Browsing by Subject "Colombia"

This thesis explores the confluence and clashes between local and global cultural flows in Latin America through the multiple literary movements and tendencies for which the Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, acts as a unifying agent. My analysis pulls from Decolonial, Aesthetic and World Literary theories, in order to analyze how cosmopolitanism and globalization resonate in contemporary Latin American letters through a survey of three geocultural categories: the Colombian local, the Latin American regional, and the literary global. My analysis of the local tracks the formal evolution of the Colombian Novela de la Violencia into the contemporary Novela Urbana and the parallel political challenge to the conventional Lettered City in Colombia after the Violencia. In terms of the regional, I critique the idea of a positive and universally stabilizing cosmopolitanism through a collective analysis of a generation of Latin American writers that were forced to travel to the cosmopolitan center through exile rather than as an act of freewill, a generation that I refer to in this project as the Generation of '72. And my evaluation of the global considers how a singular World Literary aesthetics and political economy of prestige weights negatively on contemporary Latin American authors. Through a survey of the roughly fifty novels and short stories that fall under the purview of both the Colombian Urban Novel and the Generation of `72, I conclude that aesthetic borders - the places where multiple forms of perception converge- open up spaces and forums of critique of rigid cultural models and century old aesthetic formulae, a tendency that I refer to as a poetics of globalism.

Between 2015 and 2019, approximately 1.8 million Venezuelans fled into neighboring Colombia, increasing Colombia’s population by almost 4%. In this dissertation, I study the effects of this large and unprecedented migration wave on Colombian labor market outcomes and attitudes towards foreigners. In Chapter 1, I study the economic effects of the migration using variation in the migration rate across 79 metropolitan areas, labor survey data, and an instrumental variable strategy based on historical migration rates. I find that Venezuelan migration caused a moderate decrease in the hourly wages of native Colombians that is most concentrated among low-wage and informal workers. Existing studies of this migration wave using similar methods and data have estimated different magnitudes for this wage effect, and I demonstrate the differences in specification that drive these discrepancies. In Chapter 2, I study the consequences of migrant occupational downgrading by estimating an aggregate production function that incorporates imperfect substitutability between migrants and natives and migrant occupational downgrading. I find that downgrading concentrates economic competition among less educated natives and decreases output in both the short- and long-term, thus affecting both wage equality and productivity. In Chapter 3, I study the effect of migration on trust towards foreigners using a nationwide survey on social preferences. While migration has no effect on trust on average, the effect is positive in municipalities that are more urbanized, have greater access to high-quality public goods, and where there is more residential integration between migrants and natives.

In mid-twentieth century, Colombia’s illiteracy rate was 40% with numbers close to 80% in the rural areas. These areas lacked access to formal education and were isolated from the urban centers due to poor road infrastructure. Radio Sutatenza, an educational radio station, promised to educate and integrate rural communities to the nation through radio literacy campaigns and its pedagogical model of Fundamental Integral Education. Unlike previous sociological, pedagogical, and communicational studies of the Sutatenza project, Intermedial Sutatenza highlights the project’s political and aesthetic dimensions. Dialoguing with theories and concepts from literary, cultural, and sound studies, I analyze cultural and media productions by officials and listeners of Radio Sutatenza. I focus, specifically, on radio dramas produced by the station and on coplas and songs composed by listeners, then broadcast in radio shows, and published in the print weekly El Campesino. I propose that these cultural productions are best described as intermedial narratives to highlight their many inner contradictions and the mediated context in which they emerge. Also, in their blurring of media and genre borders, these narratives dwell between the aural and the written and emerge as embattled fields of meaning production. I argue that Sutatenza’s intermedial narratives show that the radio station undertook both a continuity of and a departure from the Hispanic-Catholic project of a nation put in place in Colombia by the grammarian presidents in the nineteenth century. Likewise, I sustain that Sutatenza reproduced and remediated the literary movement of costumbrismo and the literary genre of the cuadro de costumbres, with its ideological implications, in sonic media for a twentieth century audience. At its core, my dissertation proves that the othering of rural individuals in Colombia took place also in the radio, and that Radio Sutatenza, with its far-reaching pedagogical strategies, had a fundamental role in the construction and circulation of a specific kind of rural individual and of rurality. At the same time, my work shows that, in the interstices, polysemy and the instability of the sign and the word permit for voices of resistance to emerge. Hence, the Sutatenza narratives, on the one hand, strive to unite and homogenize rural communities, and on the other, circulate and broadcast those same communities’ cultural heterogeneity. Through this examination, I clarify the role of Radio Sutatenza in Colombian community-making processes and radio’s part in narrating the nation during mid-twentieth century. Moreover, the questions I explore and the questions the dissertation opens-up are central in a country where unequal land ownership and rural labor exploitation are at the base of a more than half a century-long violent conflict. The ultimate goal and significance of my research is that it will lead to a recasting of the discourses (historical, sociological, cultural) about Colombian rural communities.

Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907 investigates the visual and literary mechanisms used to refurbish racial and social hierarchies in Brazil and Colombia in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Chorographic paintings, scientific photographs, identification documents, and naturalist literature are taken to together to argue that: on the one hand, the slave is the fleshy object that defines freedom and, in the postcolonial moment, citizenship. In "Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907," I propose that in geo-political spaces where the abolition of slavery and the re-branding of work were intensely debated and violently fought over, realist programs of representation facilitated the propagation of modern racializing schemas. Chapters 1 and 2 study the watercolors created for the Comisión Corográfica (the pre-eminent mapping project of nineteenth century Colombia) and scientific photographs produced in Brazil. These chapters uncover the stylistic conventions that make possible the staging of blackness as visible and immutable biological inferiority and as cumulative category that encompasses a variety of physical and social characteristics including but not limited to skin color, occupation, costume, and physical environment. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that the disavowal of slavery structures Brazilian naturalist novels such as O Cortiço (Aluísio Azevedo, 1890) as well as legislative debates about the nation and the citizen. By focusing on the visual and narrative orchestration blackness, my dissertation provides a critical framework for understanding how realist aesthetic conventions configured (and continue to animate) discourses of race and citizenship in Brazil and Colombia.

How do people rebuild their lives, livelihoods, and community in the same location where brutal conflict has occurred? My research in San Carlos, Colombia--a rural community emerging from a decade of violence--investigates how conflict targets the built and natural environments of people's lives. Roads, bridges, buildings, and land have all been sites of violence, illustrating the blurred lines between military and civilian space. The meanings of these locations change after war. Yet, for those returning after a decade of internal displacement, these are exactly the building blocks that must be used to remake home, livelihoods, and community. I use the concept of forensic infrastructure to explore the materiality of memory and politics in war, the immediate aftermath, and long-term reconstruction.

A forensic approach to infrastructure involves understanding materials as text and tools in which politics and memory are embedded and enacted. Forms of infrastructure serve as archives of the past and stages for the practice and performance of awesome and everyday life. As both material and metaphor for interdependence, infrastructure is the physical embodiment of complex concepts such as development, modernity, progress, citizenship, and stability.

Nowhere are these concepts more contested in Colombia than San Carlos. Between 1998-2005, the FARC and ELN guerrillas, the Bloque Metro and Cacique Nutibara paramilitaries, and the armed forces fought in San Carlos over control of the country's largest hydroelectric complex and the Bogotá-Medellín highway connecting Colombia's two biggest cities. Eighty percent of the population fled. Beginning in 2005, however, after paramilitary demobilization and military victories over the FARC, people started returning to their homes. Since 2010, San Carlos has been host to innovative initiatives facilitating return. It is often portrayed in the national media as a model for return, reconstruction, and reconciliation.

While internal displacement has been a crisis in Colombia for decades, large-scale return is a new phenomenon. Little has been written about return, especially based on sustained ethnographic fieldwork. This dissertation, based on seven research trips between 2008-2015, including fifteen months of fieldwork in San Carlos and Medellín in 2011-2012, sheds light on the everyday experiences and difficulties of return--both for those who were displaced and those who remained. Rebuilding the physical spaces of connection, containment, and circulation necessary for community to function in San Carlos embodies a larger struggle over the nature of development, progress, and reparation in Colombia. I suggest return is possible in San Carlos because the fight was over mobility instead of the land itself. The same model of return will be difficult to impossible to apply in areas where monoculture agriculture or mining play a major role in conflict.

