Latin American Literature Commons^™

Resisting And Reimagining: Flores, Ayguals, And 19th-Century Technological Innovation, Catherine Sundt

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Post-Revolutionary Post-Modernism: Central American Detective Fiction By The Turn Of The 21st Century, Gael Guzman-Medrano

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary Central American fiction has become a vital project of revision of the tragic events and the social conditions in the recent history of the countries from which they emerge. The literary projects of Sergio Ramirez (Nicaragua), Dante Liano (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Ramon Fonseca Mora (Panama), are representative of the latest trends in Central American narrative. These trends conform to a new literary paradigm that consists of an amalgam of styles and discourses, which combine the testimonial, the historical, and the political with the mystery and suspense of noir thrillers. Contemporary Central American noir narrative depicts …

Pedagogía De Hablantes De Herencia: Implicaciones Para El Entrenamiento De Instructores Al Nivel Universitario, Lina M. Reznicek-Parrado

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study researches the differences in pedagogical needs between learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language (FL learners) and learners of Spanish as a Heritage Language (HL learners) at the university level. By using the UNL Modern Languages and Literatures Department as an illustrative case and based on an analysis of the Heritage Language student profile in the context of the United States, this study seeks to explore arguments in favor of providing training for university-level instructors of Spanish that responds to the specific pedagogical needs of Heritage Language Learners.

The relevancy of this study is not only based on …

“My Life With My Cell Phone”: Creating A Magical Realist Story, Dan Gleason

The Short Story

In this lesson students are introduced to the basic elements of magical realism, a genre that combines fantastical events with the mundane normalcy of life. Students examine Octavio Paz’s short story “My Life with the Wave” as an example of the genre. In the story, the narrator travels to the ocean and falls in love with a wave, whom he bottles and takes home with him; the two go on to both cherish each other and fight terribly. After discussing the story, students create, in groups, plot sketches for their own adaptations. Students might imagine relationships with cell phones, the …

Central American Enunciations From Us Zones Of Indifference, Or The Sentences Of Coloniality, Oriel María Siu

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores Central American diasporic experiences in the US as sites for the continued exertion and reproduction of coloniality. A longstanding matrix of power transgressing all forms of borders and permeating all aspects of life—an irreversible and transgressive disease—coloniality operates so forcefully that it upholds its own survival. In the process, we live its plural incongruity and even extend its most contemptuous signs. Surveying a series of narrative texts produced from within the Central American diaspora in cities like Los Angeles and New York—Roberto Quesada’s Big Banana, Oscar René Benitez’s Inmortales, Hector Tobar’s Tattooed Soldier, and …

La Representación De La Familia En Épocas De Transformación: Un Análisis De La Carreta (1953) De René Marqués Y Noche Cubana (2009) De José Luis García Rodríguez, Alyssa Feldman

Honors Theses

This project investigates the dramatic works La carreta (1953) by René Marqués and Noche cubana (2009) by José Luis García Rodríguez to analyze the playwrights’ utilization of the family to represent the conditions of their respective nations. La carreta describes a Puerto Rican family during the island’s transition to a Commonwealth of the United States. Marqués uses the disintegration of the family to show his opposition to Puerto Rico’s colonial status and dependency on the United States. The struggles of the family in La carreta also express Marqués’ condemnation of Puerto Rico’s industrialization and abandonment of agrarian society. Noche cubana …

Centroamericanidades: Imaginative Reformulation And New Configurations Of Central Americanness, Arturo Arias

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The principal question posed in this special issue is: Where is Central America? At a primary level this would appear to be a simple geographical question, even if it were to offer a topology of a qualitatively distinct world…

The Boo Of Viramontes’S Cafe: Retelling Ghost Stories, Central American Representing Social Death, Karina Oliva Alvarado

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Chicana author Helena María Viramontes’s culturally complex “The Cariboo Cafe,” renders a contemporaneous example of social death in the lives of undocumented migrants. Sociologist Orlando Patterson bases “social death” on the “profound natal alienation of the slave” (38) that once cut off from a past and future, promulgates the slave’s desocialization and depersonalization: systems also at play with undocumented Central American immigrants. While Patterson refers to an overt and systemized economic exploitation of a people, the concept remains relevant to this analysis, though symbolic. It examines a three-fold negation through the representational experiences of undocumented immigration, gender, and what Arturo …

