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"Caracas (Venezuela)"
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Barrio rising : urban popular politics and the making of modern Venezuela
\"In the mid-1950s, in an effort to modernize Venezuela, the military government razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city's working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: the 23 de Enero (January 23). Over the next thirty years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants of the barrio learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracy--both radical and electoral--whose features still resonate today\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Barrio rising
Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America's most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was rising—unruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion. Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela's largest public housing community, Barrio Rising delivers the first in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution, providing crucial context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city's working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: the 23 de Enero (January 23). During the next thirty years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants of el veintitrés learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracy—both radical and electoral—whose features still resonate today. Blending rich narrative accounts with incisive analyses of urban space, politics, and everyday life, Barrio Rising offers a sweeping reinterpretation of modern Venezuelan history as seen not by its leaders but by residents of one of the country's most distinctive popular neighborhoods.
eBook
Reason to Believe
Evangelical Protestantism has arguably become the fastest-growing religion in South America, if not the world. For converts, it emphasizes self-discipline and provides a network of communal support, which together have helped many overcome substance abuse, avoid crime and violence, and resolve relationship problems. But can people simply decide to believe in a religion because of the benefits it reportedly delivers? Based on extensive fieldwork among Pentecostal men in Caracas, Venezuela, this rich urban ethnography seeks an explanation for the explosion of Evangelical Protestantism, unraveling the cultural and personal dynamics of Evangelical conversion to show how and why these men make the choice to convert, and how they come to have faith in a new system of beliefs and practices.
eBook
It would be night in Caracas : a novel
\"This is the chronicle of one woman's desperate battle to survive amid the dangerous, sometimes deadly, turbulence of modern Venezuela and the lengths she must go to secure her future\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America
The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade has been so notable that it has been called “the Pink Tide.” In recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does this trend portend for the deepening of democracy in the region? Benjamin Goldfrank has been studying the development of participatory democracy in Latin America for many years, and this book represents the culmination of his empirical investigations in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In order to understand why participatory democracy has succeeded better in some countries than in others, he examines the efforts in urban areas that have been undertaken in the cities of Porto Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas. His findings suggest that success is related, most crucially, to how nationally centralized political authority is and how strongly institutionalized the opposition parties are in the local arenas.
eBook
The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas
Combining traditional documentary research with new analytical strategies, Robert J. Ferry creates a rich, three-dimensional picture of early Caracas. His reconstitution and interpretation of important genealogical histories provide a model for historical studies of Latin American and other societies. Ferry's work partially eclipses previously accepted ideas about colonial Caracas. He shows how the society was dominated by a commercial-agricultural elite and demonstrates that women were responsible for arranging marriages and maintaining family lineages, that marriages among first cousins were very common, and that elite residence was matrifocal. The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas focuses on the salient features of the society and economy: agriculture, commerce, and labor. The first section treats the seventeenth-century transition from Indian encomienda labor to African slave labor. The society created by slavery and the cacao trade in the eighteenth century is the main subject of the second section of the book. Throughout, Ferry leads the reader to a deeper understanding of the elite planters of Caracas, who were wheat farmers in the seventeenth century and cacao hacienda owners in the eighteenth. Ferry also explores how some families suceeded in retaining wealth and local authority from one generation to the next. That success is momentarily halted in the 1730s and 1740s, and the revolt of Juan Francisco de León in 1749 is viewed as a crisis of both the colony's elite and the smallholder, immigrant class to which León himself belonged. The response to León's rebellion represents a major effort on the part of the Spanish crown to restructure royal authority in the colony, arguably the first of the Bourbon reforms in the American colonies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California
Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989. Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.
eBook
Community Action and Research as Citizenship Construction
Social change, well-being and liberation have been intertwined in community research and action, as much as being used as political common-places. In this paper, it is argued that community research and action can have a political character. The epistemological premises shared by both the community and political spheres are discussed, and concepts are defined. The way community psychological action can produce changes is illustrated by an experience carried out with children from poverty sectors of Caracas, Venezuela, intended to construct citizenship by developing awareness about values, civic rights and duties, while experiencing the advantages of participation, peaceful negotiation and solidarity, during art classes. Topics regarding citizenship values and ethics were painted and discussed in a participatory way. Results about how the children developed consciousness about those topics, relating them to their lives, are presented.
Journal Article
A comparative usage-based approach to the reduction of the Spanish and Portuguese preposition para
This study examines the frequency effect of two-word collocations involving para 'to, for' (e.g. fui para, para que) on the reduction of para to pa' (in Spanish) and pra (in Portuguese). Collocation frequency effects demonstrate that language speakers store the more frequent collocations in memory, thereby providing support for the usage-based model of linguistic representation and evidence against models of representation that cannot account for such effects. This dissertation reports on studies of corpus data from the Spanish of Caracas, Venezuela and New Mexico, United States as well as the Portuguese of Fortaleza and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The data were coded for the dependent variable, namely whether the form was unreduced para or the language's reduced form. The independent variables include the frequency of the two-word collocation with the preceding word (e.g. vai para, iba para), the frequency of the two-word collocation with the following word (e.g. para mim, para hacer), the following sound (vowel, coronal consonant, dorsal consonant, non-lingual consonant), the following syllable stress, and the grammatical function of the token of para. The data were analyzed using the statistical program GoldVarb X with supplemental unifactorial linear regressions of the frequency variables. The results from Spanish indicate that the grammatical function of para and the frequency with which para co-occurs with a following word are the most important predictors of the reduction of para. Portuguese, on the other hand, is most affected by the frequency with which para co-occurs with an adjacent word, preceding or following. The results coincide with previous studies of the effect of collocation frequency on phonological variation and thus support the assertion that frequent collocations are stored as chunks with all of the phonetic detail intact, providing evidence against modular models of language that would assert that grammar and the lexicon are distinct units.
Dissertation
The art of youth rebellion
In this essay, the author examines the art of rebellion in the context of the 2014 Venezuelan student uprising. Utilizing the lens of Latin American decolonial thought and examining the processes of developing popular power among youth, the author looks into the various ways that youth produce art to communicate and enforce the ideas and values that circumscribe their collective identities. It is necessary, the author argues, for educators to consider the historical, economic and political forces that shape youth's cultural production and to engage decolonial thought in art pedagogy.
Journal Article