Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Spn 122 - Latin American Language And Culture, Salvador Salazar

Open Educational Resources

Spanish 122 provides an overview of Latin American cultures. Students will analyze and discuss representative texts and other forms of cultural production (film, visual art, music, etc.) from various regions and time periods to better understand and appreciate the diversity of Latin American history and society. The course will be conducted in Spanish.

Notes From The Field - Conference Proceedings, Center For Latin American, Caribbean, And Latino Studies (Clacls)

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

CLACLS features proceedings papers from the CLACLS Fellows Showcase, held on November 2nd. This day-long event showcased the research and fieldwork results of Summer Fellows, who offered presentations on their projects funded by the CLACLS Summer Fellowship. The showcase was curated into four panels: 'Bodies in Resistance,' 'Ecocritical Approaches to Latin America,' 'Migration & Diasporic Experiences,' and 'Inequality: An Intersectional Approach.'

Colonialism And Collective Trauma: The Development And Deterioration Of Macondo, Kaitlyn Tibbetts

Scholar Week 2016 - present

Through his works Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez explores the development and deterioration of the fictional town of Macondo to illuminate how colonialism infiltrated Latin America, causing detrimental damage to the integrity of its community. Márquez accomplishes this by illustrating the industrialization of Macondo, which embodies colonialism’s detrimental influence. These effects are undeniably ongoing, as seen through the domination of neo-colonialism in Macondo. In both texts, this neo-colonialism is primarily depicted through the arrival of the American banana industry in Macondo. In this, Márquez mirrors Latin American history by alluding to the Boston-based …

Todo Sobre América Latina, Kayla Madeline Schwartz

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to inform a Spanish-speaking audience about the humanities of Latin America. The format is a blog which solicits more engagement with the embedded research and written text. Colorful photos and informative videos attract the attention of a general public that may otherwise not be interested in learning extensively about history and culture. Such focus is important because Latin American past has great bearing on the lives of much of the Latinx community today—in many regions.

Specifically, this blog contains articles about history, literature, movies and shows, dance, and travelling. The audience can learn about a broad timeline …

Interviews In Global Catholic Studies: Richard Wood, Mathew N. Schmalz, Richard Wood

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Cinema And Ritual: Decolonial Feminist Approaches To Image-Making In The Americas And The Caribbean, Natalie M. Erazo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis project is composed of an open-access syllabus hosted on a CUNY commons site, as well as a paper that examines various films and texts responding to the theme of cinema and ritual. Referenced films will focus on ritual as a decolonial feminist methodological framework, rooted primarily in Afro-descended and Indigenous cosmovisions within Latin America and the Caribbean. From a dance ritual spell warding off U.S. imperialism in present-day Puerto Rico, to a poetic visual eulogy for murdered women in rural Mexico, to a community prayer to Yemaya bringing relief for water scarcity in Cuba to a cautionary tale …

Navigating Boundaries: Challenges And Strategies In Exhibiting Brazilian Art Globally, Bruna Ribeiro Schnor

MA Theses

This thesis critically evaluates key initiatives in New York from 2002 to 2023, notably "Brazil: Body and Soul" and "Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil" at institutions like the Guggenheim and MoMA, highlighting potential shortcomings in representing Brazilian culture accurately. Additionally, it discusses exhibitions like "Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca: Five Times Brazil" at the New Museum and “The Yanomami Struggle” at The Shed for their unique approaches to showcasing Brazilian art. The methodology involves analyzing significant exhibitions in New York from 2000 to 2023, evaluating their efforts to globalize Brazilian art, and understanding their global impact. …

Representing Minority Groups And Their Heritage Across Access And Preservation Of Unique Audio Recordings A Grant Overview, Veronica Gonzalez, Ximena Valdivia

