Hosted by graduate students from Carleton University and the University of Ottawa[1]

Inaugural Ottawa Latin American and Caribbean Conference

Inside and Outside Latin America and the Caribbean

February 27, 2009

FASS Lounge, 2017 Dunton Tower, Carleton University

Light Breakfast 8:30 to 8:45

Opening Remarks and Keynote 8:45 to 9:30

“Starving Wolves: On the tradition of political violence in Latin American history”

Enrique Zuleta-Puceiro, Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Buenos Aires

Panel 1: Geographies of the Inside and Outside

9:30 to 11:00

Discussant: Judy Meltzer, Graduate Student, Department of Political Science, Carleton University

1. “Social relations, property and ‘peripheral’ informal settlement in Mexico City: The case of Ampliación San Marcos.” Jill Wigle, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University.

2. “The ‘Andeanization’ of the City: Directions for Future Research.” Marieka Sax, Graduate Student, Anthropology, Carleton University.

3. “Spaces of Indigenous Autonomy in Ecuador’s Amazon.” Matthew Hawkins, Graduate Student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

Break 11:15 to 11:30

Panel 2: Alternatives and Responses

11:15 to 12:45

Discussant: Cristina Rojas, Professor of International Affairs, Norman Patterson School of International Relations

1. “Race and Class Relations in the Andes: Mapping Regional Tensions in Correa’s Ecuador and Evo’s Bolivia.” Susan Spronk, Assistant Professor, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa.

2. “‘Cubanalismo’: The Cuban Alternative to Neoliberalism.” Carlo Fanelli, Graduate Student, Collaborative Program Sociology and Political Economy, Carleton University.

3. “Transnational civil society solidarity movements as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic.” Miranda Cobb, Graduate Student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

Lunch 12:45 to 13:45

Panel 3: Memories of Violence

13:45 to 15:15

Discussant: Prof. Alberto Florez M., Associate Professor School of International Development and Global Studies and Department of History, University of Ottawa

1. “Psychoanalysis and the Military Discourse: The disappearance, incarceration and exile of psychologists/psychoanalysts during the last Argentinean dictatorship (1976-83).” Cecilia Taiana, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Carleton University.

2. “The Art of Memory: The Historical Representation and Public Memory of the 1973 Coup D’état in Chilean communities in Ottawa and Toronto.” Christine McGuire, Graduate Student, Department of History, Carleton University.

3. “Citizenship and Violence: Medellín, Colombia.” Daniel Tubb, Graduate Student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

Break 15:15 to 15:30

Panel 4: Decolonializing Identities

15:30 to 17:00

Discussant: Juan Gualberto Melara, Graduate Student, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa

1. “Adventures in Broadcasting the Bahamian National Identity, 1970-74.” Edward Minnis, Graduate Student, Department of History, Carleton University.

2. “Human Rights as a Project of Modernity. NGOs as a Site of Performance.” Sarah Peek, Graduate Student, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University

3. “Hispanic Literature in Canada and the ‘Anxiety of Origins’” Gabrielle Etcheverry, Graduate Student, School of Canadian Studies, Carleton University.

Closing Remarks and Wine and Cheese 17:00

Panel 1: Geographies of the Inside and Outside

Discussant: Judy Meltzer, Graduate Student, Department of Political Science, Carleton University

Spaces of Indigenous Autonomy in Ecuador’s Amazon

Matthew Hawkins, Graduate Student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University

This paper explores the concept of autonomy for indigenous communities in Latin America generally and within Ecuador's Amazonian region specifically. Drawing upon critical geographic conceptualizations of space and scale, the different ways in which spaces of autonomy are created, understood, and contested will be examined. Particular examples drawn from secondary research on indigenous communities in Ecuador's amazonian region provide case studies where autonomy has been expressed in various and different forms. These varied forms of autonomy have emerged in part as a result of the contestations and reworking of uneven and unequal interactions between indigenous communities, the state, and the oil extraction industry. Autonomy in these examples is reflective of a relational understanding of space as understood by critical geographers. However, the diversity in conceptualizations of autonomy falls under an overall effort by indigenous peoples to challenge colonial conceptions of space by positing a physical place for indigenous knowledge (re)production. A multiscalar analysis is employed to understanding the varying conceptions of autonomous spaces and its political-economic uses by indigenous communities. Within a general discussion of autonomy this paper puts forward that for autonomy to be a project of liberation the context of unequal power relations must be challenged/changed to become more equal. In the examples of the Amazonian communities, autonomy will be presented as a particular strategy used by indigenous peoples to challenge and rework existing unequal relations with the state and oil companies.

