Unpacking Latin America

Jose Antonio Ocampo discussed the economic consequences of COVID19 in Latin America, the new epicenter of the pandemic. He described the dramatic effect of quarantine on employment and production, which are heightened by uncertainty on the future of trade and commodity prices. He also pointed to the emergence of new social policies reaching not only the poor, but also the vulnerable population as an important consequence. In his view, the pandemic will force Latin American countries to invest more on health and to seek improving their fiscal capacity with a more redistributive reach.

Dr. Silvia S. Martins talks about the different patterns of COVID19 spread across the countries of Latin America and the importance of timely responses in shaping its pace while emphasizing the challenges for the large vulnerable population of the region. Based on the experience of Brazil, she discusses the importance of faster and more coordinated health responses to the pandemic while highlighting the impact of unified as opposed to contradictory messages to the population. The density and inequality of NYC, which generate parallels to Latin American cities, presents challenges for the Latino population, which often lacks adequate medical insurance based on their migration status. She concludes drawing lessons from the NYC experience for the region as well as lessons from Latin America for the US.

Eduardo Moncada is the son of two parents that escape from violence in Latin America and immigrated to the US. That trajectory has marked his work including the study of violence with the risk and difficulties it implies and his choice for ethnographic methods to unearth data where it doesn’t exist. He discusses here his book on urban violence in Colombia as well as his recent work on extortion, a pervasive phenomenon emerging as a result of state weakness that deprives citizens of basic public security in Latin America. He talks about its linkages to migration North and to the emergence of vigilantism seeking justice where the state does not provide it. Finally, Eduardo describes how criminal groups in Latin America have diversified into legal activities and have become part of global commodity chains showing how their survival goes beyond weak state into a global commercial system that accommodates them.

Miguel Urquiola talks about the role of competition on educational outcomes in a region where education coverage is larger than expected for the income level of Latin American countries, but where performance, as measured by an international standardized test, is lower than expected using that same metric. In evaluating the experiences with competition and choice at different educational levels, based on data from Chile, Colombia, and the US, Urquiola highlights that education markets do not necessarily always work as expected. In areas where metrics are clearer, such as research, market competition can produce excellence as shown by top US universities. In areas where metrics are less clear, such as teaching, information is not sufficiently good to provide rewards for better performance. Instead, choice can result in sorting around other criteria producing the selection of options that are not necessarily related to the educational performance of schools and universities.

Nara Milanich talks about the shift from cultural to biological definitions of paternity thanks to DNA testing and how such testing could either be used to recover kids stolen by military dictatorships or to halt migration at the US-Mexico border. She also explains age-based violence suffered by migrant children in Central America. Family is a crucial lens to understand inequality, she says as she discusses how family law was used in nineteenth century Chile to preserve social hierarchies. Civil law forbade paternity searches, thereby creating kinless children who often ended being used as unpaid domestic labor. Milanich concludes speaking on the role of youth in contemporary Chilean protests and how this is tied to the impact of for-profit education, as part of the market-based model that is currently being questioned.

Daniel Alarcon talks about how growing in a Peruvian household in Birmingham (Alabama) shaped his work in radio journalism and his written pieces in both Spanish and English.  We talk about doing radio in Spanish and writing novels in English as well as about the origins of Radio Ambulante. He described the type of stories he and his wife and co-producer wanted to tell and how it is easier to tell Latin American stories from a global city like New York than from a country in the region. We also chatted about recent New Yorker pieces he wrote about Peru including the happiness produced by Peru’s classification in the 2018 World Soccer Cup and the suicide of former president Alan Garcia in the midst of a corruption scandal and conclude discussing Peru’s current political crisis and the possibilities open by the call of legislative elections in January 2020.

Ana Maria Ochoa talks about ethnomusicology and the connection between nature, sounds, and humans in defining what is music. Ana Maria talked about how humanity and sound are defined contextually and she described how she worked with written archives of sounds from the colonial era in Colombia and how the way we ‘record’ sound shapes our listening. Additionally, we talked about her work with Colombian indigenous film makers and the inter-disciplinary collective she convened to work on politics, environmental justice and aesthetics at Columbia University.