This dissertation analyzes how Colombian criollos – people of real or imagined European origins – dealt with the problem of representing value as part of their efforts to build a “civilized” nation during the nineteenth century (1822-1903). It researches capitalist development from the perspective of the symbolic structure that makes the accumulation of capital possible. It emphasizes the role of finance in the historical process through which Colombia’s territory and people were imagined and organized around a core principle: the pursuit of profit. As the affective and discursive center of profit-making, money is the most important pivot of liberal governmentality. This study thus takes as its main object what Mary Poovey has called “monetary genres” (e.g., bonds, stocks, paper money) as well as a variety of texts (e.g., political economy, literature, statistical accounts, press advertisements, conduct manuals, investment prospectuses) that criollos consumed and produced to understand and manage the relation of money to value. The anxiety produced by the difficulties of locating value in an “economy” based on speculation shaped not only political economy, but virtually all spheres of life. The project argues that capitalist development in Colombia involved new modes of representation that secured the trust required by financial instruments – essentially promises to pay – while simultaneously making the economy vulnerable to cyclical crises of credibility. These authorial modes of representation have been largely produced in the country by an exclusive, white, male elite. The research thus underlines the continuing reliance of capitalism on colonial structures of power and reveals how the symbolic architecture of the financial system has historically played an important role in the reproduction of gender, race, and class hierarchies.

Civil wars in the last three decades have produced staggering death tolls, unleashed huge waves of human migration through refugee flows, and generated incalculable human suffering. Understanding the dynamics of civil conflicts -- how they are fought, how they end, and their legacies on the societies that survive them -- is of critical importance, perhaps now more than ever. In this dissertation I explore three central dimensions of civil war dynamics, using the case study of the Colombian civil war as an empirical context with which to evaluate my theory-building. Chapter 2 analyzes how the electoral process shapes patterns of violence in countries experiencing conflict. I combine statistical models with fine-grained data on the timing of local elections and the prevalence of violence during three decades of Colombian history to show that insurgents respond to the electoral process and wield violence to achieve electoral goals. The results raise caution about the prospect of democratization as a palliative to conflict. Chapter 3 explores how attempts to mitigate conflict by promoting economic growth can backfire. I argue that in contexts where the state is weak, the expansion of land-intensive industries can incentivize land-grabbing and the displacement of civilians. I collect original data on the rapid expansion of the palm-oil industry in early 21st century Colombia to show that growth in this industry was associated with mass civilian displacement. The findings warn against intuition that economic growth necessarily reduces violence and instead suggests that actors can take advantage of ongoing conflict for private gain. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on the challenge of generating public support for conflict-termination in deeply divided societies. I conceptualize the broad points over which state and insurgent actors have to agree to reach settlement, and draw testable hypotheses for how different kinds of settlements will move public opinion. I use novel survey experiments fielded during the 2016 Colombian peace process to demonstrate that normative questions bearing on punishment deeply divided citizens. I derive implications for policymakers seeking to construct peace agreements with broad bases of public support.

Habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation threaten the World’s ecosystems and species. These, and other threats, will likely be exacerbated by climate change. Due to a limited budget for conservation, we are forced to prioritize a few areas over others. These places are selected based on their uniqueness and vulnerability. One of the most famous examples is the biodiversity hotspots: areas where large quantities of endemic species meet alarming rates of habitat loss. Most of these places are in the tropics, where species have smaller ranges, diversity is higher, and ecosystems are most threatened.

Species distributions are useful to understand ecological theory and evaluate extinction risk. Small-ranged species, or those endemic to one place, are more vulnerable to extinction than widely distributed species. However, current range maps often overestimate the distribution of species, including areas that are not within the suitable elevation or habitat for a species. Consequently, assessment of extinction risk using these maps could underestimate vulnerability.

In order to be effective in our quest to conserve the World’s most important places we must: 1) Translate global and national priorities into practical local actions, 2) Find synergies between biodiversity conservation and human welfare, 3) Evaluate the different dimensions of threats, in order to design effective conservation measures and prepare for future threats, and 4) Improve the methods used to evaluate species’ extinction risk and prioritize areas for conservation. The purpose of this dissertation is to address these points in Colombia and other global biodiversity hotspots.

