Arts and Humanities Commons^™

La Viuda Del Panamá -- A Sixteenth-Century Novel, Maria Cecilia Herrera Astua

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

La Viuda del Panamá es una novela histórica acerca de Sir Francis Drake y su amante, María Isabel Domínguez--una viuda mestiza de quien él se enamora cuando ella lo salva de una muerte segura. Isabel oculta su ascendencia india porque, en el pueblito Nombre de Dios, esa circunstancia es un pecado social. Mas al corregidor don Pedro—un viudo quien ha tenido un matrimonio infernal—no le interesa la pureza de sangre. Nacido en un hogar judeo-musulmán, don Pedro se enamora de Isabel desde el día en que ella lo atiende en la posada La Costeña y decide ofrecerle un futuro impensable …

A Life Of Work, David Labounty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Life of Work is an examination of workplace nonfiction where work is, for good or bad, a defining moment in a personâ??s life. This collection of creative nonfiction essays about the jobs that have shaped me was created to encourage people to tell their own tales. There is nothing groundbreaking about the work I have done (and continue to do); however, by sharing my experiences, I hope to spark other workplace remembrances, be they stories about slogging away for fifty years on one job or having multiple rewarding careers. The work we do has an enormous impact on the …

Las Nubes, Jefferson Daniel De Los Rios Trujillo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Rey, pseudónimo del personaje principal, se encuentra en prisión acusado por el asesinato de Preeda Saensuk, esposa de su amigo Santiago Vieira. En su celda, Rey pasa los días perdido en reflexiones anodinas y en recuerdos fragmentarios de lo que significo su vida en libertad.

La Tela, Un Fluir, Hugo Javier Moreno

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Tesis para Escritura Creativa. Un libro de poesía. No se requiere abstracto.

The Candlemaker: Records From The Personal Archives Of Morris St. Martins, Emily Jordan Parsley

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Candlemaker is a hybrid novel that explores the intersection of queerness, archives, and history in the rural South.

The Digital Literacy Practices Of Transfronterizx Esol College Students: Los De Esol, Laura E. Mendoza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation aims to contribute knowledge to the literature about ESOL students' digital literacy practices related to educational purposes. I studied the varied digital literacy practices the students used as mediating tools to perform their university activities (e.g., crossing to come to school, communicate with classmates/instructors about assignments, completing assignments). This study takes place on the U.S. side of the borderland area of El Paso, Texas-Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. The participants were 43 transfronterizx ESOL college students, who were young adults between 18-25 years of age enrolled in the ESOL program at Sun University. I draw on ethnographic and netnographic …

This, My Breath, Suzette Louise Mack

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This, My Breath, is a creative collection of memories gathered along the seasons in my life-mostly from my formative years. The stories highlight the patient, unconditional love my parents shared, and the way it has influenced me throughout my life. The stories are about life, love, loss, a yearning to belong, and a longing to be both interdependent and independent.

In my family of origin, it was the simple rhythms established through daily life and the honoring of traditions that inspired the deepest meaning, purpose, and hope. The seasons of the year brought my family alive with a flow of …

Soy Una Muñeca De Porcelana, Nicolas Rodriguez Sanabria

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Tesis de maestrí­a de Creación Literaria

Anfibia, Martha Carolina Davila Diaz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Anfibia es una exploración poética de la relación con el propio cuerpo, en particular de los momentos en que se evidencia el modo en que operan en este los procesos de generización y feminización. Esta exploración se concreta mediante la confluencia de dos elementos: la herencia de la metáfora animal como camino para explicar las virtudes, defectos, características y roles de los seres humanos, y la tecnología como extensión de nuestra corporalidad. Anfibia es la mirada atrás sobre la historia personal con el fin de identificar las circunstancias en que los discursos únicos, los conceptos normativos que forjan la subjetividad, …

Reanimation (Afterlife Rebellion Book 1), Nicole A. White

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Reanimation (Afterlife Rebellion Book 1) is the first book in a young adult science fiction and fantasy duology about a group of ghosts and a teenage necromancer who must come to terms with a corrupted afterlife. The overarching goal was to craft an accessible fantasy, with its characters being unfamiliar with genre conventions so that readers who were as well could have an entry point into the category, and familiar readers could enjoy new interpretations of the canon. Traditional character archetypes and stereotypes that have been proven to impede representation in the genre and deter new readership are subverted or …

Ghosts Of Madmen: A Generational Tale, Kristen Leigh Olin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A family story depicting an immigrant family that must deal with the horrors of the past while delving through the psyche of the present. One woman's look into the deepest reaches of her American family and their generations of alcoholism and abuse and her resolution to the ghosts that haunt the family's women.

La Enfermedad Florece En El Desierto, Xochilt Alejandra Sequeira Aguilar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

La enfermedad florece en el desierto es un poemario híbrido cuyo material discursivo se construye a partir del verso libre, el diario y las anotaciones de cuaderno. Es, además, un libro ecfrástico que propone un diálogo entre poesía y fotografía para meditar sobre dos tópicos recurrentes en la literatura: el desierto y la enfermedad. Sus objetivos son, en primer lugar, explorar una metáfora propia de ambos tópicos y, en segundo lugar, definir a qué tradición pertenece este trabajo al recurrir a la técnica de la écfrasis y a los temas en mención.

