Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) Seminar Series.

For generations, the Afro-Caribbean islanders from the Archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia had regularly migrated to and from Central America and other islands in the Caribbean Sea. By the middle of the twentieth century, waves of migrants from mostly new locales in mainland Colombia and even as far as the Middle East transformed the tiny Colombian-administered islands' economy, society, and culture. Drawn to newfound opportunities due to the opening of the free port and promotion of tourism in San Andrés, these international and national migrants served as unintentional yet willing partners to state efforts to integrate the islands administratively, economically, and socially within Colombia. Drawing on ethnographic studies from the period, Colombian newspaper articles, and oral histories available in the collections at the Banco de la República Casa Cultura in San Andres Island, I trace how the rise of new aviation technologies and the creation of the free port facilitated an uneven integration of the island into the Colombian nation. While the free port strengthened administrative ties and contact between mainland Colombians and islanders, it failed to integrate the majority of native islanders who retained an oppositional stance against Colombian authorities and national projects. Unlike other studies on this topic, this paper gives equal attention to the experiences of migrants and native islanders.

Dr. Sharika Crawford is the inaugural Speedwell Professor of International Studies and Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Her primary research focuses on modern Latin America, specifically, Colombia and the interstitial places in the circum-Caribbean. In 2021, the Association of Caribbean Historians commended her first monograph The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making, published by the University of North Carolina Press, an Honorable Mention from its Elsa Goveia Prize in the Caribbean History. Additionally, she has published articles and essays in the Global South, Historia Crítica, International Journal of Maritime History, Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research Review, and the New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids. Some of her current projects include a co-edited volume titled Understanding and Teaching Modern Latin American History, which is under contract with the Harvey Goldberg Series at the University of Wisconsin Press, and a second monograph-in-progress examining the social, political, and environmental histories of twentieth-century the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia.

"iSpraak: A Platform for Second Language Pronunciation Instruction, Assessment, and Research"
Dan Nickolai
Associate Professor of French and Director of the Language Resource Center, Saint Louis University

This presentation will showcase the latest feature developments to the iSpraak platform. This free online tool incorporates multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech technologies to both model and assess pronunciation in 36 different languages. Now generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, iSpraak has significantly expanded on its previous feature set and has adopted new tools for learners, teachers, and researchers.

Bio: Dr. Dan Nickolai is an Associate Professor of French and the Director of the Language Resource Center at Saint Louis University. He has a professional and educational background in the fields of Computer Science, French, and Second Language Acquisition. His current work focuses on developing web-based applications that support language learning, assessment, and research. In addition to his roles at Saint Louis University, Dr. Nickolai serves as the President of the International Association for Language Learning Technology.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) Seminar Series

Due to storm-related travel delays, Pablo Abufom’s talk has been rescheduled. It will now take place in conjunction with his previously scheduled talk at Autumn Leaves (115 E. State St.) at 6pm on Wednesday, February 14. (Previously, it had been scheduled to take place at 12:20 pm in Uris G08).

This talk will attempt to explain larger political and social phenomena on a global scale from the Latin American experience, considering there was a wave of revolts between 2018 and 2020, and then a deep dive into the rise of neofascism everywhere (Argentina is the most recent case), and how to find strategic lessons out of that situation and back to a new international antifascist movement.

Pablo Abufom is a philosopher, translator, director of Alternativa, Institute for Anticapitalist Studies and member of Movimiento Solidaridad, biology student and anarcho-communist in anarcho-capitalist times.

Talk by Kavita Panjabi (Former Professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata)

Turtuk is now an Indian village on the India-Pakistan border in the Karakoram mountains, in the contested zone of Baltistan. People in Turtuk who went to sleep in their homes in Pakistan on the 13th of December 1971, woke up on the 14th morning to find themselves in India. Unlike the people of the neighbouring village of Chalungka, who had fled en-masse further into Pakistan when the Indian army had arrived there a few days ago, the people of Turtuk had decided to stay with India. The Balti people of Turtuk, and its neighbouring villages Thang, Pachathang, and Tyakshi, were not compelled into any forced removal; they were subject to “in-situ displacements” (Feldman) in the conflict between Pakistan and India - staying within their homes, they had been displaced from one nation to another. Transitional spaces such as these that form the borderlands between nation-states are spaces of liminality, and the conditions inducing liminality in this region were severe. For the people of these villages, space had shrunk, and time stood still. Once situated at the crossroads of international trade and ideas on the silk route, they had become effectively sealed off from the rest of the world when the borders came up in 1948. Captive in the borderlands of Pakistan till 1971 and then in India, Turtuk finally opened to the rest of this country in 2010. For more than 60 years, the people here had found themselves in a literal “time capsule”, practically isolated within the borderlands of Pakistan and India. In this talk, Panjabi maps, through oral narratives of the Balti people of Turtuk, and the prism of their liminality, the cartographies of affective life pulsating beneath the officialese of borders. She tries to understand how the long duree of their liminality inflected their efforts both to preserve Balti culture across the borders of two nation-states and to safeguard their historical memory of an Asian internationalism. Thus, Panjabi hopes also to retrieve some of the strands of the politically shrouded webs of significance that once characterized the connectivities between Asian cultures.