Social relations, property and ‘peripheral’ informal settlement in Mexico City: The case of Ampliación San Marcos

Jill Wigle, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University

This paper explores the complexities of informal urbanization at the metropolitan periphery of Mexico City through a case study of Ampliación San Marcos, a former agricultural area on the city’s south-eastern periphery. While the physical annexation of small towns and their environs is a common feature of Mexico City’s growth, the settlement of Ampliación San Marcos is more accurately described as a two-pronged process involving the extension of a nearby pre-hispanic town and the expansion of Mexico City itself. The case study shows that the rural periphery of Mexico City is no tabula rasa upon which urban growth simply “takes place,” rather settlement processes are influenced by longstanding in-situ social relations and practices related to property. The paper highlights the importance of considering the relationships among social relations, property and informal settlement for understanding the complexity of metropolitan growth and change in large cities such as Mexico City.

The ‘Andeanization’ of the City: Directions for Future Research

Marieka Sax, Graduate Student, Anthropology, Carleton University

The massive trends of urban migration from the Andean highlands have led some commentators to draw attention to the “Andeanization” of cities in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Cultural markers of the “lo andino” (e.g. music, dance, food, artisanal products) have gained an increasing presence in urban settings (see Salman & Zoomers 2003). Migrant settlements established on the periphery of cities such as Lima and La Paz have undergone a significant degree of formalization and legitimization since their origins as rebellious land occupations and squatter settlements, with residents demanding more recognition and representation as legitimate citizens and access to the means of their own self-directed “progress” in the informal economy (see De Soto 1989; Lazar 2008; Paerregaard 1997; Seligmann 2004). At the same time, urban migrants remain connected to the countryside in a variety of ways, such as social and economic networks (e.g. remittances sent to family members still in the highlands; the sponsorship of fiestas); the partial maintenance of small agricultural landholdings (e.g. renting lands out to rural residents, returning to the highlands for periods of agricultural production); and health- and production-related rituals that are directed towards life-giving powers embodied in the highland landscape (e.g. mountain spirits, the pachamama) (Skar 1994; Lazar 2008; Paerregaard 1997).

While there are admirable studies that investigate the political economy of urbanization and migratory movements in the Andes (for example Collins 1988; Larson & Harris 1995; Paerregaard 1997), there are fewer that consider the symbolic and practical domains that inform and emerge out of such migration and urban-rural connections (see Skar 1994; Turino 1993). In the highlands, agro-pastoral rituals are directed towards divine powers embodied in specific landforms (Allen 2002[1988]; Gelles 2000; Gose 1994); the “feeding” of hungry sources of fertility and prosperity is likewise necessary in non-agricultural spheres of production, such as mining and the marketplace (see Harris 1989; Ødegaard 2008; Salazar-Soler 2006; Seligmann 2004). Ethnographic data and participant-observation fieldwork indicate that urban areas may be transformed by these continued ritual practices, by which urban hillsides may similarly be made the focus of health- and productive-related ritual offerings and payments. The dialogics of urban migration can thus make “foreign” places “more Andean,” thereby incorporated into lo andino by being attributed with tutelary powers and obligations (cf. Gose 2008; Radcliffe 1990), even as urban migrants hope “to become true members of Peruvian society” (Paerregaard 1997: 19).

This paper will propose some directions for further investigation of the connections between the highlands and the city through the emplaced ritual praxis (Casey 1996; Gose 1991) of Andean residents and urban migrants. These tentative research questions are in direct response to research carried out in the Department of Huancavelica and the municipality of San Juan de Lurigancho (Lima) in Peru from 2007 – 2008 (Sax 2009).

Panel Two: Alternatives and Responses

Discussant: Cristina Rojas, Professor of International Affairs, Norman Patterson School of International Relations

Race and Class Relations in the Andes: Mapping Regional Tensions in Correa’s Ecuador and Evo’s Bolivia

Susan Spronk, Assistant Professor, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa.