In Chapter 2, I identified the global, strategic conservation priorities and then downscaled to practical local actions within the selected priorities in Colombia. I used existing range maps of 171 bird species to identify priority conservation areas that would protect the greatest number of species at risk in Colombia (endemic and small-ranged species). The Western Andes had the highest concentrations of such species—100 in total—but the lowest densities of national parks. I then adjusted the priorities for this region by refining these species ranges by selecting only areas of suitable elevation and remaining habitat. The estimated ranges of these species shrank by 18–100% after accounting for habitat and suitable elevation. Setting conservation priorities on the basis of currently available range maps excluded priority areas in the Western Andes and, by extension, likely elsewhere and for other taxa. By incorporating detailed maps of remaining natural habitats, I made practical recommendations for conservation actions. One recommendation was to restore forest connections to a patch of cloud forest about to become isolated from the main Andes.

For Chapter 3, I identified areas where bird conservation met ecosystem service protection in the Central Andes of Colombia. Inspired by the November 11th (2011) landslide event near Manizales, and the current poor results of Colombia’s Article 111 of Law 99 of 1993 as a conservation measure in this country, I set out to prioritize conservation and restoration areas where landslide prevention would complement bird conservation in the Central Andes. This area is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, but also one of the most threatened. Using the case of the Rio Blanco Reserve, near Manizales, I identified areas for conservation where endemic and small-range bird diversity was high, and where landslide risk was also high. I further prioritized restoration areas by overlapping these conservation priorities with a forest cover map. Restoring forests in bare areas of high landslide risk and important bird diversity yields benefits for both biodiversity and people. I developed a simple landslide susceptibility model using slope, forest cover, aspect, and stream proximity. Using publicly available bird range maps, refined by elevation, I mapped concentrations of endemic and small-range bird species. I identified 1.54 km2 of potential restoration areas in the Rio Blanco Reserve, and 886 km2 in the Central Andes region. By prioritizing these areas, I facilitate the application of Article 111 which requires local and regional governments to invest in land purchases for the conservation of watersheds.

Chapter 4 dealt with elevational ranges of montane birds and the impact of lowland deforestation on their ranges in the Western Andes of Colombia, an important biodiversity hotspot. Using point counts and mist-nets, I surveyed six altitudinal transects spanning 2200 to 2800m. Three transects were forested from 2200 to 2800m, and three were partially deforested with forest cover only above 2400m. I compared abundance-weighted mean elevation, minimum elevation, and elevational range width. In addition to analyzing the effect of deforestation on 134 species, I tested its impact within trophic guilds and habitat preference groups. Abundance-weighted mean and minimum elevations were not significantly different between forested and partially deforested transects. Range width was marginally different: as expected, ranges were larger in forested transects. Species in different trophic guilds and habitat preference categories showed different trends. These results suggest that deforestation may affect species’ elevational ranges, even within the forest that remains. Climate change will likely exacerbate harmful impacts of deforestation on species’ elevational distributions. Future conservation strategies need to account for this by protecting connected forest tracts across a wide range of elevations.

In Chapter 5, I refine the ranges of 726 species from six biodiversity hotspots by suitable elevation and habitat. This set of 172 bird species for the Atlantic Forest, 138 for Central America, 100 for the Western Andes of Colombia, 57 for Madagascar, 102 for Sumatra, and 157 for Southeast Asia met the criteria for range size, endemism, threat, and forest use. Of these 586 species, the Red List deems 108 to be threatened: 15 critically endangered, 29 endangered, and 64 vulnerable. When ranges are refined by elevational limits and remaining forest cover, 10 of those critically endangered species have ranges < 100km2, but then so do 2 endangered species, seven vulnerable, and eight non-threatened ones. Similarly, 4 critically endangered species, 20 endangered, and 12 vulnerable species have refined ranges < 5000km2, but so do 66 non-threatened species. A striking 89% of these species I have classified in higher threat categories have <50% of their refined ranges inside protected areas. I find that for 43% of the species I assessed, refined range sizes fall within thresholds that typically have higher threat categories than their current assignments. I recommend these species for closer inspection by those who assess risk. These assessments are not only important on a species-by-species basis, but by combining distributions of threatened species, I create maps of conservation priorities. They differ significantly from those created from unrefined ranges.