UC Berkeley

"Disrupting Environments" explores how boarding school domesticity was a central tool to instill Catholic and Socialist values in two twenty-century Latin American nations. In Colombia, an elementary boarding school for indigenous children that operated between 1913 and 1958 in La Guajira region was the most influential component of a project of Christianization and “Colombianization” of the Wayúu indigenous group. Founded by the Catholic Capuchin order with funding from the Colombian government, the boarding school was set to be the center of a new town meant to facilitate missionaries’ control of the indigenous territory. In Cuba, a program of rural boarding schools for middle-school students that operated between 1971 and the early 1990s was intended to shape the "hombre nuevo" (new man) for the emerging Socialist society. Hundreds of these boarding schools were built in rural areas across Cuba as part of the government’s push to upgrade the countryside’s physical conditions. This dissertation shows how the social transformation campaigns in both Colombia and Cuba relied heavily on the built environment and used boarding schools as their catalyst elements. I contend that the Capuchin order and the Cuban government used their power to produce physical interventions while simultaneously spreading narratives prescribing how to interpret these interventions. Such narratives shaped the boarding schools’ domesticities, situating them as part of larger coherent landscapes (physical and rhetorical), making it difficult for students to contest the values they were set to learn. The two ideologies promoted in both campaigns, Catholicism and Socialism, were carefully spatialized and domesticated to change children’s lives through quotidian activities. "Disrupting Environments," therefore, understands boarding schools as domestic spaces. It claims that the academic activities performed in these institutions are secondary to their domestic use. It also shows that readings of domesticity require the analysis of the narratives that shape it, which circulate beyond the traditionally understood boundaries of domestic space.