Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies

of A thesis presented to ABSTRACT This project explores how corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns are creating new forms of governmentality through partnerships formed between multinational corporations, government institutions, non governmental organizations (NGOs), and not for profit organizations. By focusing on one multinational corporation, the Coca-Cola Company, and utilizing Gramsci's understanding of hegemony and Foucault's concept of "field[s] of intervention," this project argues four main points: 1.) CSR initiatives are part of a broader initiative to bolster legitimacy for free market policies by attempting to incorporate social concerns. The result of CSR initiatives has been the creation of new forms of governmentality. 2.) The Coca-Cola Company utilizes corporate sanctioned studies, technology, and institutional research to create an image of social responsibility. This 'top down' approach serves the following functions: to gain

Authors: Jose Cruz and Jackie Hayes

As of 2002, only nine states collected racial data on voter registration forms, in six out of the nine states the provision of information about race is optional. This report provides a comparative analysis of electoral data collection practices in Alabama, California, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania with the purpose of making recommendations that will improve electoral data collection in New York. The working assumption
of this research is that electoral data collection by race and ethnicity is justifiable, fair, and necessary. Provisions about the collection of racial
data have been primarily established to aid efforts to identify needs and target services for minority communities, as well as to track discriminatory practices.

The risks associated with data collection by race and ethnicity in terms of privacy and governmental abuse are minimal, even in cases where racial and ethnic identification is required rather than optional. California was the most recent example of a state adopting a provision to collect racial data on voter registration forms. The state’s experience illustrates that the change has a minimal fiscal impact.

After comparing the experiences of four states that collect racial data, it seems apparent that New York State should also collect racial data on voter registration forms. The state should emulate California but take its initiative one-step further by requiring rather than requesting citizens to specify their racial/ethnic background on the state voter registration form. The collection of data by race and ethnicity will allow researchers to better gauge voter registration and turnout in the state. With this information efforts to promote voting would be more effective. Policymakers will be better able to monitor and regulate the electoral process to insure the highest degree of participation by citizens. Political parties and civic organizations will be in a better position to mobilize voters. Finally, the collection of electoral data by race and ethnicity will safeguard not just minority voting rights but the rights of all voters as well.

Authors: Jose Cruz and Jackie Hayes

According to the New York State Workforce Investment Board, “Between 1993 and 2005, while New York State’s total labor force grew by 10%, the number of minorities within it grew dramatically.” Latinos in the state’s labor force grew in numbers by 61% during this period compared to 22% for blacks and only 3% for non-Hispanic whites. From these proportions it follows that workforce development efforts in the state should pay special attention to minority workers, especially Latinos. Therefore, in this report, we assess the degree to which available resources in this area are being used to service this group of workers.

Puerto Rican officials revealed that, given the depressed economy, the government could never generate the revenues required to pay the staggering $73 billion debt. They warned that without federal assistance Puerto Rico would soon face a profound humanitarian crisis that the insular government was incapable of managing. The federal government’s response was the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, popularly known by its acronym, PROMESA. The law, signed by President Obama on June 30, 2016, authorizes the president of the United States to appoint a financial control board with extraordinary powers and with a mandate to enforce measures to compel Puerto Rico to repay its creditors. According to the law, the financial control board “holds supremacy over any territorial law or regulation that is inconsistent with the Act or Fiscal reform plans.”

, he (Governor Rafael HenWldez Col6n) skipped the year-end fiestas that fill Puerto Rican plazas to stroll alone on the Scottish moors and contemplate the narrowness of his recent re-election. There he reached a mOIDCitOOS decision: to call for a plebiscite (oow set for 1991) to decide whether Puerto Rico sOOuld declare iOOependence, become the 51st. state, or retain albeit in a more precisely defined and updated fonn-its singular status as a Commonwealth.

While the world's attention focuses on the economic crisis in Greece, another financial debacle looms closer to home for the United States. Puerto Rico is now being called "the next financial catastrophe," and the territory's outstanding debt is being compared to that of Greece. Financial pundits are rushing to declare that both Greece and Puerto Rico are on the verge of financial collapse. Perhaps the Puerto Rican government, like the Greek government, bears some responsibility for its financial crisis. But a closer look shows how the Greek and Puerto Rican cases are very different. Moreover, Puerto Rico's fiscal woes cannot be resolved independently by its government.

In the summer of 1H98 the United States allaim•d its long-standing goal of acquiring strategic insular possessions in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Moreover, with its decisive defeat of Spain, U.S. expansionists could rightly claim that their nation had achieved imperial status. But the United States not only appropriated far-flung exotic islands but ~dso claimed sovereignty over approximately 10 million inhabitants of the lands ceded by Spain 1 The sobering question that confronted the United States after the euphorL! of military victory was the legal status and political rights of these subject peoples. Eventually it devised a complicated structure of laws that prescribed a distinctive citizenship status for the subjects of each of its territorial possessions (Smith, 1997: 428). While the inhabitants of the territories were all perceived to he so racially and culturally different as to justify their permanent exclusion from the American polity, U.S. empire builders believed that effective colonial rule required that they be Americanized. Colonial administrations embarked on ambitious campaigns to transform the legal systems and codes of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines and to install a program of universal public education of which English-language instruction was the cornerstone. While Americanization, or the colonizing mission, \Yas never a coherent policy, it die! identify the general outlines of the institutional transform~ttion and political change that the colonial governors were expected to undertake. Colonial officials were permitted. indeed expected, to modify the content of the Americanization programs to adjust to local conditions. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the methods and goals of the colonizing mission in Puerto Rico during the first thirty years of U.S. rule. I document the contradictions inherent in the mission, some of the more 115