Bolivia and Ecuador share much more in common than amazing biodiversity and stunning geography. Both countries are home to powerful indigenous movements that have been characterized as amongst the most powerful on the continent. After long periods of political instability, they both elected left-of-centre presidents who have promised to end “the long night of neoliberalism”: Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s eighth president within ten years and Evo Morales, Bolivia’s sixth president within eight years. Both finished the electoral race with decisive popular mandates. Despite these similarities, this paper argues that the “bottom up” nature of the Bolivian transition—rooted in radical social movements—has made the Bolivian transition much more fraught with tension than the Ecuadorian one, beleaguered by powerful counter-resistance movements.

To begin to explain why Bolivia is on the brink of divorce while the government in Ecuador enjoys a political honeymoon, this article draws on the literature in comparative political sociology (e.g. Barrington Moore, Ruth Collier) and historiography (e.g. Brooke Larson, Mark Becker) to compare the politics of the transitions along three axes—the geography of natural resource struggles, the politics of representation, and the relationships between political parties and social movements. The paper argues that in some crucial respects, Evo and the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) faces a much more difficult set of historical circumstances than Correa’s government in their bid to achieve progressive reform. Given the “top down” character of the political transition underway in Ecuador, however, however, the prospects for radical transformation under Correa remain limited.

‘Cubanalismo’: The Cuban Alternative to Neoliberalism

Carlo Fanelli, Graduate Student, Collaborative Program Sociology and Political Economy, Carleton University.

This paper compares and contrasts neoliberal discourses with the Cuban method of development, referred to as cubanalismo, in the areas of healthcare and education, economic and environmental policies, and considers needs-based trade as opposed to free–trade (i.e. FTAA vs. ALBA) . Furthermore, the author examines whether or not Latin America is witnessing the “dawning of a new era” in terms of regional solidarity and anti-neoliberalism, and discusses Cuba’s foreign internationalism and humanitarian relations. The author concludes that the leftward movement in Latin America is in direct opposition to US-led neoliberalism and imperialism, and asserts that winds of change are indeed on the horizon. All things considered, cubanalismo remains a workable alternative to neoliberalism based on its social and human emphasis, and the prioritization of eliminating poverty, marginalization, and underdevelopment as central policy mandates.

Transnational civil society solidarity movements as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic

Miranda Cobb, Graduate Student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

Since the 1990s Canadian mining companies have significantly expanded their activities in Latin America, bringing with them considerable socio-economic change and conflict. In response, transnational civil society (TCS) has become increasingly active. This is due in part to growing sensitivities to, and an outcry for, corporate social responsibility from multi-national corporations (MNCs). The focus of this paper is whether transnational solidarity movements reinforce a hegemony of global coloniality or constitute an anti-globalization counter-hegemonic movement. This question is answered through analysis of a case study on Canadian-based transnational solidarity movements calling for increased accountability and regulation of Canadian mining sector MNCs working in Latin America. Within this case study, a document review of an independent Canadian-based paper The Dominion is completed. I first examine how solidarity movements fit within the colonial historical bloc through looking at Western development discourse and historical global colonial relations. This investigation leads to questioning whether solidarity movements are confined completely by, or able to overcome, this hegemony. I then move on to explore how solidarity movements can be seen as part of the counter-hegemonic movement by looking at how they engage in postcolonial discourse, non-hierarchical and anti-capitalist practices, promote international rule of law, and their capability to unify global networks around common issues. I conclude that transnational solidarity movements are necessarily founded in local culture and political economy. In addition, they must negotiate cross-cultural settings, often with underlying power differentials and colonial histories. Despite these barriers, Canadian-based transnational solidarity movements constitute successful counter-hegemonic forces.

Panel Three: Memories of Violence

Discussant: Prof. Alberto Florez M., Associate Professor School of International

Development and Global Studies and Department of History, University of Ottawa

Psychoanalysis and the Military Discourse: The disappearance, incarceration and exile of psychologists/psychoanalysts during the last Argentinean dictatorship (1976-83)

Cecilia Taiana, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Carleton University.

The turbulent decade of the 1970s in Argentina culminated in the bloody dictatorship installed by a military coup in 1976. This regime lasted until 1983 and was characterized by a growing intellectual polarization. Many intellectuals, among them practitioners and students of psychology/psychoanalysis, died or disappeared, others were forced into exile, and those who remained were subject to rigid censorship.

