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The relations between the Latin American states and their armed forces have been a special one at all times. In this region the military played and still plays a major political role. But the political role of the military has changed several times during the last century. These changes were forced by social movements, new patterns of thought, the USA or the Cuban Revolution. During the years, the military had different self-perceptions, which caused in a lot of interventions and military dictatorships. Today, it seems that democracy is well accepted throughout Latin America, but the military still has possibilities of influence.

Since 1986, when the immigration Reform and Control Act was passed, migration to the United States has grown steadily. This includes immigrants, nonimmigrants, undocumented immigrants, and border crossers. Immigration averaged nearly one million annually from 1990 to 2002, with family unification accounting for over 70 percent of the new immigrants. The number of nonimmigrants topped 30 million by 2002, most of whom were tourists. Estimates for undocumented aliens topped 400,000 by the turn of the 21st century, in spite of large increases in funding from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and substantial new positions along the Mexican-United States border. The exact number of border crossers is not known, but the federal government has noted that well over 200 million crossings (mostly along the Mexican border) are recorded each year. In response to tighter controls on migrants after 9/11 the numbers coming to the United States dropped in 2003. However, they increased again in 2004. It appears that the figures will increase in the future.

This chapter explores the “Constitutional Revolution” of the 1930s, as it played out beyond the walls of the U.S. Supreme Court. It argues that a radically revised historical memory of the Constitution accompanied the ascent New Deal liberalism. Prior core values associated with the Constitution's history, such as federalism and the sanctity of private property, were dramatically downgraded, while the civil liberties embodied in the Bill of Rights dramatically rose. By so redefining their historical memory of the Constitution, Americans could enjoy the active government that most desired while still celebrating the constitutional traditions of individual freedom and limited government.

This chapter offers a brief comparative and socio-educative overview of Latin America and the Caribbean, elaborated with the purpose of guiding reflection on the diversity of contexts that constitute the region. This overview highlights economic, social, political and cultural aspects that characterize the region and that, consequently, indicate points of departure and arrival for the design and implementation of educational policies aimed at satisfying the socio-historical needs of each of the Latin American countries.

This abbreviated study includes a systematic review and contrast of basic aspects of regional education systems, focused on achieving the formation of an integral citizen, capable of applying the acquired competencies in the resolution of problems that will prepare them for insertion in the labor market once their schooling is completed. In this sense, the countries and dependencies that integrate the Latin American and Caribbean region still face complex challenges closely related to the quality that educational services have achieved, in addition to the conditions of equality and equity so necessary to integrate the broad sectors of the population located on the thresholds of poverty and marginalization, of the secular horizon that has characterized the Latin American socioeconomic reality.

In this chapter, we have proposed that an important approach to understanding occupational stress and well-being among racial and ethnic minority workers is to integrate the occupational health disparities paradigm into work stress research. As such, the current chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of the existing literature on occupational health disparities for Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. Each of the three sections has highlighted the unique occupational health problems encountered by the specific racial and ethnic group as well as the research and policy gaps. We end with a series of recommendations for future research.

This chapter reviews the challenges facing educational research and knowledge production, in the independent post-Soviet Central Asia through examination of the case of Tajikistan. The chapter revisits issues discussed in Niyozov and Bahry (2006) on the need for research-based approaches to with these challenges, taking up Tlostanova’s (2015) challenge to see Central Asian educational history as repeated intellectual colonization, decolonization, and recolonization leading her to question whether Central Asians can think, or must simply accept policies and practices that travel from elsewhere. The authors respond by reviewing Tajikistan as representative in many aspects, if not all particulars, of the entire region. Part one of the review describes data sources, analyses, and our positionalities. Part two reviews decolonization in comparative, international, and development education and in post-Soviet education. Part three describes education research and knowledge production types and their key features. Thereafter, the authors discuss additional challenges facing Tajikistan’s and the region’s knowledge production and link them to the possibilities of decolonization discourse. The authors conclude by suggesting realistic steps the country’s scholars and their comparative international education colleagues may take to move toward developing both research capacity and decolonization of knowledge pursuits in Tajikistan and Central Asia.

