HIS 115 Cuyamaca College NACLA Report on the Americas Paper

/in /by

History 115—section 7440

Spring semester 2020

Professor Oscar Cañedo

Guidelines for NACLA assignment #1

For this assignment, you are to read current news articles about Latin America from the website for the North American Congress of Latin America (NACLA) and submit 3 short reviews during the semester. Please submit one review per due date. Each review is to be at least 3-4 pages and each due date corresponds to a regional topic in Latin America. I’ll explain further later in these instructions. The due dates for these reports are April 17 and May 8 . Here are the regional topics corresponding to each due date:

  • April 17: North and Central American and the Caribbean region (Mexico, US-Mexico border, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, or Panama)

  • May 8: South America ( Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, or the Guianas)

To find your article of choice, go to the General Forum and find my thread about North and Central America and the Caribbean. I have collected several articles ranging from early 2019 to April 2020. Pick any of the articles from that list, you don’t need to notify me, just pick any article and start working on your review.

Please submit your reports through Canvas in either of the following formats: doc, docx or PDF (if you are using Apple Pages to compose your review, please be sure to convert your paper to docx or PDF before submitting it). Late papers will be accepted for each submission, but only for one week after the assigned due dates and will be assessed a full grade deduction. Please use both a title page and a works cited page (neither of these pages count toward your 3-4 pages of text). These 2 reports will count as a combined 25% toward your final grade. In your works cited page, compose your article entry in a format like this:


Nidia Bautista, “Justice for Lesvy: Indifference and Outrage in Response to Gender Violence in Mexico City,” NACLA Report on the Americas website (July 31, 2017).

In terms of the content of each report, I am looking for two main points of discussion. First, you should devote the first half of the report to a summary of the main points in the article that you selected. To help you to address this issue, consider some of these questions: What is the main issue being discussed? (i.e. immigration, elections, education, environment, women’s issues, crime, etc.) Who are the main personalities mentioned in the article? (i.e. Enrique Peña Nieto, Nicolás Maduro, Mauricio Macri, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Jair Bolsonaro, President Trump, Secretary of State Pompeo, etc.) How does the issue affect the people of the country mentioned in the article? Does the issue have any connection with United States interests? In other words, please try to be as objective as possible during this portion of the assignment.

And for the second point of discussion, please analyze the article that you selected and present your point of view on the story. For example, how do you feel about the story? How did this article contribute to your understanding about modern Latin America or the Americas in general? And what do you think about the author’s perspective on the article?