Kavita Panjabi (Comparative Literature PhD '92) is a former Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, where she taught for 33 years. Over three decades of activism in the Southasian women’s movement, a passion for oral history, and a lively interest in cross-border people’s perspectives inform her book Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement and her Pakistan diary, Old Maps and New: Legacies of the Partition. She has also edited anthologies on Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia, and on Feminist Culture and politics, as well as two volumes on borders with Debra Castillo namely, Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas, and Centering Borders in Latin American and South Asian Contexts: Aesthetics and Politics of Cultural Production.

The Latina/o Studies Program Fridays with Faculty luncheon seminar offers an opportunity for Latina/o and non-Latina/o students of all levels and disciplines to meet faculty and administrators from across the university for informal conversation about their current research/work in progress. All are welcome!

Fridays at 12 noon.

February 2
Camille Suárez
Assistant Profesor
Department of History
College of Arts and Sciences

February 9
Fernando E. Villegas Rivera
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Government/Latina/o Studies

February 16
Alexandra Dufresne
Director
State Policy Advocacy Clinic
Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy

March 1 NOTE: CANCELLED AND POSTPONED FOR FALL 2024
Tejasvi Nagaraja
Assistant Professor of Labor History
School of Industrial and Labor Relations

March 8
Victor Cuicahua
Associate Director for Student Empowerment, Undocumented and DACA Support
Student and Campus Life
Office of the Dean of Students

April 26
Gabriela S. Gómez Estévez
Assistant Professor
Director of Orchestras
Department of Music
College of Arts and Sciences

Payments made to non-state armed groups are often treated as predation. But rebels deploy multiple logics when constructing their taxation systems, many of which cannot be reduced to extortion. Rebels also use taxation as a “technology of governance” to resolve a number of social and political challenges related to constructing a wartime order. Drawing on field work in three different countries (Colombia, India, South Sudan), Zachariah Mampilly, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, CUNY, looks at the distinct taxation systems established by armed groups in each.

In Colombia, the author focuses on the FARC-EP’s taxation of coca to reveal the ideological and political factors that shaped their taxation system. In India, he examines how the NSCN-IM implemented distinct taxation regimes across four distinct subnational areas of control. And finally, in South Sudan, he explores the role of external actors in shaping the nature of the rebel taxation system.

About the Speaker
Zachariah Mampilly is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, CUNY and a member of the doctoral faculty in the Department of Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the Co-Founder of the Program on African Social Research. He is the author of Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War and with Adam Branch, Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change. His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Hindu, Africa's a Country, N+1, Dissent, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Washington Post​ and elsewhere.

HostJudith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

"Constitutions include systems of checks and balances to distribute power between government branches and guarantee accountability mechanisms for higher public officials. They also create relief valves in times of political conflict. The Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 includes the classical impeachment process and what has been called "muerte cruzada" which allows the president to dissolve the National Assembly (the national legislative body) and call for new elections. The Assembly holds the same capacity but a limited version of it.

Politicians employed these mechanisms in 2022 and 2023. The Assembly tried to apply "muerte cruzada" against the president after the violent repression of protesting citizens in 2022 and initiated an impeachment process on corruption charges in 2023. President Lasso's response was the dissolution of the Assembly. By the end of 2023, Ecuadorians elected a new president and representatives.
Instead of enhancing power control and accountability, politicians are weaponizing the Ecuadorian Constitution against political rivals or to elude legal responsibility for corruption accounts. Amid the recent political conflict, the Constitutional Court was called to police the branches of state and the respect of the Constitution. Still, it could not stop the political and constitutional dispute that has put Ecuador in a severe economic and social crisis. Is the 2022 -2023 phenomena a sight of the future on how politicians will handle their conflicts? Or does the Constitution provide elements to prevent the abuse of the checks and balances mechanisms?"

David Cordero-Heredia, J.S.D. ’18 is an Associate Professor of Law, at Universidad Católica del Ecuador currently visiting Cornell University as Visiting Fellow of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. He is a Visiting Professor at the Andean University Simón Bolívar (UASB).