Wall Street Over Haiti

 In The Ransom, NYT outlines nearly two centuries of interventions by France and the United States that -- combined with the collusion of internal elites -- have perpetuated debt and disarray in Haiti. Even coffee is implicated.

US Military in Haiti, 1920 Image: NYT

Monterrey COIL Project: Livable Cities

This post is a bit longer than usual because I am both describing a recent teaching collaboration and including the thoughtful work that our students produced. Because the post is rather long, I am going to open with the conclusions -- what some might call the take-away findings.

Introduction and Conclusions

This post elaborates on a presentation my geography colleague Dr. Boah Kim and I presented at the BSU-CARS Symposium in May 2022. We were among faculty members from several departments who were describing our recent experiences in several parts of the world with Collaborative Online International Learning, or COIL. Specifically, we reported on our COIL experience with colleagues at TEC-Monterrey in Mexico.

My conclusions:

• COIL is a valid and valuable international experience, both for those who have additional international opportunities and for those who may lack access to -- or even interest in -- conventional international experiences.
• Small is beautiful: a short-term assignment of limited scope can produce very positive results.
• Experience helps: partners with previous COIL experience helped this project to succeed, even though we had not worked together previously.
• Language: the high level of English proficiency among the students in our partner institution was essential to the success of the project.
• Collaborating with students in another country helped local students to deepen their curiosity about and understanding of Gateway Cities in Massachusetts.

Background

I had no international academic experiences until the summer after I completed my master's degree, but providing international experiences for undergraduates later became a big part of my career. I have led or co-led short-term programs in Nicaragua, Cape Verde, Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil. I also helped to establish a program of long-term exchanges in Brazil that provided semester-long international experiences for more than a dozen students. 

These have been important, life-changing experiences for the students involved and for me as a professor. They often have ripple effects on other students and on the family members of the students who participate. 

Despite our best efforts, however, only a tiny percentage of the students I teach have had experiences of this kind. And because of an extended global pandemic, I am on an involuntary hiatus from such experiences myself. I am grateful that I traveled with students in January 2020, but it will be at least May 2023 before I do so again! 

Enter COIL -- Collaborative Online International Learning, a concept well described by its name and more fully elaborated on the website of SUNY COIL, one of the institutional leaders in this kind of programming. I was intrigued by this concept when I learned of it from some of our campus leaders in international programs in the depths of the pandemic. I explored the COIL concept with colleagues with whom I had developed some of the successful programs described above, but we did not find a way to make it work. 

In early 2022, I received a more specific invitation: to develop a COIL project with potential partners at TEC-Monterrey, a private university in northern Mexico with deep experience in the approach. We soon formed a team involving two TEC faculty in a planning/architecture program and two BSU geography professors.

We situated the collaboration in my upper-level course Latin America: Globalization & Cohesion. The course was well underway when we began planning, so I had to adjust my syllabus and assignments considerably to make the COIL possible. I decided that the only way to make the experience worthwhile -- especially as it came near the end of an exhausting academic year -- was to give the project plenty of space to succeed. By this I mean that I decided to devote class time to it and to reduce other planned assignments. 

The TEC professors had previous experience with these international collaborations and they had administrative support that was very helpful in structuring the project we did together. The project structure had several key components:

• Synchronous meetings that would include faculty input and also small-group break-out rooms for the students.
• Structured "ice breaker" activities -- low-stakes but relevant questions that required students to start talking and writing together during the first meeting.
• Asynchronous collaborations in the same small groups, working for a week or two on more focused questions and with the goal of combined work products.

The course in which this work was situated is a broad survey course; a collaboration on environmental, cultural, or political geography would have been viable. But since the focus of my collaborators and of the TEC-Monterrey students is urban studies, we made that the focus of our projects. Specifically, Dr. Kim introduced the use of the SWOT (Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat) concept to analyzing urban places and planning. Fortunately, three of my students were in her urban planning class, and a fourth member of that class was able to join our collaboration.

We formed three student groups of equal size, with equal numbers of Monterrey and Bridgewater students in each. All of the Monterrey students applied SWOT analysis to an area of Monterrey itself. The Bridgewater students did the same with three different nearby urban places: the Gateway Cities of Lowell and Brockton and the similarly-situated Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. The level of familiarity with these places varied considerably, so there was a lot of learning required about places close to home. This was fitting, though: in all of the international programs I have led, people learned something about their homes.

