have recently started or that are currently considering the introduction of a CCT.
667 p., The author locates New Orleans as a cultural and cartographic heart linking the Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America into what she calls Américas du Golfe. The author traces flows of cultures and citizens(hips) through New Orleans and across national borders: physically, culturally, economically, visually, linguistically, and musically, challenging traditional nation-based scholarly frameworks, and reorienting New Orleans as a Gulf, rather than American, city.
Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
4 p., The growing violence and instability in Mexico and the Caribbean will clearly demand greater attention from the United States in the future. This conference, held at the University of Pittsburgh campus on October 28-30, 2009 offered an important opportunity to assess these threats, and to consider what can be done to counter them. Includes chapter "Perspectives on the Caribbean."
Includes discussion of the beneficial impact on host countries in terms of employment creation, contribution to export earnings, and economic diversification.
Washington, DC; Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
430 p., Assesses the consequences of civil war for democratization in Latin America, focusing on questions of state capacity. Contributors focus on seven countries: Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru where state weakness fostered conflict and the task of state reconstruction presents multiple challenges. Includes Johanna Mendelson Forman's "An illusory peace: the United Nations and state building in Haiti."
What even serious individuals must note is that 40 or 50 years ago, the kind of jobs that illegal immigrants migrate towards today are the same positions that African Americans were relegated to. How else can we explain highly educated African Americans, even some with Ph.D's, being forced to work at the post office or as a hotel waiter. The barriers for African Americans were Jim Crow; for Hispanics or Latinos fleeing Mexico, El Salvador, Guatamala or other South American countries, it is the wretched poverty in those countries. For them, such jobs are a "step up" from what they had to accept in their country.
