New K-12 Resources in Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Update No. 83, December, 2000
Nan Volinsky, Outreach Coordinator
On the Web
When roads are built in rainforests, loggers, miners, and settlers flood the area, and the rainforests near the road are quickly destroyed. What will be the future of the Peruvian rainforests, now that a Trans-Oceanic Highway is being built? The National Geographic Society and National Public Radio offer an audio presentation called “Peru's Trans-Oceanic Highway and the Rainforest.” This presentation aired on the NPR/National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions program on November 27 and 28, 2000. After clicking on the audio link, the listener is taken on a new road through Peru's Amazonian rainforest. A team of scientists funded by the National Geographic Society has been studying the side effects of road building in this part of Peru. NPR Science Correspondent John Nielsen recently joined them for a six-day road trip. You can listen as Nielsen, in the first of two Radio Expeditions, travels with the research team down a badly degraded one-lane dirt road, visiting an isolated farming village and a badly polluted gold mine in the rainforest. In Part Two of the Expedition, the team reaches the nearly finished Trans-Oceanic Highway. Nielsen speaks with various Peruvians living near this new road, and then talks about possible solutions with Anton Seimen and Peter Zahler, co-leaders of the expedition.
At the web address above, you can find other Radio Expeditions programs on Latin American and Caribbean countries. For example, “Guatemala's Living Wetlands” is another program that can be heard on the web. For over a decade, Conservation International (CI) has combed the world for what it calls biological hot spots. These are places where the diversity of flora and fauna is unusually rich. This program joins the listener with a CI team of international wildlife biologists on a Rapid Assessment Program, or RAP, to the largest wetland in Central America. Located in the Petén region of northern Guatemala, it is both rich in species and under great pressure from colonization and oil exploration.
CALLIOPE is a World History Magazine for readers ages 9-14. Published by Cobblestone, Calliope won the 1998 Golden Lamp Award of the Educational Press of America. Each issue centers on an exciting and colorful theme that enhances your students' understanding of their world. Topics featured in CALLIOPE cover framework-mandated subjects in a way no textbook can. Each 52-page, full-color issue offers articles that broaden the young reader's understanding of a particular theme. Maps, time lines, meaningful illustrations, and art from major museums enrich each issue. Other features such as "Fun With Words," "Past is Present," and "Digging Up the Past," also gain the interest of young readers. No two issues are alike and readers respond enthusiastically by contributing their poems, letters, and art, as well as their contest entries, to upcoming issues of CALLIOPE. Click on the monthly issue to obtain a free Summary and Lesson Plan (when available).
From the people at Retanet (Resources for Teaching about the Americas) come photographs of Latin America and the Caribbean, donated by the photographers themselves. Permission is granted for one-time non-commercial educational use only. If you would like to publish them or use them in a commercial context, you can contact the photographers for permission at retanet@ladb.unm.edu. Go to the gallery to access photographs that were shot in the Central Highlands of Guatemala in 1983. These photographs document market stands, market activity, and the people in Chichicastenango, el Quiché and Panajachel, Lago de Atitln, and Solola. This photographic section of Retanet will be expanded as additional images are gathered.
The Resource Center of the Americas, a not-for-profit human rights organization, added the Mexican Labor News and Analysis (MLNA) to their web page. The MLNA is produced in collaboration with the Authentic Labor Front (Frente Auténtico del Trabajo) of Mexico and the United Electrical Workers of the United States
PBS Online is offering "Conquistadors: An Online Learning Adventure," designed to parallel an upcoming PBS documentary, "In the Footsteps of the Conquistadors." This documentary will air in the spring, 2001. In addition to lesson plans, activities, and articles, the site provides an exploration of the clash between the Old and New World cultures, and looks at how these events have shaped and continue to shape life in the modern world.
Click on the links at the Economist Newspaper that take you to Latin America. This site lists nearly eight links to the news articles and analyses written by Economist staff reporters in the previous 30 days. These articles are available to non-subscribers. A side frame on this page offers up to 30 daily online articles from such news agencies as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the BBC, and the Miami Herald.
The Global Gazetteer is a directory that locates and identifies nearly three million cities and towns around the world. Locales are organized by country and linked to a map for each place. Included are Google search engine links to internet sites related to each city or town.
Latin American Newsletters is “the world’s leading source of economic and political information on Latin America since 1967.” The home page lists 7 links to free reports and articles written during the previous 30 days. A side frame lists further links for special reports, such as “Political and Economic Risk in Latin America” and “The Internet in Latin America: Investigating the Boom.”
Another source for online news is CNN. This page offers a list of up to 25 current-day news stories, and contains news from under-reported Latin American and Caribbean countries and islands, such as French Guiana and St. Lucia. You can also access this list of links for the previous 5 days.
The Information Services Latin America is a professional news and reference service that provides a comprehensive overview of U.S. and British media coverage on Latin America as it happens. ISLA offers feature coverage, current events, project information, and links. Feature coverage focuses on a different Latin American or Caribbean country. Its current feature deals with Brazil and offers links to such articles on the Landless Workers Movement, the World Bank and its impact on the Agrarian Reform in Brazil, and the WTO and its impact on the Brazilian Amazon. There is an Action Alert link that describes for instance how Northern Brazil has been hit by one of the most severe droughts in recent memory. There is information for you and your students to learn how to help.
