Modern Latin America

INSTRUCTIONS FOR RESEARCH PAPER:

1. Read Skidmore, Smith, and Green chapters 12 and 13. Please read slowly and carefully; these chapters are not your regular narrative, but more about terminology and concepts that are used to explain some of the cycles and events that happen in this region.
2. Choose a country in the Latin America-Caribbean region. Try to make it one of the countries that have been well studied, such as Mexico, Argentina, Cuba; stay away from nations such as Paraguay or Bolivia.
3. The authors discuss several economic-political frameworks in the above chapters, and your first task is to understand their definitions and characteristics:
   1. Liberalism
   2. ISI
   3. Socialism
   4. Neo-liberalism
4. For the country that you chose, which ones do you consider having been (a) the most successful and (b) the least successful, and why do you think this was so? For example, you should ask yourself whether neo-liberalism has been most successful in addressing the economic and political problems of Mexico or Cuba, or whichever country you chose. In writing your response you should consider only the period between the late 19^th century and the 21^st.
5. Paper should be 4 pages in length, regular margins, 1.5 space, 12 pt. font Times New Roman.
6. Since this is a research paper, you are expected to use sources other than the textbook. In using these sources, you are also expected to cite them properly, Turabian/Chicago style. Please use RefWorks when looking for your outside sources, since the program will do the formatting for you. Please use footnotes (rather than endnotes) to indicate where you obtained your information. MS Word does footnotes (find References in the menu bar; Insert Footnote is one of the commands). No bibliography is necessary, as long as you reference all your sources fully by giving author’s name, full title of book, publisher, and year of publication, plus the page where you found the information you are using.
7. Google and Wikipedia are not scholarly sources. You may use them to clarify general concepts and timelines, or to locate other sources. As usual, the reference librarians (particularly Prof. Richard Kearney) will be your most valuable allies in finding other sources.
8. Remember that your paper should focus on answering the questions above, not on giving general historical background on the specific country.