Room 350, Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics (133 S. 36th Street)
Food provided / Free and open to the public

Camille Saurez (Penn History)
"Contesting California: Race, Law, and Resistance in California, 1850 - 1860"

Ximena Benavides (Yale Law)
"The Painful Rationing: Austerity, Inequality, and Health in Puerto Rico"

CAMILLE's paper examines the varied ways African Americans, Native Americans, Californios, and Chinese immigrants advocated for rights in California from 1850 to 1860. At the core of this paper is the question: how did African American migrants negotiate the realities of “unfreedom” in a free state with laws that criminalized free African Americans? Alongside the African American experience, Camille interrogates how California Indians resisted exterminatory settler colonialism, how Californios sought to maintain the rights guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and how Chinese immigrants challenged political exclusion. She argues that the colonial system that made California an American place depended on the separate, but intertwined racialized exclusions of these groups.

XIMENA’s paper focuses on austerity and inequality on the right to health in Puerto Rico as a result of rationing policies. Beginning with the story of a continuously reformed Puerto Rican healthcare system--shaped by the colonial relationship of the island and the United States—the paper analyzes the financing and delivery of healthcare, as well as the micro-allocation policies used to ration it. Ximena determines when rationing policies can be painful and end up harming the system and elaborates on the differences between the continental U.S. and Puerto Rican healthcare markets, concluding that following the policies of the former represents poor rationing and inequality in the access of healthcare. The paper is drawn from arguments in her doctoral (J.S.D.) dissertation, Where are Health Care Losses Coming From and How Can They Be Controlled? A Legal and Political Analysis of the U.S. Health Care System, which includes studies of wasteful care and the rationing of health care costs.