This investigation will provide an opportunity to contrast two discourses at play during this dictatorship period: the discourse of the military regime and psychological/psychoanalytical discourse as they pertain to the ontological notion of “man” in Argentina at the time, both of which are presented in spoken and written language and used to enact a specific given identity. An analysis of both ontologies will expose the antithetical counter-culture to the military regime embodied in psychological/psychoanalytical theory.

The proposed research therefore has two primary objectives: to study and document the disappearance, incarceration and exile of psychologists/psychoanalysts during the last dictatorship in Argentina and to produce a monograph that will bring together related aspects of a more general topic on psychological/psychoanalytical ideas and their role in the conflict between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian, and between theocratic and secular, worldviews.

The Art of Memory: The Historical Representation and Public Memory of the 1973 Coup D’état in Chilean communities in Ottawa and Toronto

Christine McGuire, Graduate Student, Department of History, Carleton University

Many scholars have examined the dynamic and enigmatic relationship between historical representation and visual memory, considering the various ways that imagery creates and reproduces ideas of collective memory, identity, and reconciliation. For my research, I examine the historical representation and public memory of the 1973 Chilean military coup d’état in Chilean communities in Ottawa and Toronto. The study of collective experiences and memories, allows me to examine how various Chilean communities have used different cultural productions to remember this time in their past and how it has become part of their identity today in Canada. The study of memory is particularly important in understanding how Chileans have struggled to define and re-define the meaning of this collective trauma. Through these cultural productions and practices, personal and public memory act in a reciprocal relationship to explain the larger process of how memories are shared.

Between 1973 and 1988, over 24,000 Chilean nationals, mostly refugees, would arrive in Canada. Chileans have kept an active memory of these extremely violent years, influencing the representations of their experiences in Canada. Conducting oral interviews with Chilean-Canadians has allowed me to examine the collective memory of the coup, which has been expressed in cultural productions and practices. Chilean art is part of a larger effort today by these artists to express their past experiences, and form collective memories and identities in Canada, which places this study in an important historical discourse.

Citizenship and Violence: Medellín, Colombia

Daniel Tubb, Graduate Student, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

This paper articulates, in the dual sense of description and connection, violence and citizenship in the city of Medellín between 2003 and 2008. Over this period, Medellín experienced rapid economic growth concomitant with investment in cultural and social programs. Yet, violence, in its corporeal, epistemic and economic senses, remains an important challenge. By paying particular attention to the immanent relationship between violence and two contradictory citizenship projects being deployed in Medellín, this paper contributes to an understanding of the reasons how and why, in-spite of no shortage of investments in ‘citizenship’, Medellín remains profoundly violent and increasingly unequal. It argues that in Medellín there are two dialectically related citizenship projects being undertaken. The first consists of municipal and civil society programs deployed in the poorest comunas that focus on collaborative planning, participatory budgeting, and investment in libraries, schools and cultural events, explicitly with the intention of promoting ‘citizenship’. The other citizenship project has two facets. First, the national government has deployed a policy of ‘democratic security’, with the consequential military occupation of sectors of the city, the repression of indigenous protests, a massive increase in extrajudicial killings, and continued displacement from rural Colombia. Simultaneously, in Medellín, the municipal government has employed discourses of globalization, public space, and culture borrowed from US and Spanish debates on urban planning with the intention of increasing urban competition and promoting an entrepreneurial spirit. I argue that these two understandings of citizenship are both in tension with and yet immanently related to violence. In this context, I argue that the much-publicized decline in the homicide rate in Medellín should not be understood as a decline in violence, but rather it should be attributed to the securing of hegemonic control of the city by paramilitary forces. This suggests that Medellín’s ‘renewal’ is incomplete and profoundly fragile, and that any recent gains in building certain kinds of citizenship may reverse themselves. Indeed, trends in 2008 suggest that the ‘renewal’ was never as consolidated as assumed by many commentators, and that a reversal may in fact already have occurred. Theoretically, this paper draws on the critical citizenship studies literature and the governmentality literature focusing specifically on the technologies and rationalities of governance. This paper is based on interviews and fieldwork for my Masters thesis conducted over a three month period during the summer of 2008 in Medellín, Colombia.
Panel Four: Decolonializing Identities

Discussant: Juan Gualberto Melara, Graduate Student, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa

Adventures in Broadcasting the Bahamian National Identity, 1970-74

Edward Minnis, Graduate Student, Department of History, Carleton University

The Bahamas is an archipelago of islands that stretch from Florida to Haiti. As a colony of Britain, the country was ruled by a white minority until the black-led Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) won the general election in 1967. With majority rule the population, which was 80% Black, was in an exuberant mood. Despite their newfound pride though, blacks were still working to serve whites because of the country’s economic dependence on the tourism industry. Reports of Tourist harassment were soon on the increase and the new government worried that low levels of Tourist satisfaction would have dire economic circumstances.

