Lauren Romaguera is a Ph.D. candidate at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. As a Miami native and daughter of Cuban exiles, she has been surrounded by Latin culture all her life and feels personally invested in transnationalism, issues of social justice, migration, and the identity politics of marginalized communities. She earned her B.A. in Literature in 2013 from Florida International University, where she explored parallel themes of the exilic experience. She began teaching Philosophy at a middle school soon after and implored her students to think critically and be active members of society. She completed her Master’s degree in Literature, as she worked as a graduate instructor teaching classes on Composition/Rhetoric and Social Justice. Her thesis, entitled “Identification Through Movement: Dance as the Embodied Archive of Memory, History, and Cultural Identity,” explores dance as a conduit of history, supplying multiple tellings of history and historiography. During her graduate career she was an active member of many university and community projects. She co-founded and ran the Sanctuary Campus division of her university, was nominated Vice President of the Women’s Studies Organization, and was a research volunteer for the Cuban Research Institution. For her doctoral research she seeks to further problematize hegemonic tellings of history through the performativity of cultural memory in a Caribbean context.

I am an economist that studies Latin American growth and development. In particular, I have recently been studying how public policy related to public infrastructure investment affects the distribution of wealth and income in Mexico and Paraguay. When governments build more roads, highways, and water systems, how are households in various quintiles of the income distribution affected? Along with my co-authors on several published journal articles on this topic, we have found that the answers depend on how infrastructure investment is financed (by income taxes, by consumption taxes, by government borrowing, etc.). We generally find that poorer households may benefit significantly in terms of income and welfare, but that richer households may also benefit, in some cases, comparatively by even more.

In previous published research, I have also analyzed the effects of public infrastructure on aggregate economic growth in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. I had found that there is a positive effect, but this positive effect may diminish and even turn negative with excessive investment. All the Latin American countries mentioned were well below the threshold, so improving their infrastructure would lead to higher growth rates.

I have also written on the effects of the financial system on growth, poverty reduction and inequality in Latin America. As the banking and financial system was expanded in Latin America, in some countries to a larger degree than in others, those countries grew. Some of the middle income quintiles benefited, but not the poorest which lacked access to the banking and other financial services. Hence, access to financial services is a key issue for the poorest households in the region. Related to this, I am more recently working on how micro finance institutions fulfill dual objectives of profit and social outreach.

For many years, I served as the director of the PhD and masters programs in economics at my previous institution, Georgia State University. I teach a seminar course on Latin American development, as well as macroeconomics and global economics courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

Thomas Reese has been with the Stone Center since 1999 as Executive Director. His scholarship and publications include studies of eighteenth-century Spanish art and politics, culture contact in sixteenth-century Mexico, devotional space in Colonial Andean society, and contemporary architectural practice in Europe and America. His most recent research focuses on images and identity in turn of the century Argentina and Mexico. Previous to coming to Tulane, he served as Deputy Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and taught at the University of Texas at Austin. As Executive Director, he is responsible for overseeing all academic and administrative functions of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. In addition, he also teaches courses in art history in the Art Department.