The students spent about two weeks applying SWOT to two aspects of these places: mobility and demographic makeup. 

Student Work

After comparing mobility in their communities through a SWOT lens, each group created an infographic to summarize those comparisons. Each group developed its own format, as seen below. Each infographic is a bit too big for this blog screen; please click each to enlarge or open in a separate tab to enable zooming or printing..

After comparing the demographies in their chosen communities through a SWOT lens, each group created an infographic to summarize those comparisons, as they had done with mobility. These discussions were a bit deeperEach group developed its own format, as seen below. Each of these infographics is a too wide for this blog screen, so as with those above, please click each to enlarge or open in a separate tab to enable zooming or printing..

Reflection

Formal COIL exchanges involve require all students to participate in two activities that bookend the experience. The first is a structured ice breaker and the last is a reflection that is shared with all participants. The reflection posted by BSU student Felicia Prata represents what many of the students wrote:

I thought this was an absolutely incredible experience that was unlike anything I have ever experienced. I learned a whole lot about the country of Mexico and the town of Monterrey, as well as the students, their academic experience in Mexico, and their cultural problems.

It helped me not only learn a lot about them as students and the area in which they live, but also taught me a lot about myself, and the differences we have in our everyday American culture. I would definitely like to do this with my students when I am a teacher as well.

Iturbide and Kahlo

While contemplating a good way to wrap up my course on the geography of Latin America, I was fortunate enough to hear this bit of radio journalism.

I thought I recognized the photographer's name and I was even more certain that I recognized her focus on indigenous people as her favored subjects at a certain point in her career.

Indeed, this was the photographer I was thinking of, and I had posted an article about the work of Graciela Iturbide in this space early in 2019. I wrote Mexico Contrasts, In Black & White based on a NYT article before I even went to her exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (Search the MFA site for her name to see a lot of related stories.)

It was also in early 2019 that I learned of a Frida Kahlo exhibit that was coming to MFA in the same season and some new scholarship around her life and work. I wrote about this at the time in Frida La Pared.

I did not write much about the exhibit itself, but at the time I did post this sign that I had found just outside the gallery.

I have seen a lot of bilingual signage in museums, but I do not think I have ever seen a bilingual sign about bilingual signs. Attention was being called to their use because they were the first such signs used in MFA since it opened in 1876. A Juneteenth 2019 story on WGBH reminds me that this was during a time of controversy and introspection about race and access in the museum. 

Iturbide's Casa de la Muerte (1975) captures Mexican motifs of the dead.

Lagniappe

Those reading this post now (April 26, 2022) might have an opportunity to visit the Immersive Frida exhibit in Boston or in another city.

Crossing the Chaco

The Amazon rainforest is the largest ecosystem in South America; it is the one that drew me into the study of geography. I know quite a lot about it, though I still have plenty to learn. 

Three-banded armadillo is one of 150 mammal species
in the Gran Chaco. Image: WWF

I know very little, however, about the second-largest ecosystem of South America: the Gran Chaco of Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia. It is also second in biodiversity, with over 500 species of birds alone. 

Map: Wikipedia. Chaqu is a Quechua word meaning 
"hunting land" and hinting at the region's diverse fauna.

I have even more to learn about it, especially as both the land and the people of the Gran Chaco are threatened by rapid changes related to the opening of a bioceanic transportation corridor. The Amazon experience is, sadly, instructive -- rapid expansion of roads is bringing all manner of peril. In both cases, heretofore uncontacted civilizations are at greatest risk. 

Detail from an interactive map at Corredor Bioceanico, a website promoting the project.
The Gran Chaco is being traversed by road, rail, and river. 

 

Break It All

My initial interest in Latin America was the problem of deforestation in the Amazon. I lived in Mexico and in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for a number of years before living in Rondônia for three months for my dissertation research in 1996. Thanks to people I met during that stay, I started to learn something about the music of Latin America. 

I took more interest in the music around me during our last year living in southmost Texas, and I started to do a bit of research on the cultural geography of the music of the entire region. A decade later, I did a small tour of Massachusetts college campuses, discussing the topic as a MaCIE Lecturer -- complete with a wheeled suitcase full of CDs so I could play examples for my audiences.