Tourists Of The Past: Topographies Of Memory In W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Ana Menéndez's Loving Che, And Teju Cole's Open City, Benjamin Lee Williams

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Examining, comparatively, the exemplary fictional texts of W. G. Sebald, Ana Menéndez, and Teju Cole enriches the study of exilic experience concerning cultural memory as their destabilization, while geographically and ethnically divergent, represents the constellations of mobility and potential for memory. As absences resonate and profoundly disrupt their works, there is a turn to histories to cope with traumas. By turning to the past, each writer confronts destabilization and uprootedness and, in doing so, plays a game with History. Readers play too as we search through the fictionalized lacunae to consider the extent to which we are complicit in the …

Using Spanish In English-Language Spaces: Identifying Bilingual Composition Students' Translanguaging Practices, Maria Isela Maier

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation is a qualitative study that uses ethnographic research methods to examine the translanguaging practices of bilingual students in first-year composition at a university along the U.S.-Mexico border. Specifically, I observe how and why bilingual students employ translanguaging practices, as they are encouraged or invited by their instructors, in contexts where English Standard Language policies exist. The results of this qualitative project demonstrate bilingual students' use of translation as part of their translanguaging practices, as well as a tool that uncovers students' writing processes which also demonstrates their language negotiation. Furthermore, the students' translanguaging practices reveal the rhetorical use …

Cicada's Song: A Memoir, Luz Hernandez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cicada's Song is a true account of my coming-of-age as a first-generation Colombian-American girl growing up as the only child of two loving parents-one of whom abused me sexually for eleven years, while the other stood by without intervening. Yet the story is not one of resentment, blame, or self-pity. Rather, it is one of identity, self-reliance, survival, forgiveness, and love. Through a series of memories, essays, statements, and poems, the memoir invites the reader on a voyage through my childhood and youth, with stops in my both present-day and recent past, in the hopes that he will see the …

Language, Literacy And Project Based Learning: An Ethnographic Case Study Of A New Tech Classroom In A High School On The Us/Mexico Border, Nora Lee Paugh

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This ethnographic case study sought to understand how English Language Learners used their language and literacy practices within a project based learning (PBL) classroom to complete their PBL tasks. Studies revealed the impact of how English language learners within a PBL learning environment were able to use their language and literacy as a social practices that led to successful student engagement (Call & Sotillo, 1995; Campbell, 2012). This study was conducted at Wilson High School, located along the US/Mexico border. The focus of the case study was a 9th grade combination English/World Geography class of the school's inaugural New Tech …

A Voiced Labiodental Fricative [V] In El Paso Spanish, Roberto Israel Ortega

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Voiced Labiodental Fricative [V] in El The present study analyzes the voiced labiodental fricative [v] as a variant of the Spanish phoneme /b/ in El Paso Spanish under the scope of language contact. The data used was elicited from thirty one participants employing a task where the influence of the orthographic representation of the graphemes and was absent. Results are compared to previous studies where the influence of orthographic representation was present. This research analyzes the following three factors: 1) the linguistic factors of stress, position in word, and previous and following segments. 2) The social factors gender and …

Rapsoda Texana Freestyles Desde La Frontera Norte A South Border Rap, Criseida Santos-Guevara

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Bajo el concepto de interseccionalidad, este trabajo transita entre las fronteras de forma física y emocional. La propuesta coincide con la idea de la literatura transfronteriza, entendiendo por fronterizo todas aquellas situaciones que están en el límite del discurso hegemónico, tales como la sexualidad, la maternidad lésbica, el uso del español en los Estados Unidos, el biculturalismo, etc. Para los fines de este trabajo, lo que busco es representar aquello que está en constante movimiento, no solo en lo geográfico sino en lo emocional, cosa que por supuesto se refleja en el aspecto formal. Este proyecto no puede suscribirse dentro …

Habla De La Arena (Procesos Contemporáneos De Escritura Poética), Carlos Mijail Lamas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Este trabajo se plantea la creación de un poemario que reflexione sobre el poema como un campo de experimentación no solo formal, sino anímico, donde el andamiaje formal y rítmico de cada uno de los textos sea resultado de una indagación de la manera en que nuestra sensibilidad se ha modificado en relación con los estímulos de los entonrnos cibernéticos, la hiperconectividad y la simultaneidad de sus procesos. Las preguntas que se propone responder son ¿De qué manera el poeta puede enfrentar la abundancia y el flujo constante de información? ¿De qué forma el poema puede expresar la alteración de …

An Echo Of Swelling Voices, A Meta-Fictional Novella, Adolfo Danilo Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Horacio P. is an exiled Nicaraguan American poet living and teaching in Austin, Texas since the 1970s. Despite his enormous reputation and highly supportive wife, he feels incapable to write his last, and best, novel. This novel is about the life of Asdreni, an Albanian poet who was also exiled in Romania during the time before World War II, and his quest to find out who sent him a mysterious box containing the unpublished manuscripts of an unknown poet. One day, Horacio himself also receives a mysterious box containing the unpublished manuscripts of an unknown poet. His novel and his …

Arak And Other Stories, Fatima Sausan Masoud

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Set in the West Bank, Arak and Other Stories follows the lives of members of the Al-Hakim family. Through the stories, Palestinian-American, Layla Al-Hakim, uncovers long buried family secrets and discovers deep connections to her Palestinian cousins.