Enter “The Fergusons of Farm Road.” This radio soap-opera was designed to educate Bahamians on the importance of Tourism to the economy and to thus encourage them to improve their attitudes. The show started in 1970 and became immensely popular. The show exists on the cross-roads between Tourism, economic policy, national identity and cultural production, and as such is worthy of study. The show sheds light on the tensions existing in Bahamian society in this crucial phase of its history. Tensions between the government and the governed, between blacks and whites, and between the tourist and the native, issues of gender, race and the potential for Black leadership are all there in the surviving episode scripts. The show also raises questions about the media as a form of social control.

Human Rights as a Project of Modernity: NGOs as a Site of Performance

Sarah Peek, Graduate Student, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University

Human rights are commonly understood as the universal language to discuss issues of social justice, oppression and inequality within and across states. Rooted in legal discourse, human rights are believed to be a neutral and impartial assessment of the elementary rights to which all people are entitled. These fundamental rights have been employed in many different struggles around the globe. In spite of its many criticisms, human rights as a discourse, has come to command significant power both in and outside the West. In the lead up to the 60th anniversary the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, this paper calls for a deeper, more critical reflection on how far "we" have come and who has been included on this journey.

Drawing from Latin American decolonial scholarship, this paper explores how a human rights regime, embedded in the liberal capitalist project, known today as neo-liberal globalization not only inhibits our ability to be allies in the defense of and struggle for human rights but, because it is built on violent relationships rooted in the logic of sovereignty and capitalism, also contributes to the perpetuation of human suffering. This paper then explores hidden connections between the international human rights regime and the project of modernity and how these veiled connections impose grave limitations on the construction of transnational solidarity. To investigate these relationships my analysis focuses in particular on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (using rights-based language) as a place where human rights advocacy is performed.

This paper is a first part of a MA thesis project. The larger project seeks to explore alternative routes to transnational solidarity building through a study of indigenous Maya communities in Guatemala and their partnerships with Rights Action, a Canadian incorporated not for profit that is based in Guatemala City.

Hispanic Literature in Canada and the “Anxiety of Origins”

Gabrielle Etcheverry, Graduate Student, School of Canadian Studies, Carleton University

Based on my doctoral research, this presentation will provide an interdisciplinary analysis of selected Latino-Canadian literary texts and their conditions of production. I will discuss how Western ideas of history and time (it is measurable, linear, and progressive) are equally important as ideas of space and land to the modern project of nation-building, as well as to discourses of national belonging, cultural identity, and literary value in Canada. The critique of the Western concept of time that I will be incorporating into discussions of space and deterritorialization in the Canadian context is largely informed by scholars working in the fields of hemispheric and Latin American literary and cultural studies, such as Walter Mignolo, Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Aníbal Quijano. Their insights will help to elucidate how the “anxiety of origins” (or the uneasiness stemming from the status of the Americas as a “new world” supposedly lacking history) has propelled Canadian nationalist discourses and policies to privilege spatial metaphors of cultural identity and belonging, as well as to focus on delimiting physical and symbolic national boundaries. In so doing, this paper will also demonstrate how Hispanic literature in Canada implicitly and explicitly problematizes national frameworks for the creation and reception of literature.

The Latino-Canadian texts selected for this paper are works by Chilean poets Gonzalo Millán and Claudio Durán, who deal with the problem of temporal disjuncture stemming from the spatial (as well as cultural and linguistic) disjuncture associated with migration and exile in the late modern period. The discussion of these texts and their mode of production will not only uncover some of the ways in which nationalist discourses and cultural institutions construct migrants as cultural, territorial, and temporal Others, but also how these cultural Others use literary expression to negotiate such constructions.

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[1] Support for this conference has been provided by the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Faculty of Public Affairs, Department of Geography & Environmental Studies, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of Political Science and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University, the School of Political Studies at Ottawa University, the Embassy of the Argentine Republic, Prof. Cristina Rojas and Prof. Cecilia Taiana.