The link for current events takes you to a concise and critical overview of current events in Latin America as covered by U.S. and British press on a monthly basis. ISLA's mission is to promote a more equitable relationship between North and South by providing greater access to the U.S. public record on Latin America. ISLA pursues this mission by serving the information needs of academic institutions and non-profit advocacy, activist, and educational organizations throughout the Americas. Every month, ISLA online offers approximately 350 pages of carefully selected articles from nine major English-language news sources, organized in a convenient, user-friendly format. Subscribers can order the full service, a regional service (Caribbean, Central America, Andean, or Río de la Plata), a customized configuration of countries, or an individual country. ISLA can provide these press profiles dating back to 1970, upon request. For subscription information, contact Karen Crump at isla@lmi.net or by telephone at (510) 559-8796. Ask for your free sample.
The Bookstore at the Resource Center of the Americas has screened existing titles to find the best books for multicultural educators and their students. Books can be searched by author, country, title, or by such subjects as Agriculture, Aztecs, Development, Drug war, Economics, Environment, Fair trade, Folktales, Food, Migrant workers, Rain forests, and U.S. intervention.
At the Hispanic American Index Periodical, you can check citations, save them to a bibliography ordered alphabetically or by chronology, and have your bibliography emailed to you.
The Latin America Data Base produces four on-line news digests, which are distributed by e-mail, or which can be picked up at its website with a password. Each contains articles on topics not readily covered by US media. Recently LADB has begun archiving Latin American publications as well. Each article is archived in LADB's searchable database.
LADB writers read and interpret source materials (in Spanish, Portuguese and English) to produce original articles. This is a process of translating, checking sources for accuracy, rewriting, combining and interpreting source information. Numerous Latin American and international news and scholarly sources are used by LADB's professional journalists to produce original articles and analysis for LADB. LADB also prints articles produced by special arrangement by reporters in Latin America. You may also subscribe to a searchable archive of all articles written for LADB since 1986. The four on-line news digests are SourceMex, NotiSur, NotiCen, and the new CubaSource.
The Economic & Political News & Analysis of Mexico (SourceMex) focuses on Mexican economic issues such as investment, agriculture, policy revisions and initiatives, debt, petroleum industry, the environment, macro-level political developments and social issues. Published on Wednesdays, SourceMex places particular emphasis on developments and analysis of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade issues, including matters related to the U.S.-Mexico border such as transportation and the maquiladora industry.
The South American Political and Economic Affairs (NotiSur) contains news, summaries and analysis on a variety of political, economic, and social issues in South America. NotiSur covers regional peace processes and "democratization," including topics such as political parties and elections, governmental reform and judicial issues, political violence and human rights, military issues, and regional economic stories such as trade integration. Weekly headlines from the NotiSur news bulletin are published electronically every Friday.
The Central American and Caribbean Political and Economic Affairs (NotiCen) offers information and analysis about regional economic integration, economic liberalization, and the impact on the environment, labor, politicization and income distribution in the countries of the region. Cuba and the non-English speaking Caribbean countries are also covered in this newsletter. NotiCen is published on Thursdays.
The Political and Economic Affairs of Cuba (CubaSource) was launched in May 2000 in addition to the Cuba content in NotiCen, to offer more information about Cuba's politics, economic changes, human rights, and international relations. This bulletin is currently available for free to all readers.
Video
“Gender and Globalization” was the theme of the fifth UI Area Center Joint Symposium (April 13-15, 2000). This conference provided a thematic platform of intellectual and practical interest, giving rise to lively presentations concerning Western and non-Western feminisms, North-South dialogues and divisions, and the political economy of global capitalism. The outreach component of the Gender and Globalization conference was a two-hour VHS tape of the Keynote Address by Amrita Basu, "Mapping Transnational Women’s Movements: Globalizing the Local, Localizing the Global," and a local high-school educator, who utilized the address to develop academic courses for grades 9-12. The video was produced by the UI College of Engineering, who up-linked it through the Illinois Satellite Network. This Network is a consortium of community colleges, three regional library systems, and institutions of higher education. Each of these target sites were able to down-link the video from the satellite, make a copy of it, put the copy in their library, and share it with their constituents in service areas. High-school teachers may also request a broadcast quality copy of the video from the UI College of Engineering.
In Print
FACES: World Cultures are booklets for readers ages 9-14. FACES have been published on the Incas, Puerto Rico, Rainforest People of Peru, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and People of the Argentinean Pampas. For example, the FACES April 2000 Pampas issue asks students to draw a map of Argentina and identify the countries that surround it. Using textbooks, the map on page 4-5, and other materials, you can ask them to identify the other main regions of Argentina and their climates. Have them study and draw the national flag. Using information they can find from The World Factbook 1999 or Destination Argentina, ask them to translate the information on percentages of land use, ethnic groups, and religions into pie charts. Ask the class to compare the Pampas to the grass lands of the Great Plains in the U.S. Why do they think people prefer to live in the Pampas rather than in the highlands or mountain regions? Compare the climate of the Pampas with that of your region.