Kyle B. Young is a May 2022 graduate of the Latin American Studies M.A. program at the Stone Center. In 2020, he graduated from Tulane with a B.A. in Political Science and Spanish/Portuguese. In 2019, he studied Portuguese and Brazilian Politics at the Pontifica Universidade Catolica in São Paulo, Brazil, as a FLAS Undergraduate Fellow. His research interests include queer cultural production, international politics and digital activism. He is passionate about art, music, language, and social justice. In his free time, he likes to paint, spend time outdoors, and explore New Orleans. He plans to move forward in a career in critical journalism and media.

Hayley Woodward earned a joint Ph.D. in Art History and Latin American Studies. She earned her B.A. in Art History with Honors from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013, and received her M.A. in Art History from Tulane University in 2017. Her research explores Aztec and early colonial visual culture, specifically cartographic documents created in early New Spain by indigenous painter-scribes. Her dissertation examines questions of narrative, geography, and indigenous historiography as they pertain to the Codex Xolotl, a pictorial history painted in a prehispanic style within the early years of the colonial order. Her research has been supported by the Stone Center of Latin American Studies, the Newcomb Art Department, and the J.E. Land Fund.

I am a historian of post-colonial social and cultural history, particularly focused on the construction of identity within the context of everyday politics. At the same time, my work seeks to cross back and forth over the boundaries between social scientific and cultural analysis, to explore the interconnections between structure and imagining.

In my 2007 book, The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua (University of Nebraska Press), I analyzed how popular communities—both indigenous and non-indigenous—understood, negotiated and transformed the meaning of national identity through struggles over land, labor and ethnicity. The book’s exploration of quotidian social life and politics reveals how diverse economies, ethnicities, and geographies engendered multiple experiences of nation. These invigorated a new Nicaragua citizenry through a fragmentation of local community authority and autonomy, which laid the ground from which August Sandino and Anastasio Somoza would spring.

In 2010, I published Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place (Duke University Press), co-edited with Lowell Gudmundson. Based on an international conference held at Tulane University, the collection explore the history of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas, who came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since then, our book shows, people of African descent have constituted substantial parts of the nonindigenous populations in the region. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and political involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region‘€™s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821.

My current project, tentatively titled On Equal Grounds: Race and Empire in the Age of Manifest Destiny, is microhistory of the port of Greytown/San Juan del Norte—the eastern terminus of the Gold Rush-era transit route across Nicaragua. For centuries, explorers, politicians, scientists, and merchants dreamed of an interoceanic canal across Nicaragua. In 1848, this dream seemed on the verge of realization, when British forces claimed sovereignty over the port town of San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua, the transit route’s Atlantic starting point, rechristening it Greytown in honor of Jamaica’s then-governor. With the discovery of gold in California in 1849, the canal seemed even more urgent. Thousands of people make the trek through the isthmus; between 1850 and 1855, more than 80,000 people flooded across Nicaragua. As steamships began to arrive, Greytown evolved from a quiet village of a few dozen huts to a bustling town of hotels, stores, billiard halls, bars, storehouses, and the like. In 1852, as Americans poured in and Greytown began to challenge the Panamanian transit route, the British converted Greytown into a free port, with a constitution that provided universal manhood suffrage. The men of African descent—from the U.S., the Caribbean, and Nicaragua—who formed the town’s electoral majority, embraced this experiment in political freedom and opportunity. For pro-slavery travelers and observers, Greytown produced fevered visions of emancipation’s prospects in the U.S. By 1854, the collision of these forces led the United States to bombard and torch the entire port. Against the scholarship’s tendency to frame this as an episode in the “Southern dream of Caribbean empire” or an expression of white “othering,” this project uses a microhistorical approach that places the residents of Greytown at the center of debates on slavery, empire and social equality.

Dr. Alberto Cortes Ramos has a degree in Political Science from the University of Costa Rica. He received his M.A. in Development Studies from ISS in The Netherlands and his PhD in Geography from Loughborough University, England. He is a full professor at the schools of Political Science and Geography of the University of Costa Rica, as well as a researcher at the Center for Research and Political Studies, CIEP-UCR. He is currently the coordinator of the Central America Chair at the UCR.

His research interests are the following:

• Development, power and politics in Central America.
• Geopolitics, power and territoriality in Central America.
• Migration and development in Central America, with emphasis on the migratory dynamics between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, as a case of south-south migration.

At this moment, he is part of an interdisciplinary and intergenerational group of researchers that is developing a publication on Central America and the bicentennial, which will be celebrated this year. While at CIPR he will continue this research, exploring in particular the relationship between power, development and types of states in Central America, from a long-term perspective (1821-2021).

Elena Vanasse Torres [she/ella/ela] is a graduate of the MA program at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies and is a cultural worker in her community of Jayuya, central Puerto Rico. Prior to her time at Tulane University, she received a bachelor’s of science in biology & society with honors, and served as a Fulbright Fellow in Belém do Pará, Brazil (2020). Elena is currently working with territoriality and race in Latin America and is particularly interested in mapping land/sea-based (re)territorialization between Brazil and the Antilles. Her thesis research focuses on the impacts of protracted military occupation and environmental trauma facing Vieques, Puerto Rico and its effects on viequense cultural production. This work locates the social practice of resistencia as one that actively (re)maps the material and imaginative geographies of past colonial encounters. In her spare time she keeps a garden and dances.