The eclectic music I have found -- much of which I have also played for a lot of my classes -- has included rock music, and some of that rock has exhibited interesting connections with traditional musical forms. So I was excited to learn that the growing catalog of original international programming from Netflix would include a six-part series on Latin rock. 

My favorite librarian (and fellow Latin Americanist) and I have now watched the first and second episodes, and almost everything we have seen and heard is new to us. In other words, the world of Latin rock music is much bigger than we realized, and the coverage of Break It All: The History of Rock in Latin America is thorough.

The second installment -- "La Represión -- is particularly poignant, as it focuses on a period in which young musicians and their fans found themselves at odds with increasingly repressive governments, most of which were closely allied with -- or even installed by -- the United States. Weaving together archival video from the first half of the 1970s and interviews with many of the musicians themselves, we learn about varying degrees of repression in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina.

Young voters and rock music were part of Salvador Allende's political success,
and he recognized their importance. He is shown here praising Victor Jara,
a musician whose assassination followed his own by just a few days.

One chilling detail is the bonfire in which Chilean soldiers burned rock music albums during the 1973 U.S.-backed coup. It reminds me of the glee with which religious extremists in the United States were destroying albums just a few years later. I witness the breaking-not-burning version at indoor rallies of Kansas City Youth for Christ. I was never tempted to go that far in my "devotion" but nor did I understand the real implications of such frenzy until reading F451 years later. It was also at KC-YFC that I first heard the name of Guatemala's dictator Ríos Montt -- whose religiosity was admired by the group.

Allende's attitude toward youth and music was in sharp contrast to those of the dictators who followed him in Chile and elsewhere. In Argentina, for example, Jorge Alberto Fraga was both a military dictator and the secretary of social welfare. When asked for his opinion of the origin of drug addiction, he did not hesitate to equate social pathologies with the very act of thinking. More work and less studying were needed, in a view echoed by anti-intellectuals to this day.

Lagniappe: Brazil

So far, the series makes very little mention of Brazil, perhaps because the producers speak Spanish but not Portuguese (I'm speculating). This episode brings to mind three Brazilian artists -- two musicians and one visual artist -- whose stories I do know and share with my students. One of them is Chico Buarque de Holanda, whose ongoing performance of the song "Calice" was a remarkably brave act of defiance during that country's dictatorship. 

Another is Sergio Mendes, who spent much of his career in the United States after being forced to flee. When he eventually went home, he named his next album simply Brasileiro, meaning Brazilian. The Grammy-winning album bursts open with 100 samba drums recorded in Rio -- where these things are decided -- and continues as a musical declaration of this refugee's right to return.

The final example is an artist I met personally -- and whose work is on the wall in front of me as I type this: Anká. My encounter with him and his art is described in the third entry of my Folha da Fronteira newsletter, written just after I visited his Amazon hermitage in 1996. I explain that he would not tell me his full name nor the place of his birth -- and I thought he was kidding when he said that these were "details for the police." It was almost 20 years later that I realized he was not kidding at all, and that it was no coincidence that a Brazilian man of a certain age without a phone, a legal name, or even a street address would also be an artist. 

Cien Años

 My favorite librarian has her first master's degree in Spanish literature, so she has read Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel Garcia Márquez more than once. I have always been vaguely aware of it, but it was not until I heard this discussion of the work on the BBC Forum that I was motivated to read it soon, rather than eventually.

Image: Detail of mural by Oscar Gonzalez & Andrew Pisacane
Raul Arboleda via Getty & BBC

While we were listening to the discussion, Pamela ordered the Audible version of the Rabassa translation for us to read together (she knows my Spanish level). I will be updating this post when we have finished, and may be assigning this to geography students in the near future. I will at least be assigning this conversation, as the scholars explain so much about the human geography of the entire Latin American realm in just 39 minutes.

The seven-generation family saga that some of these scholars consider a veritable bible of Latin America takes place in the fictional coastal village of Macondo. As they detail in their discussion, it is based very directly on the arrival of modernity in the author's real home village of Aracataca -- which is much more fun to pronounce.

