Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Paper Title: "In Defense of Prince Saunders: African American Educator and Proponent of Emigration to Haiti, 1816-1839"

Abstract:
Thousands of free African Americans, mostly from cities in the north, made the decision in the first half of the nineteenth-century to leave the United States and resettle in the new republic of Haiti. For some, emigration permitted individuals and their families a chance to escape society in free states where harsh restrictions increasingly curtailed the liberties of African Americans. As a whole, emigration to Haiti in the nineteenth-century was the larger expression of African American activism in the United States. This paper looks at one of the earliest plans for African American emigration to Haiti through the efforts of Prince Saunders (1785? -1839) who demonstrates how Haiti and the revolution of 1791-1804 figured prominently in the minds of African Americans as the first nation in the western hemisphere to eradicate slavery and colonial rule. Haiti’s achievement openly posed a threat to slave societies who felt the consequences of the revolution in the spread of slave resistance and antislavery in the Americas. An analysis of Prince Saunders’ writings in the Haytian Papers, letters of correspondence with the British anti-slavery activist Thomas Clarkson, and speeches presented to audiences in the U.S., reveals Saunders' vision to help African Americans achieve a better life outside of the constraints of an oppressive society. Saunders' involvement in Haiti also challenges contemporary perceptions of him as a self-interested individual and instead, allows us to see his impact as an advocate and supporter of Haiti's independence.

Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: This paper addresses the historic links between American cartographic production and nineteenth-century images of westward migration. It argues that a number of American artists, who struggled to adapt aesthetic and intellectual modes of vision to their pictures of uncharted frontier spaces, were also largely informed by the ideologies of Manifest Destiny and a “golden age” in American cartography that effloresced in response to Western exploration and settlement.

Before the annexation of the expansive territories between the Mississippi River and California, many Euro-Americans already envisioned a nation that spanned the continent from Atlantic to Pacific. Lured by the promise of gold and new agricultural opportunities in lush California valleys, thousands of fortune-seekers consequently found themselves swept westward in a tide of emigration by mid-century. The urgent clamor for maps of the “new” regions - conceived initially as the “Great Desert” or simply as “Indian country” - spurred the rapid proliferation of cartographic firms, government surveys, and the publication of emigrant guides for navigation through the American southwest. This paper will argue that such maps and geographic texts, alongside the rhetoric of westward travel, in turn, fashioned the lens through which a number of American artists understood – visually and conceptually - the western interior. It will consider paintings by artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Emanuel Leutze, and John Gast within the context of the widely disseminated print and material culture of which they were a part. Such images - and the narratives that supported them – typically conveyed the westward journey as a linear itinerary - panoramic in scope and horizontal in format – from right to left and east to west . This paper will also consider the ways that these middle crossings over “empty” lands - already well populated by Native and Hispanic Americans - were conceived and articulated in such panoramic pictures.

Addressing a variety of pictorial works, from images on maps, powder horns, letter sheets, travel guides, and other printed ephemera, to monumental paintings and panoramic murals, this interdisciplinary paper examines the historical moment that led a number of American artists to view the picture plane as a map-like surface upon which to inscribe their images of emigration and travel across the American southwest. It, thus, reexamines nineteenth-century American landscape paintings of the frontier in terms of the visual and political context of cartography.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Economists and political scientists, often dazzled by the cases of the four Asian Tigers, overemphasize the centrality of education to economic success. In the aftermath of World War II, the Philippines had an educational infrastructure comparable to those of most developed countries and the country appeared to be on the verge of a new era of prosperity. But despite achieving high educational attainment rates, the Philippines was unable to absorb its educated population. Instead, the Philippine government focused on building institutions to facilitate the export of this surplus labor. This paper argues that the Philippine state built the labor export industry as it sought to appease the interests of the business elites who owned many of the private higher educational institutions while creating jobs to ease the political pressures coming from the educated unemployed. The Philippine state not only became active in creating the labor export industry, but it also expanded its capacity in education by developing more public universities and vocational schools that would produce graduates who would be absorbed into the domestic labor market. As labor export grew, business interests in private overseas recruitment agencies, the remittances industry, households, and the government became dependent on the foreign exchange from migrant remittances for their financial survival.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Immigration scholars have studied how host country religious institutions try to manage the challenge of immigrants’ heterogeneity by integrating them into the host society in ways that will attenuate, if not erase, the distinctions between natives and foreigners. What this scholarship misses is that institutions in migrant source countries face the challenge of heterogeneity from a radically different perspective. How can they avoid the disintegration of their communities when emigrants become foreigners and return with the cultural baggage acquired in a more heterogeneous environment? These two conflicting imperatives can exist within the same religious organization in sending and receiving countries. This paper examines the Catholic Church, which has been studied as a transnational organization linking migrants across nation-state lines, but whose nationalist aspect has not been analyzed in the growing literature on migration and religion. I describe and explain the development of the Mexican Catholic Church’s stance towards emigration and emigrants from 1920 to 2004 both in formal policy statements and actual practices in Los Altos de Jalisco – the core of the historic migrant sending region. Based on 18 months of archival research and interviews with priests, I argue that the Church is an effective institutional promoter of reactive Mexican nationalism precisely because its transnational organization and universal human rights discourse free it to move with migrants across nation-state boundaries.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Development scholars, heavily informed by the cases of the four Asian Tigers, have attributed success in development to education and domestic political institutions. Although the Philippines looked even more promising than the Asian Tigers before they began developing, the country has not become a development success. Instead of furthering development, educational and political advances in the Philippines have led to an enormous exodus of labor. Failing to utilize its highly educated labor force in the domestic economy, the state focused its attention on exporting its workers by creating a set of elaborate institutions to facilitate overseas employment. Why did the Philippine government develop institutions for exporting labor rather than focus its energy on building the domestic economy? This puzzle can be understood in terms of the intimate connection between the capacity of the state to control the educational system, labor export and economic development. This paper argues that the dominance of private tertiary educational institutions coupled with limited employment opportunities in the domestic labor market are important factors in determining why the Philippine state had to take an active role in exporting its educated labor force.