From Epicentros To Fault Lines: Rewriting Central America From The Diaspora, Maritza Cárdenas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay examines how representations from the Central American diaspora rewrite the Central American imaginary. It focuses on the ways EpiCentroAmerica—a poetry collective who view themselves as Central American, but reject a single unifying vision of home by seeing themselves as part of a transregional and transnational community—challenge traditional configurations of Central America(n). This reinscription of the signifier Central America is best exemplified in the work of Salvadoran-American poet Marlon Morales, whose poem “Centroamérica is,” avoids suturing Central America with traditional nationalist geological images of volcanoes and the isthmus, in favor of constructing Central America as an amorphous abstract and …

Cultural Transgressions In Omar S. Castañeda’S Remembering To Say ‘Mouth’ Or ‘Face’, Alicia Ivonne Estrada

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This study examines the ways Omar S. Castañeda’s Remembering to Say ‘Mouth’ or ‘Face’ (1993) deconstructs national and hyphenated identities. It argues that rooting these short stories within the Popol Wuj’s narrative structure allows for the construction of different historical references and cultural genealogies, which are not solely based on national identities or histories. This is evident in the second section entitled “Crossing the Border,” which blends myths from the Popol Wuj with the characters, contemporary historical contexts in the United States and Guatemala. At the same time, the stories illustrate the protagonists’ multiple displacements, but also their links to …

The Disembodied Subject: Resistance To Norms Of Hegemonic Identity Construction In Carmen Naranjo’S Diario De Una Multitud, Regan Boxwell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Costa Rica, whose civil war ended in 1948, represents a distinct literary space in which problematics of subjectivity were debated long before such dialectics appeared overtly in the rest of the isthmus. Carmen Naranjo’s novel Diario de una multitud (1974) is situated in this context, and her novel demonstrates a preoccupation with the heterogeneity of tico identity.

Naranjo favors a collective representation of the urban citizenry. Through the perceptual liminality of the individual subject, the friction generated by its absence, the constant blurring that resets the boundaries of specific identities, and the disappearance of the private realm, Naranjo avoids inscribing …

Diasporic Reparations: Repairing The Social Imaginaries Of Central America In The Twenty-First Century, Ana Patricia Rodríguez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Contemporary Central American diasporic writers like Horacio Castellanos Moya, Francisco Goldman, Héctor Tobar, and Marcos McPeek Villatoro, in Senselessness (2008), The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (2007), The Tattooed Soldier (1998), and the Romilia Chacón detective series, write in response to various forms of violence. They grapple with the image of Central America as a site of unsustainable violence, inhospitable material conditions, and unresolved historical issues that extend into the lives of Central Americans in the United States. The past is not easily dismissed, but lies at the core of transnational Central American subject formation. This essay …

Centering Panama In Global Modernity: The Search For National Identity And The Imagining Of The Orient In Rogelio Sinán’S “Sin Novedad En Shanghai”, Junyoung Verónica Kim

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since its independence from Colombia in 1903 backed by the United States government, which resulted in a treaty that granted the US free rein to build, administer and control what would be known as the Panama Canal, Panama’s quest for modern nationhood has been severely called into question. More often than not it is posited as an artificial state with little organic unity and limited sovereignty: a state that is literally made in the USA. Panamanian intellectuals, such as Rogelio Sinán, responded to these discourses on the Panamanian nation-state by actively constructing a Panamanian national identity, and by calling attention …

Maurice Echeverría’S Labios: A Disenchanted Story About Lesbians In Guatemala’S Postwar Reality, Yajaira M. Padilla

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last two decades, lesbian, gay, and queer literary studies have gained significant ground in the broader field of Latin American cultural studies. Within this growing body of critical work, however, the Central American region and its literature have been largely ignored. This article, which focuses on the representation of lesbians and queer desire in the Guatemalan novel Labios (2004) ‘Lips’ by Maurice Echeverría, seeks to contribute to such a lack in Central American perspective. This essay contends, Echeverría’s text, one of a growing number of recent Central American narratives to call attention to and portray gay, lesbian, and/or …

Literatura Judía Latinoamericana Contemporánea: Una Antología = Literatura Judaica Latino-Americana Contemporânea: Uma Antologia = Contemporary Jewish Latin American Literature: An Anthology, Stephen Sadow

