The Founding of Latinx and Latin American Studies at University of Missouri-Kansas City

This article has been requested by the journal Dialogo, from DePaul University, and focuses on the important role of Latinx leadership in the development of the UMKC Latinx and Latin American Studies Program. The article includes the historical events leading up to the founding and development of the program along with interviews with some of the key participants in its founding.

Guadalupe Centers, Inc.: Leadership and Fostering a Latinx Community: 1990s-2017

This article, which is being submitted for an anthology on Latinxs in the Midwest, develops the historical setting and context that reveals the significant leadership of Guadalupe Centers for Kansas City metropolitan area. The Guadalupe Centers, Inc. (GCI) has made a lasting impact on the lives of many Latinxs and people living in poverty in the Westside of Kansas City and surrounding metropolitan areas. The purpose of the Guadalupe Center article is to document their leadership as a nonprofit agency at the local, regional, and national levels. What are the ingredients to the leadership and success of GCI from 1990 to 2015? This question is the central focus of the research and will be the based on (archival research, interviews, photographs, and videos), so that others will learn the significant elements of the long-lasting legacy of success and leadership that can be passed on from one generation to another.

Latina Leaders: The Spirituality, Resilience, and Resistance that Grounds their Leadership

This book is an on-going writing project that incorporates interviews of ten Latinas’ wisdom based on their histories of leadership and social justice commitment to empower their communities. The women were selected on the basis of their proven leadership and the respect of their communities as leaders. The timeline for this book is publication in 2018-2019.

Hartman, J.R. “Oh Capitol, My Capitol: Neoclassicism, Nationalism, and the Limits of the American Imperium in Havana, San Juan, and Manila.” Journal article manuscript.

Neoclassical formalism embodied a new U.S. dominion in the ex-colonies of Spain after the Spanish-American War of 1898. This essay will examine three works of civic architecture constructed in Manila, Havana, and San Juan, each used as seats of legislature and patronized by local civic leaders under the auspices of the United States during the 1920s. The Federal-style architecture of the Caribbean and Pacific legislative buildings activated a complicated network of reproduction and simulacrum in the island nations and the American Imperium. The Philippines’ Legislative Building, built in 1926 and formerly intended as a grand Capitol under Daniel Burnham’s unfinished 1905 plan, featured a neoclassic temple façade; Cuba’s Capitolio, unveiled in 1929, was a near-replica of the Capitol in Washington D.C.; and Puerto Rico’s Capitolio, also inaugurated in 1929, employed designs nearly identical to Cuba’s. Drawing from shared geographies and cultures, the Spanish Caribbean examples were necessarily distinct from the Legislative Building of Manila. Nonetheless, the three buildings displayed remarkable parallels in their respective histories and designs. With the support of U.S. financial and political interests, local architects trained in the United States and Europe created the design for each building (Raul Otero, Rafael Carmoega, Juan M. Arellano, among others). They employed a mixture of indigenous symbolism with “universal” signifiers of Western democracy. So too, the three buildings embodied typologies of quintessential North American Capitols, Statehouses, and Legislative Buildings, as seen in the porticos, copulas, rotundas, and symmetrical wings of legislative houses in Minnesota, Texas, and many other states. Unveiled within three years of one another under the administration of U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and used variously as sites for legislation and political ceremonies: The three buildings reveal an untold history that moves beyond common narratives of monument cataloguing and Western appropriations. This paper will argue that these replications expressed a contested transnational vision of nationalism within the American Empire. Supported by local politicians as well as U.S. financial and political interests, the buildings were symbols of local sovereignty negotiated through and around longer histories of U.S. imperial hegemony and Spanish colonialism. The three “Capitols” registered the capitalist ambitions of the United States as well as Cuban, Filipino, or Puerto Rican assertions of national identity and autonomy.

Hartman, J.R. Book project: Dictator’s Dreamscape: How Architecture and Vision Built Machado’s Cuba and Invented Modern Havana. Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.

