The multiple factors that have driven a migrant exodus from Central America over the past 10 years will be considered at Windham World Affairs Council's talk with Latin America expert Dr. Sarah Osten on Thursday, March 21, at 6:30 p.m. at 118 Elliot, 118 Elliot St.
The event is co-sponsored by the Community Asylum Seekers Project (CASP). Executive Director Liv Berelson describes CASP as "a nonprofit founded in 2016 that supports asylum seekers in the Brattleboro area. We provide lodging, food, healthcare, employment placement, and legal support to newly arrived asylum seekers. More than half of CASP's clients are from the Northern Triangle region."
According to Berelson, a former student of Osten, "Sarah deeply understands the complex and interwoven factors behind why people from this region are seeking asylum in and migrating to the U.S., and the U.S.'s role in creating these factors."
Homemade empanadas will be available made by a CASP client who came from Honduras with her two children several years ago. She hopes to one day have her own restaurant or food truck, and enjoys cooking and baking.
To explore why so many people in the Northern Triangle region of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have chosen to flee to the U.S., this talk examines long-term political and social histories of the region, which have included U.S. interventionism, and the long-term social, political, and economic legacies of violent Cold War conflicts that Central Americans are still living with today.
Among others, these include the effectively unchecked spread of organized crime and street gangs in the region, themselves the products of an earlier migrant exodus to the U.S., and then a mass deportation.
Osten is a historian of Latin America and an associate professor at the University of Vermont, specializing in 20th-century Mexico. She is the director of graduate studies in the UVM history department, as well as the director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program. In recent years she has served as a Spanish-English interpreter for detained asylum seekers as well as a Mexico country conditions expert for asylum cases. She holds a doctorate in history and a master's in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, both from the University of Chicago. Her bachelor's degree is from Brown University.
As the sole historian of Latin America at UVM, Osten teaches on a variety of Latin American topics and countries, from the ancient world to the present. In addition to introductory courses on Latin American history, she teaches courses on topics including revolutions, authoritarianism, indigenous history, history and memory, drugs and drug trafficking, and modern Mexican history.
Her newest teaching project is an interdisciplinary immigration justice program and course sequence.
This event is free to the public, but a $10 donation is suggested. Registration is encouraged at WWACmigration.eventbrite.com. A Zoom link is available upon registering for those unable to attend in person.
This Town and Village item was submitted to The Commons.