Nara Milanich is a historian at Barnard College. Her work centers on the comparative histories of family, gender, childhood, reproduction, law, and social inequality.  She is the author of 3 books: Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850-1930 (Duke University Press, 2009), The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2013), and most recently Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019).  In this episode, Milanich talks about the shift from cultural to biological definitions of paternity thanks to DNA testing and how such testing could either be used to recover kids stolen by military dictatorships or to halt migration at the US-Mexico border. She also explains age-based violence suffered by migrant children in Central America. Family is a crucial lens to understand inequality, she says as she discusses how family law was used in nineteenth century Chile to preserve social hierarchies. Civil law forbade paternity searches, thereby creating kinless children who often ended being used as unpaid domestic labor. Milanich concludes speaking on the role of youth in contemporary Chilean protests and how this is tied to the impact of for-profit education, as part of the market-based model that is currently being questioned.

Unpacking Latin America

Interview: Historian Nara Milanich

 Daniel Alarcon is a professor of Broadcast Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the creator of RADIO AMBULANTE, an award-winning Spanish-language podcast on NPR. He has also written for Harpers, The New York Magazine, The New Yorker and Etiqueta Negra and published two novels: Lost City Radio and At Night We Walk in Circles. Alarcon talks about how growing up in a Peruvian household in Birmingham, Alabama shaped his work in radio journalism and his writing in both Spanish and English, including The New Yorker piece he wrote on Peru, the 2018 World Soccer Cup, the suicide of former president Alan Garcia amidst a corruption scandal, and Peru’s current political crisis before its 2020 elections. Join us as he shares stories about his Spanish radio program and the type of Latin American stories he's working on and more in this episode. 

Interview: Journalist Daniel Alarcon

Ana Maria Ochoa is an ethnomusicologist in the departments of Music and Anthropology at Columbia University. She is currently the Chair of the Music Department and is affiliated with the Center for Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She was born and raised in the country of Colombia. She was educated in Canada and the United States and she teaches at both Columbia University and Universidad de Los Andes, in Colombia.

Interview: Ethnomusicologist Ana Maria Ochoa

A podcast hosted by Columbia University Prof. Vicky Murillo, discussing major themes around Latin American history, culture, and politics with faculty and researchers at Columbia University.

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Unpacking Latin America

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