Because BBC often sunsets its digital content, I have downloaded this discussion for use in my class, and I am copying its description below, because it includes the names of all the speakers. 

Released On: 15 Apr 2021

Considered to be one of literature’s supreme achievements, One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez is reported to be the most popular work of Spanish-language fiction since Don Quixote in the 17th century. Written in 1967, it tells the story of seven generations of the Buendía family, whose patriarch is the founder of a fictional Colombian village called Macondo. But why is it said this novel – which fuses the fantastical and the real – tells the story of Latin America and has given an entire continent its voice?

Joining Bridget Kendall are Ilan Stavans, Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, in the United States, and the biographer of Gabriel García Márquez; María del Pilar Blanco, Associate Professor in Spanish American literature at Oxford University, and Parvati Nair, Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

Produced: Anne Khazam

Mexico Contrasts, In Black & White

“Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, México (Angel Woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico),”
1979. Graciela Iturbide / Museum of Fine Arts, Boston & New York Times

In her recent article Graciela Iturbide's Photos of Mexico Make 'Visible What, To Many, Is Invisible' is an treasure in the form of a very unusual photo essay. All of the images are by a renowned photographer who continues to interpret her cultural landscape five decades after taking up her profession. All of the text is by Evelyn Nieves, a journalist who clearly delights in introducing Iturbide's work to (mostly) new viewers.

That work informs viewers of a rich tapestry of unexpected contrasts captured in many places throughout Mexico. Those of us in the Boston area are -- for now -- very fortunate that we can begin our exploration in this Times article and continue it in an exhibition of Iturbide's work at the Museum of Fine Arts this January 19 to May 12. Some of the work -- including the arresting image of a prosthetic leg and boot -- will be part of a separate exhibition of works about the great artist Frida Kahlo, February 27 to June 16. I will be visiting some time in the overlap between the two.

Lagniappe

I look forward to exploring more work under the byline of Evelyn Nieves, much of which celebrates the work of photographers.

Hothouse Earth

Hearing this interview on my local NPR station today reminded me of The One Who Got Away ... the academic version.

When I was at University of Arizona during the early days of climate-change, Dr. Diana Liverman was a guest speaker a few times. I also met her -- and more importantly her graduate students -- at conferences. I almost transferred to Penn State, where she was on the faculty, even though PhD students do not really do that.

It did not work out, and she ended up coming to Arizona, too late for me to have a decent advisor, though I eventually wiggled my way through.

Hearing her cogent discussion on the radio took me way back, but I have no regrets -- I love what I do now and work with her would have kept me in the R-1 orbit.

Like many geographers, she is deeply worried but not yet resigned -- we could not continue to teach if we did not retain at least some hope. And like many geographers, her work is deeply interdisciplinary. The interview draws on a recent report -- Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene -- that she published with a global team of scientists from many disciplines.
I will be sharing this with many of my students, including those in my Environmental Regulations class this fall. In addition to her insights on the physical science, she mentions something that I will be stressing all semester: the U.S. Federal government is an important environmental actor, but it is not the only one. While it is abdicating its environmental responsibilities, other nations and our own state and local governments -- as well as individuals and private corporations -- must and will fill the void.

Murder City

Photo: NPS

Ciudad Juarez was once one of my favorite places. Many years ago, I read Tom Miller's On the Border, about a journey in which he traversed every border crossing, from Tijuana to Matamoros, from Brownsville to San Diego. After years living in the Gasden Purchase section of Arizona -- where my wife Pamela actually got to work with Tom on one of his books --  and in the southmost tip of Texas, I realized that I had been through most of the border crossings. Los Ebanos with its hand-drawn ferry was a favorite, but so, too, was through the Chamizal Peace Park between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

Almost all of the cities on the Mexican side of the border are bigger than their U.S. counterparts, and Juarez is no exception. It is the largest border city in the world, with 2/3 of the population on the Chihuahua side. Despite its sprawling size, I enjoyed several visits in the 1990s, and walked around comfortably in the sunshine and even in the evenings. In those days, even the crossing back into the U.S. was simple and easy.