Stephen Sadow

LITERATURA JUDÍA LATINOAMERICANA CONTEMPORÁNEA: UNA ANTOLOGÍA es un compendio de poesía y prosa escritas por judíos latinoamericanos. Viendo de comunidades judías dispersas por la inmensidad de las Américas al sur de los Estados Unidos, estos escritores proveen una riqueza de descripciones y modos de entenderá esta frecuentemente ignorada población de unas 450.000 almas. También hay obras de escritores, quienes por razones políticas, económicas o sionistas viven fuera de los países natales. Sin embargo, a pesar de las distancias geográficas entre estos escritores y las distintas culturas que los rodean, todos crean poemas y narrativas que son profundamente judías-- la liturgia, …

Antonio Preciado And The Afro Presence In Ecuadorian Literature, Rebecca Gail Howes

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the literary trajectory of Antonio Preciado Bedoya (1941), a major Afroecuadorian writer, poet and diplomat whose work spans more than 50 years. Although relatively unknown outside of Ecuador, this dissertation will address that lack of recognition by studying his work in the more general context of the African Diaspora. It will reflect upon Preciado’s re-definition of Ecuadorian identity in the new millennium. Preciado is a poet who portrays the Afro presence as central to the national experience of ethnic diversity and the construction of a pluricultural Ecuador. He emphasizes that Afroecuadorians be recognized as an integral component …

La Construcción Literaria De La Identidad De Puerto Rico: El País De Cuatro Voces, Lisa Ybonne Figueroa Parker

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies how language in Puerto Rican literature has been instrumental in reconstructing national identity in the context of the Island’s colonial histories. Bearing in mind that colonialism not only produced economic and political domination, but also epistemic control over cultural values and practices in general, Puerto Rican writers have used language to resignify a national imaginary that continues to be elusive and contradictory. To demonstrate how language in literature has become a site of struggle for decolonization, this study analyzes four representative voices from the nineteenth and twentieth century which construct distinct, yet complementary, identities.

Chapter one focuses …

Representaciones De La Mujer En La Literatura De Violencia: El Universo Narco-Sicaresco De Rosario Tijeras De Jorge Franco, Ruth Nelly Solarte Gonzalez

Theses and Dissertations

El tema central de esta tesis es analizar la representación de la mujer sicaria presente en la era narcoterrorista colombiana recreada en el universo literario de la novela Rosario Tijeras de Jorge Franco. Se examina aquí cómo el sicario encarnado en una mujer contribuye a una complejización del género de la novela sicaresca, puesto que el sicario en la tradición literaria ha sido siempre representado con personajes masculinos. Por esta razón se analiza el bildungsroman en torno a la protagonista, así como también su retrato literario frente a la construcción capitalista y consumista de lo femenino, el lugar de la …

El Esclavo Y El Letrado: Máscaras De La Auto-Representación En La Temprana Narrativa Antiesclavista Cubana, Maria A. Aguilar-Dornelles

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Los tres textos aquí discutidos, Autobiografía de un esclavo,Francisco y Sab,narran la experiencia de la esclavitud desde la perspectiva del esclavo.Sinembargo, laperspectiva del narrador de Autobiografía de un esclavopermite establecer una distancia ideológica con la imagen del esclavo creada por Suárez y Romero y Gómez de Avellaneda. A pesar de que Autobiografíafue editada y alterada para adecuarla a la norma lingüística de la ciudad letrada, es posible identificar estrategias de negociación y desafío a la autoridad de los intelectuales que intentaron controlar sus condiciones de emisión y difusión.A este respecto, elnarradorno enfatiza lavictimizacióndel esclavo, como síhacen Suárez y Romero y …

Identity, Engagement, And The Space Of The River In Cumandá, Lee Joan Skinner

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In Juan León Mera’s Cumandá, o un drama entre salvajes (Ecuador, 1879), the River Pastaza and the journeys the novel’s characters take on it form the centerpiece of the narrative. The novel presents rivers as problematic, problematized spaces of shifting meanings. The river is a space of mediation between humans and the natural world, a landscape that both supports humans and is inimical to them. Thus the eponymous, indigenous heroine of Mera’s novel at first navigates the Pastaza with exceptional grace, and yet, once she rejects her clan and tribe, she is unable to traverse the river as easily as …