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Until recently, most North Americans thought of Central America as the land of bananas and exotic vacations. Today, government, media, and public concern are focused on the region's instability and the United States' role in it. This “crisis” in Central America has generated a barrage of publications. Perhaps an appropriate title for this article would have been “Central America: Crisis in the Library.” The growing number of publications on Central America is matched by growing demand for them in both public and academic libraries. This bibliography will help librarians build an adequate and balanced collection on Central America without having to locate and examine each book.

With the success of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 and the ensuing Reagan Doctrine of the 1980's, Central America has become an area of much debate in the United States. Despite its renewed visibility in the media, a comprehensive understanding of the region and of the serious issues faced by its people is still lacking. The need for timely and accurate information on Central America is made clear by such indicators as:

Central America is exposed to a variety of natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and floods. The region, located on four connected tectonic plates with 24 active volcanoes and in the path of hurricanes, has experienced 348 major disasters from 1981 to 2010, resulting in 29,007 deaths and US$16.5 billion in direct economic losses. Therefore, all six Central American countries rank among the top 35 countries in the world at high mortality risk from multiple hazards. The countries in this region, including Costa Rica, began paying attention to the disaster risk management (DRM) initiative recently, after Tropical Storm and Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which was the region’s worst catastrophe of the century. After the devastation by Mitch, several local DRM capacity development projects were implemented in the region. By reviewing these project profiles of local DRM implemented in the region, this chapter identifies outcomes, lessons, and challenges of DRM at the local scale, from Mitch to the present, as a baseline for incorporating climate disaster risk reduction into local development planning.

The support of host country nationals (HCNs) is critical for expatriate adjustment and performance. Drawing from social identity theory and self-categorization theory, this study investigates the antecedents of HCNs' support toward expatriates in Central/South America, focusing on cultural similarities and expatriate race.

We conducted a quasi-experimental study to understand the antecedents that promote the willingness of HCNs to offer required support to expatriates. Data were gathered from 117 Latin American participants, who were asked to respond to questions about their perceptions of expatriates from the USA and their willingness to offer support to those expatriates.

Overall, our findings suggest that HCNs are likely to provide support to expatriates when they perceive the expatriates as similar in terms of culture and race. Specifically, African Americans received more positive attitudes and support than White Americans in South/Central America. The effect of cultural similarity on HCN willingness to support expatriates was mediated by perceived trustworthiness.

The present study extends the research on HCN support to expatriates, to Central/South America, an important region that has been under-studied in the expatriate–HCN context. Another novel feature of our study is that we investigate the role of expatriate race and cultural similarity and illuminate the underlying mechanism of the relationship between expatriate race and HCN support.

This chapter examines the lives of Central American immigrant workers, with a focus on the paramount position of legal status in immigrants’ lives.

The legal context into which Central American immigrant workers arrive creates the various legal statuses they hold, which in turn dictate the kind of jobs they can obtain, where they live and, in general, shape their prospects in the United States. Although many Central Americans have held various forms of temporary protection from deportation, such relief is temporary and therefore subject to multiple extensions, applications, forms, and renewals, which serve to accentuate these immigrants’ legal uncertainty. Given their legal predicament and the consequent truncated paths to mobility, many Central American immigrant workers live in poverty; indeed, they are more likely to live in poverty than other foreign born. At the same time, they have high labor force participation rates. Their high rates of poverty coupled with high labor force participation rates indicate that their jobs do not pay much. In spite of these circumstances, they remit a significant portion of their earnings to their non-migrating family members in the origin countries.

The largely unchanged occupational and sectorial concentrations of Central Americans in the U.S. economy over the last two decades underscores the critical implications of legal status for immigrant incorporation and socioeconomic mobility.

This chapter exposes the vulnerabilities imposed by a precarious legal status and highlights the importance of more secure legal statuses for immigrant workers’ potential integration and paths to mobility.