Building on theories of adolescent learning, including cognitive, personal, social, and moral development, this chapter considers how using media literacy techniques to analyze a children’s television program can create wide-awake, active learners while dissecting media messages. By analyzing children’s television for its portrayal of race and ethnicity, this chapter will explore the role media play in children's understanding of people and cultures outside of their own. A textual analysis of episodes of Maya & Miguel, the chapter describes the depiction of several cultures found represented on the program including White, Asian, African, Dominican, and Mexican and how race, ethnicity, and culture is framed in the television program.

Some theories suggest that television is a primary tool in the socialization of children. Children are attracted to the animation in cartoons, the colors, the movement and the easy-to-follow simplicity of the dialogue. Given the impressionable nature of children, it is possible that they begin to act out the biased nature of the cartoons they watch. Thus, considering their vulnerability, information literacy is relevant to discerning media messages. In this way, information literacy converges with media literacy and visual literacy. Guiding children to interrogate what they view is critically important especially when they are at an age where they can be easily influenced by misinformation or dominant messages. Additionally, the volume of information is steadily increasing in the 21st century as are the modes for accessing, creating and manipulating information. Thus, this work will demonstrate how promoting participatory learning by objectively viewing media and exercising reflective thinking will be important components of children’s education in this millennium.

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promised to reduce inequalities in insurance coverage between Latinos and non-Latinos by expanding coverage, it also excluded a large portion of noncitizen immigrants. Past research has demonstrated that among Latinos, further inequalities have developed between citizens and noncitizens after the ACA took effect, but it is unclear if this pattern is unique to Latinos or is evident among non-Latinos as well. I use data from the 2011 to 2016 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) (n = 369,386) to test how the relationship between citizenship status (native citizen, naturalized citizen, or noncitizen) and insurance coverage changed after the ACA, adjusting for health, demographic, and socioeconomic factors. I disaggregate the analysis by ethnicity to test whether this change differs between Latinos and non-Latinos. The analysis finds that after the ACA, naturalized citizens across ethnic groups moved toward parity with native citizens in health insurance coverage while the benefits of the ACA for noncitizens were conditional on ethnicity. For non-Latinos, lacking citizenship became less disadvantageous for predicting insurance coverage while for Latinos, lacking citizenship became even more disadvantageous in predicting insurance coverage. This bifurcation among noncitizens by ethnicity implies that while the ACA has strengthened institutional boundaries between citizens and noncitizens, this distinction is primarily affecting Latinos. The conclusion offers considerations on how legal systems of stratification influence population health processes.

Past studies have shown that acculturation has been linked with media consumption (Shi, 2005; Shohat & Stam, 1996). Some risky health behaviors are associated with immigrants’ acculturation into the American society. In this study, we investigate the association between Latino adolescents’ recreational use of media with acculturation as related to risky health behaviors such as the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, the experience of getting sunburns, smoking, and drinking alcohol.

Regression models were run to analyze the Latino adolescent subsample (aged 12–17) of the 2009 California Health Interview Survey (Ponce et al., 2004).

The regression models show that weekend television and video gaming are significantly associated with the number of sunburns one had in the past year (incident rate ratio = 1.008, z = 2.73), and weekend recreational computer use is significantly associated with the number of cans of soda with sugar one drank during the previous day (incident rate ratio = 1.003, z = 2.09). The use of English for the interview, age, parents’ educational attainment, household size, and gender are also found to be associated with different acculturation-related risky health behaviors investigated in this study.

This study is the first to analyze media consumption’s association with sunburn among Latino adolescents. Our findings indicate that among Latino adolescents in the United States, a large amount of media consumption can lead to risky health behaviors that were not common in Latin America. Therefore, parents should heed possible behavioral consequences when they decide on the amount of media exposure children have.