The Afro-Cuban Religious Complex (ARC), developed in Cuba, where the material used in their rituals was obtained trough different sources. However, the concept of a centralized store of religious goods, called bótanicas, for the ARC did not develop in Cuba alongside the religion. The reasons for the absence of these stores in Cuba until the early 1990s is explored via personal interviews with members of the ARC, participant observation, 200 questionnaires distributed in Cuba and Miami, and anchored in scholarly works about the psychology and economics of migration, as well as in those concerned with religious anthropology and sociology. Results… ... [Learn More]

This dissertation offers an ethnographic account of how indigenous Kichwa tour guides in Napo, Ecuador, the vast majority of whom are young men, negotiate the demands and expectations of the ecotourism industry and how, in the process, they produce and enact new understandings of their ethnic, gendered, and sexual identities. These new understandings are reproductive of outsiders’ expectations and fantasies about indigenous Amazonians, as well as personally and culturally meaningful. I engage with a variety of anthropological literatures, including the anthropology of race and gender, the anthropology of indigenous Amazonia, the anthropology of tourism and sex tourism, and the more… ... [Learn More]

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS THE MANGO SNORES by Michael S. Garcia Florida International University, 2021 Miami, Florida Professor John Dufresne, Major Professor Set in Miami at the start of the twenty-first century, THE MANGO SNORES is a seriocomic crime novel chronicling a week in the life of Sam Espada, Cuban-American writing professor and author of the Mango series of detective fiction. Reeling from the sudden dissolution of his marriage and the abject failure of his latest book, Sam finds himself embroiled in a plot right out of one of his novels when his newest pupil, private investigator Leonard Cobb, is… ... [Learn More]