View Larger Map

In the 13 years since we left the borderlands, Juarez has become a tragic place -- one of the few I would rather not visit for a while. Jennifer Lopez has told the story -- at some risk to her own safety -- in Bordertown. I highly recommend both the fictionalized account (see trailer) and the DVD extra feature that explains how the film came to be made. The otherwise infamous narcocorrido singers Los Tigres del Norte told the story in the CD Pacto de Sangre. Both of these refer to the hundreds of young women who have been kidnapped, raped, killed, and left in the deserts surrounding Juarez over the past decade or more. Many of them have been attracted to the area for maquila manufacturing jobs, working long hours for low pay in factories that do not provide them adequate protection. It is thought that a conspiracy among very elite men is responsible for the failure to solve these crimes -- about two thousand women who have disappeared. The image at left is from a blog post called ¡Feminicidios sin resolver! -- one of many that expresses outrage and sorrow about the loss of innocent young lives in this once beautiful city. This particular image is remarkable for the way it integrates motifs representing femininity and veneration of the dead at one level, along with representations of crime scenes and of the border itself. The accompanying narrative is focused on the fact that many of the victims were killed going home from jobs that they were far too young to hold legally.

Pam reminded me that the first time we heard about the Juarez killings was through a performance of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues (an important program that is put on each February at BSU). Each year, the VDAY show focuses on a cause, and in 2004 the women of Juarez were that focus. One of the monologues, The Memory of Her Face, honors women victims of violence in Islamabad, Baghdad, and Ciudad Juarez, with a stanza of the reading representing a woman in each of these cities in which violence against women has become a consequence of wars -- declared and undeclared. Read more about the Women in Juarez Spotlight and about the 5,000 shows performed in Mexico City in support of Juarez women (second item on this news page).

In the past couple of years, this already tragic and violent story has gotten much worse -- probably ten times worse. The murder rate in Mexico as a whole remains relatively low, in part because firearms are very difficult to procure. But the murder rate in Ciudad Juarez has become much higher, as it has in other border towns. The reason: the Sinaloa drug cartel, which formerly operated with impunity throughout the northwest of the country, is in a battle over territory with a group called the Zetas in the northeast. I met a few of the Zetas during an inspection stop near Monterrey in the 1990s, when they were legitimate narcotics police. They eventually cooperated with the Gulf Cartel, and still later took it over. Now shootouts are so common in Matamoros, across the river from my former job at UT-Brownsville/Texas Southmost College that the campus has actually been hit by stray bullets.

Borderland journalist Charles Bowden describes the killing in Juarez in his book Murder City, which is at the same time compelling and unbearable. He explores the dynamics I outline above, but goes beyond this to put the brutality in the context of even larger forces related to economic exploitation. He discusses his claims -- and explains why he keeps going back to Juarez -- in an interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly that was recorded after three people affiliated with the U.S. consulate were killed last April.

View full gallery at
MexConnect

I argue, with Bowden, that  is not possible to understand violence on the border without acknowledging the transformation of the border itself from an edge situated within a bicultural zone of transition to an increasingly impersonal sieve that separates humans from their labor. It is also not possible, however, to understand death along the border without understanding the distinctive attitude toward death in Mexico, as exemplified by the Dia de los Muertos. November 1 is a colorful holiday -- as suggested below -- in which the dead are honored, celebrated, visited, and consulted.

As reported last spring in a fascinating article in National Geographic, the increasing brutality of the drug war has created a class of wealthy and youthful criminal class who are full of both bravado and fear and at the same time increasingly status-conscious. In this context, graves -- while always important -- have become sites of obsessive competition among traffickers. The focus of the article -- Troubled Spirits -- is on the veneration of Santa Muerte, literally Saint Death. Even in the panoply of images that embrace the figure of the skull, the imagery of Santa Muerte is remarkably chilling. Whether standing in a gown in a tiny living room or being carried on the shoulders of mourners at a gangster funeral, figures of Santa Muerte are arresting. Although not sanctioned by the Catholic Church, Santa Muerte is an increasingly important object of adoration and supplication, as traffickers seek both protection and riches through her. And although many assume Santa Muerte to be a very recent phenomenon, at least one Hoodoo practitioner claims several generations of veneration of Santa Muerte.

See the amazing, complete photo gallery at NGS Magazine

Lagniappe

In a late 2023 post, I cite New York Times reporting from our part of the borderlands in Texas, which highlights traditional, non-criminal associations with Santa Muerte.