Hernán Cortés: Virtù vs. Fortuna

En este trabajo analizo algunas de las hazañas del conquistador Hernán Cortés, en base a los conceptos de “virtu” y “fortuna.” Visto desde esta perspectiva, Cortés aparece como un hombre de indiscutible inteligencia y valentía personal cuyos logros políticos en Mesoamérica han sido sobre-estimados.     

Biculturalism as a double-edged sword: The perspectives of Mexican American emerging adults

Cultural and ethnic identity research largely highlights the adaptiveness of biculturalism among Latino youth in the United States. Less is known about how Latino youth themselves define and experience biculturalism, the cultural identity content that they deem relevant, and how heritage and host identities intersect. Using an inductive approach, this study examines the salience, valence, and meaning of biculturalism among Latino youth living in a multicultural U.S. city. Twenty-six Mexican American emerging adults (M_age = 22.35 years) participated in semi-structured interviews and constructed cultural identity maps focusing on their experiences of biculturalism. Qualitative analysis reveals that participants overwhelmingly deem biculturalism to be positive and explores the duality (i.e.: opposition or contrast) that lies beneath that positivity. Participants emphasized individual-level advantages of biculturalism, namely, that their Mexican heritage provides identity rootedness and enables expanded career and educational opportunities. The bicultural challenges that participants discussed were overwhelmingly relational: familial cultural gaps due to dissonant values and critical gazes from others due to inadequate cultural performances. By revealing that and why biculturalism is mostly positive in the eyes of participants, and exploring the duality that lies beneath that positivity, this study draws attention to the complexity of biculturalism that can be obscured by exclusive reliance on quantitative self-report measures.     

Profiles of Multi-cultural Identity Integration in a Conflictual Context

This study addressed the phenomenon of multiple social identities in a conflictual context. It examined the case of Palestinian-Christians living in Israel, a nation imbued with ethno-religious conflict, a complex combination of three distinct collective identities: national (Palestinian-Arab), ethno-religious (Christian), and civic (Israeli). The current study proposed a conceptual and methodological expansion of the “Bicultural Identity Integration” (BII) model (Benet-Martinez & Haritatos, 2005) as a way to assess different levels of integration between three types of identities (national, ethno-religious, and civic) in a sample of 383 Palestinian Christians with Israeli citizenship. Results revealed that the three integrations of BII (Arab-Christian, Arab-Israeli, Christian-Israeli) are positively predicted by favorable intergroup contact with Jews and Muslims and negatively by discrimination by these groups. Further, Latent Profile Analyses revealed four distinct identity profiles: two (“Pro-Arab” and “Pro-Israel”) were highly conflictual and characterized by both discrimination and negative intergroup contact, and two (“Ambivalent” and “Peaceful”) were characterized by less conflict across pairs of identities. These findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical contribution to the study of multiple social and collective identities in contexts of conflict, and their practical implications for the groups under study.