| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation examines the history of Pan-Americanism and international education to understand the geopolitics of U.S.-Latin American educational cooperation during the twentieth century. Specifically, it considers how U.S. and Latin American university officials, policymakers, businesspeople, and students used hemispheric educational cooperation to their advantage in a variety of ways: to advance national and regional efforts at economic development, to benefit personally from the U.S. economic empire by working for U.S. businesses and firms in Latin America, and to gain international recognition and prestige. In doing so, the dissertation reveals the origins of Latin American Studies (LAS) at U.S. southern universities, tracing the rise of LAS programs at institutions such as Tulane, Louisiana State University, the University of Florida, and the University of Miami. It argues that debates over hemispheric educational cooperation were rooted in larger questions about the role of U.S. imperial power in Latin America. For many Latin American policymakers and educational officials, participating in Pan-Americanism—the hegemonic framework for educational cooperation during the first three decades of the twentieth century—offered a way to define the limits of U.S. power in the region. By using Pan-American conferences as a platform for criticizing issues such as U.S. intervention in the Caribbean and policies such as the Monroe Doctrine, Latin American policymakers challenged U.S. power and positioned their own nations as leaders. While these historical actors interacted with Pan- Americanism in many different contexts, educational relations represented a particularly active domain for these debates about U.S. imperialism and influence over U.S.-Latin American relations. The dissertation begins with the rise of anti-imperialist Latin American student movements in the early twentieth century, traces Pan-Americanism’s rise in popularity and hegemonic influence during the interwar years, and then examines the emergence of alternative forms of transnational Latin American educational cooperation following with the creation of the Union of Latin American Universities and UNESCO in the late 1940s. It ends by considering how decades of anti-imperialist student movements in Latin America influenced LAS within the United States and discusses the continued attempts of the United States to establish hegemony within inter-American educational cooperation. | |