“The Dictator’s Dreamscape examines the legacy of nation building in Cuba and its cultural stakes in a wider hemispheric and global context during the twentieth century. The book focuses on the public works program of President Gerardo Machado y Morales (in power 1925-1933). Political histories often condemn Machado as a U.S.-backed dictator, overthrown in a labor revolt and popular revolution. Architectural histories tend to catalogue his regime’s public works as derivatives of U.S. and European models. The building campaign of the machadato (Machado’s regime) has yet to be viewed within the broader cultural context of twentieth-century Cuba. This book addresses that gap by reassessing the regime’s public works program as a visual project embedded in centuries-old representations of Cuba alongside wider debates on the nature of art and architecture in general, especially in regards to globalization and the spread of U.S.-style consumerism. In this discussion, the public works of the machadato articulated a forceful and highly nuanced politics of space, vision, and cultural experience aimed at both local and foreign audiences.”

Janet Garcia-Hallett, Toya Like, Clara Irazabal-Zurita and Theresa Torres. “Latinx and Crime: Criminalization and (In)Security of Ethnic Enclaves in Kansas City”. Journal of Planning Education & Research (forthcoming).

Like, Toya Z. and Jennifer Cobbina. “Emotional Girls and Rational Boys: Gendered Discussions of Violence among African American Adolescents”. Crime and Delinquency 65(3), 295-321.

Cobbina, Jennifer E., Toya Z. Like and Jody Miller. Gender-Specific Conflicts among Urban African-American Youth: The Roles of Situational Context and Issues of Contention. Deviant Behavior 37(9), 1032-1051

Like, Toya Z.  “Urban Inequality and Racial Differences in Risks for Violent Victimization”.  Crime and Delinquency 57(3), 432-457

Like-Haislip, Toya Z. and Karin Tusinski Miofsky.  “Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Violent Victimization”. Race and Justice 1(3), 254-276.

Like-Haislip, Toya Z. and Patricia Warren. “Routine Inequality? Violent Victimization at the Intersections of Race, Ethnicity and Gender”. Violence and Victims 26(1), 88-102

Cobbina, Jennifer, Toya Z. Like-Haislip and Jody Miller. “Gang Fights Versus Cat Fights: Urban Young Men’s Gendered Narratives of Violence”.  Deviant Behavior 31(7), 596-624.

Holsinger, Kristi, Toya Z. Like and Jessica P. Hodge.  “Gender-Specific Programs: A Glimpse of Where We Are and Where We Need to Go”.  Women, Girls & Criminal Justice 11(1), 1-16

Like, Toya Z., Lori Sexton, and Savannah Porter. “Threat, Danger and Vulnerability: Trayvon Martin and Gwen Araujo”. Pp. 81-112 in Deadly Injustice: Race, Criminal Justice, and the Death of Trayvon Martin, edited by Devon Johnson, Patricia Y. Warren, and Amy Farrell. New York: NYU Press.

Like-Haislip, Toya Z. “Racial and Ethnic Patterns in Crime and Victimization”.  Pp. 107-134 in The Oxford Handbook on Ethnicity, Crime and Immigration, edited by Sandra M. Bucerius and Michael Tonry. New York: Oxford University Press.

Like, Toya Z. and Jody Miller. “Race, Inequality and Gender Violence: A Contextual Examination.” Pp. 157-177 in The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America, edited by Ruth Peterson, Lauren Krivo and John Hagan. NY: New York University Press.

Miller, Jody, Toya Z. Like and Peter Levin.  “The Caucasion Evasion: Victims, Exceptions, and Defenders of the Faith.” Pp. 100-114 in Images of Color/Images of Crime, 2nd Edition, edited by Coramae Richey Mann, Marjorie Zatz, and Nancy Rodriguez. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company.

Warren, Madeline and Toya Like-Haislip. “Where we Live Matters: The Effect of Residential Segregation on Violence. Pp. 173-177 in 2015 State of Black Kansas City: Picture of Health, edited by Gwen Grant. Kansas City: Urban League of Greater Kansas City and the REACH Healthcare Foundation.

Like, Toya Z. Violence at the Intersection of Risk and Resilience: The Interlocking Effects of Trauma and Triumph among the (dis)Advantaged.

Owens, Jennifer Gatewood and Toya Z. Like. “Intra- and Intergroup ViolentVictimization Patterns: An Analysis of the NCS & NCVS by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender from 1974 to 2016”.

Like, Toya Z., Valerie Wright and Rhiannon Coates. “The ‘Real’ Housewives: Media Depictions of Femininity across Race and Ethnicity”.

Owens, Jennifer Gatewood and Toya Z. Like. “Blackness as Threat? An Examination of the Situational, Emotional, and Physical Effects of Interracial Victimization Using the NCVS”.