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The Cultural Dual Identity In Cristina Garcia's Dreaming In Cuban And Julia Alvarez's How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Azahria John-Otway

Dissertations and Theses

Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents are two novels that explore the effects immigration can have on the development of one's identity, respectively. Throughout both novels, it is understood that in order for an immigrant to have a sense of belonging, an exploratory journey of the self must be made. In making this journey, literally and figuratively, the immigrant person begins to appreciate their homeland and immigrated home, thus feeling a sense of belonging and accepting they are of a cultural dual identity.

Travel To Cuba: A Case Study Of Media Branding In A Politicized Context, Yaneisis Infante

Student Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to detail a case study of U.S. tourism to Cuba in a politicized context; specifically, to compare and contrast the Obama and Trump administrations. This study seeks to examine how the Cuban “brand” and the island’s overall tourism strategy is formulated, circulated, shaped and reshaped by various actors and the public in the changing context of the newly antagonistic bilateral U.S.-Cuba political relationship. The research questions explore issues of how diplomatic relations impact Cuban tourism and advertising messaging. This paper also discusses the changes in the U.S. news media coverage of Cuba as a …

The Diaspora At Home, Ivan A. Flores

Capstones

Cuba only existed in the quiet whispers and faded memories of my mother and her two sisters. As children, they were refugees fleeing Castro. All my life, I heard their stories. I would hear about the family that never made it across that narrow strait, how the heat on the island was never oppressive because of cool breezes that rolled in with the waves that crashed on its shores. There was never a more beautiful country. They have never returned to Cuba.

I have sought to document the diaspora of one family divided by politics. Mixing portraiture, archival images with …

Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that white women played crucial roles in the economic, political, and cultural circuits that linked the United States and Cuba, and the hemisphere broadly, during the nineteenth century. It inserts white women into a historical account of U.S. imperialism by analyzing the literary works of a number of American women who traveled to or simply fantasized about Cuba during this period of intense and widespread interest in the island. It identifies white women not just as providing the symbolic rationale for Cuban annexation or intervention – the preservation of their chastity being a common justification for the …

Choteo Cubano: Humor As A Critical Tool In Twentieth-Century Cuban Theater, Rebecca L. Salois

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the incorporation of choteo in specific Cuban theater texts written during three distinct periods in twentieth-century Cuban history, all of which coincide with specific moments of social, political, and/or economic unrest or transition. Choteo in the theater has served as a tool to demonstrate discontent and frustration with authority figures in various contexts. As that need has altered over time, so too has the approach that playwrights have taken to speak out about these issues. I suggest that by responding to changing circumstances with choteo, confronting a difficult situation is more palatable to audiences or readers than …

Arte De Resistencia De Escritoras Latinas En Los Estados Unidos: Magali Alabau Y Carmen Boullosa, Agustin De Jesus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation, I focus on the literary production of Latina authors, who live and write in the United States. By using the notion of the art of resistance, I explore the works of Magali Alabau, Hemos llegado a Ilión, Volver and Amor faltal, and Carmen Baullosa, Texas. Both writers clash about the discourses linked to segregation. Pondering on their works, I propose to extend the current idea of the art of resistance, associated with political views, to one that opposes all kinds of segregation. In Part I, taking into consideration the debates regarding truth and fiction, …

Documenting Internationalism: The Instituto Cubano Del Arte E Industria Cinematográficos As A Cultural Extension Of Cuban Foreign Policy, Vella V. Voynova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the connection between the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos and the Cuban Revolution's internationalism and argues that it made ICAIC documentarians, their methods of production, and their documentary films a valuable asset to Cuban foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s.

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

The Double-Edged Sword: Smallpox Vaccination And The Politics Of Public Health In Cuba, Stephanie Haydee Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tracks the introduction and development of smallpox vaccination in colonial Cuba from the early nineteenth century to the American occupation of 1898. Native (creole) medical practitioners utilized smallpox vaccination as an instrument for securing status as professionals and conceptualizing new identities in a colonial slave society. The smallpox vaccination program allowed licensed practitioners to create a medical monopoly, foster scientific standards and cultivate a medical ethic. Creole vaccinators initially identified with a colonial state that protected their professional interests as necessary for the maintenance of Cuba's slave-based, agro-industrial sugar complex. By the end of the nineteenth century however, …

Paris And Havana: A Century Of Mutual Influence, Laila Pedro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to trace the history of exchange and influence between Cuban, French, and Francophone Caribbean artists in the twentieth century. I argue, first, that there is a unique and largely unexplored tradition of dialogue, collaboration, and mutual admiration between Cuban, French and Francophone artists; second, that a recurring and essential theme in these artworks is the representation of the human body; and third, that this relationship ought not to be understood within the confines of a single genre, but must be read as a series of dialogues that are both ekphrastic (that is, they rely …

"La Feminista Nuyorquina" Contextualizing Latina Experience In The Space Of Radical U.S. History: Dominican, Puerto Rican, And Cuban Presence In New York City, Maribi Henriquez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

International migrations of women to the United States had a pronounced urban bias because cities offered women the best chances to work for wages, whether they came alone or in family groups. Immigrant women were more likely than men to arrive in East Coast ports, especially New York - Donna Gabaccia

Latino immigrants have been entering the United States through New York City since before the inception of the country's history. Political history on the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba includes influential interference from the United States. Latinos began mass migration to the U.S. in the …