When
Where
The Center for Latin American Studies is partnering with the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry this spring to host the Charlas con Café Speaker Series – a weekly space to hear lectures from a wide variety of experts and discuss topics relevant to the Latin American region, Fridays from 1-2 pm (unless otherwise specified). Coffee and snacks starting at 12:30pm!
Come support LAS graduating seniors as they present on the final projects they have been working on this semester in LAS 498 Senior Capstone.
Presentations:
Andrew More, "Migration on Film: Comparing Perspectives in the United States and Latin America."
How do perspectives on migration in Latin American film differ from those in United States films? This project seeks to answer this question by analyzing and comparing narrative and documentary films about migration in Latin America and the United States drawing from scholarship on popular metaphors, discursive identity, and dehumanization. With this scholarship, I identified and compared four different categories of migration film: Latin American Narrative Film, Latin American ‘Testimonio’ Documentary, Law-Enforcement-Focused, and Humanitarian-Focused United States Documentary. Comparing these categories, I found that direct migrant perspective mostly absent from even sympathetic United States documentaries is essential to a portrayal of migration on film that doesn’t reinforce harmful narratives.
Andrew Pongrátz, "Political Culture and the Politics of Security: Explaining Divergent Responses in El Salvador and Costa Rica."
This paper examines why neighboring countries facing similar crime pressures adopt sharply different security responses by comparing El Salvador and Costa Rica. Since 2019, El Salvador under Nayib Bukele has embraced a militarized approach characterized by mass incarceration, a prolonged state of exception, and expanded military involvement in policing, with broad public support. In contrast, Costa Rica has maintained a civilian security model grounded in its demilitarized identity and strong democratic traditions. The paper argues that these divergent outcomes are best explained by differences in political culture: El Salvador’s history of civil war, chronic violence, and low institutional trust has normalized coercive policies, while Costa Rica’s post-1948 democratic trajectory has reinforced resistance to militarization. Ultimately, the analysis shows that public acceptance of security policies is shaped less by material conditions alone and more by historically rooted understandings of state authority and democracy.