El Makech Púrpura, Daniela Gonzalez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Collection of short stories that take place in Chetumal.

The Geometry Of Loss: A Novel, Elidio La Torre La Torre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In the year 2025, Orlando Aniello, nicknamed “Or,” a Puerto Rican poet with a broken life, becomes a “consciousness in virtual space.” Tricked by a couple of goons that devote most of their duties to bootleg memories for people who lead dull and meaningless lives, Orlando’s personality splits into fragments. As consequence, his actual experiences blend the host’s own recollections, which accidentally upload to Orlando’s brain. If bootleg mnemonic technologies glitch, Orlando does not know who he is anymore. Indeed, Orlando/ Gogo/ Alejandro suffers anterograde memory loss, and the narrator becomes merely a voice without a body. A geometry of …

El Más Fuerte De Los Ruidos, Gianfranco Giusseppe Languasco Bellido

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Tesis para optar por el título de Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

Brújula Quebrada, Julio Antonio Molinete

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Brújula quebrada o la reinvención del dolor, es un cuaderno de poesía en el cual se aborda el fenómeno del exilio, de la diáspora. Verso a verso es la historia de un diasporante signado por la angustia, el rechazo y el desprecio. Pero más que un poemario personal, deviene en un pedazo de la historia contemporánea cubana. Esa en donde los hijos de la Isla se ven obligados a escapar en pos de la libertad, un derecho que se hace esquivo aun en la tierra de la libertad.

La Gente Entre Nosotros / The People Between Us, Gerard Stephen Robledo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This collection stems from the tradition of poetry of witness / anthro-poetry, and chronicles the lives of individuals within communities who are affected by racism, ignorance, and Americanization. The catalyst for this collection was the massive influx of immigrant children fleeing South and Central American, and Mexico to the United States in the summer of 2014. This event spurred a whirlwind of anger, confusion, and racism, which left children in the political crossfire. Thus, this collection is aptly titled La Gente Entre Nosotros / The People Between Us.

In this collection, I take the approach of the anthro-poet, to document …

Orbic Bards: Religious Liberalism And The Problems Of Representation In The Postbellum Works Of Walt Whitman And Herman Melville, Anthony Gus Cohen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In an attempt to reconcile the critical camps that attempt either to christianize or otherwise, "scripturize" nineteenth century literary texts with the converse, which attempts to paint them cynically as "infidel countertexts" this project seeks to find a middle ground. The works of Herman Melvile and Walt Whitman steeped in the increasingly liberal religious atmosphere of New York City following the Civil War, both strive to offer up an impressively accurate historical and poetical record, free from the problems of hearsay that nagged the deists and transcendentalists, and instead attempted to offer something that instead was nearer to reason, and …

Analysis Of English Language Learner Student Reasoning About Measures Of Center And Variation: A Triangulation Of Quantitative And Qualitative Data, Lorena Galvan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The population of Spanish-speaking English Language Learner (ELL) students has been growing rapidly in the past 20 years. It has been estimated that by the year 2018, 1 out of 4 students in grades K-12 will be an ELL. There is a large body of research about assessment of Spanish-speaking ELL students in mathematics; however, there is little that focuses on statistics only. Statistics courses are frequently confused and/or classified under mathematics courses. However, students taking an introductory statistic course are required to know a new set of concepts, words and vocabulary that are not always used in mathematics courses. …

'Out Vile Jelly': The Consumption Of Violence In King Lear And The Winter's Tale, Evan Marie Stapleton

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

There is a distinct difference in the representation of violence and its aftermath in Shakespeareâ??s Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. More so after 1603, bloody spectacles, brutal torture, and public theatrics are commonplace in daily life and entertainment; Jacobean life is comprised of a culture of violence. This paper examines the representation of violence and its aftermath in "King Lear" and "The Winter's Tale." As Shakespeare adapts plays for a Jacobean audience, the violence in the plays is decidedly more nuanced and psychological than in the Elizabethan plays, which tend to favor gore, spectacular images, and mostly physical damages. First, I …

Translingual Practice & Identity Performance: A Study Of Mongolian Youth On Facebook, Sara Bartlett Large

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study explores the translingual practices and identity performances of five participants on the social networking site, Facebook. The participants in this study are five young adults from Mongolia who participated in the U.S. State Department sponsored English Access Microscholarship program, an intensive English language program for disadvantaged youth in developing countries, from 2009 - 2011. Using a qualitative methodology based on constructivist grounded theory and relying on interviews, questionnaires, and observations of the participants' Facebook pages, this study considers the participants' use of translingual practices to build and maintain capital - linguistic, cultural, and social - as they develop …