Athenaeum: Scholarly Works of the FIU Libraries Faculty and Staff

In 2021, the Florida International University (FIU) Libraries received the Recordings at Risks (R&R) grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The funds allowed us to digitize, create metadata, and provide online access to hundreds of unique Caribbean and Latin American songs produced between 1900 and 1935 that are included in the Diaz Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection (DAC) Cassette Series. The digitized materials comprise more than 1,000 cassettes with approximately 1,200 songs, recorded originally in 78rpms by Columbia, Victor, and other historical record companies. The music represents a variety of genres and is …

Idiosyncrasy Of The State And God: An Analysis On Religiosity And Ideology In Latin America, James D. Fiorenza

Culture, Society, and Praxis

In this research paper, I will be analyzing the relationship between the religiosity of Latin America in terms of popular religion and religiosity of its followers, and how it has impacted and continues to impact the political systems of Latin America in terms of ideology. I will be conducting this research by conducting three case studies following the development of my hypothesis, my research of my case nations and the collecting of all needed data. After this, I will compare all my data and establish a well-developed conclusion which accurately conveys and demonstrates this data. My research will focus on …

Urban Space, Genre And Subjectivity In African And Latin American Cinema, Matthew Marcus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project studies twelve African and Latin American films from a range of eras and countries, with an emphasis on their treatment of urban space, their manipulation of genre elements, and their approaches to character subjectivity. The analysis draws on major works of urban theory by Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Jane Jacobs, and others in order to investigate the relationship between cinema and the urban experience. As the films in the study are mostly set in cities that are not discussed by the theorists, the analysis entails testing their theories against the realities of these other settings, as …

Un País Invertido: The Current Immigration Regime Of Colombia, Magdalena Hendrickson

Honors Theses

Throughout its turbulent history, Colombia has seen drastic changes in structure and administration. From military coups to shaky coalitions, the country’s infamous instability has long forced its citizens to find better prospects elsewhere. However, with the rise of the Maduro administration in Venezuela, Colombia faced a massive new flow of migrants and was forced to rectify current circumstances without properly addressing its internal issues beforehand. Despite its historical status as a nation of emigrants, Colombia marks a new norm for the rest of the globe. As new issues like climate change and increased armed conflict grow worldwide, countries on the …

Making And Taking: Evaluating The Ethnographic Gaze In Graciela Iturbide’S Los Que Viven En La Arena, Lauren Gonzales

Theses and Dissertations

Graciela Iturbide’s career-defining engagement with indigenous subjects began with a commission by the Mexican government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) to document the Seri people. This thesis contextualizes the resulting photobook, Los que viven en la arena (1981), within the history of indigenous representation in Mexico and the controversial policies of the INI.

Women In The Cuban Revolution: Where's The Change?, Sierra Beaulac

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was a notable turning point in the country's history, with significant ramifications for politics, culture, and society. One crucial aspect of the Revolution was its impact on the role of women in society. The Revolution sought to end capitalism and establish a socialist government as communism emerged, but alongside this was a push to challenge the entrenched gender norms of Cuba's patriarchal society. Before the Revolution, Cuban women faced significant inequality and discrimination. They were often relegated to traditional roles such as homemaking and childcare and excluded from participation in formal politics and activism. However, …

Coastal Frontiers: The Littoral Borderland In Alta California And The Spanish Pacific World, Chantra Vanna Potts

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intricate relationship between Spanish exploration, the economy of the Pacific World, and their impact on colonization in Alta California during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It offers a new perspective on the history of the region by situating it within the context of the Eastern Pacific Basin and littoral borderlands, highlighting the transregional and global processes that shaped social and economic exchanges among Spanish colonists, Indigenous people, European and Anglo-American merchants, and diverse groups of sailors on the northern frontier of New Spain. Using the theoretical framework of mental mapping, or the subjective mental representation …

Cartografías Cosmopolitas: León De Greiff Y La Tradición Literaria, Marco Ramírez Rojas

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria analyzes the poetic works of this twentieth-century Colombian writer as a manifestation of cosmopolitanism, global cultural cartographies, and a self-fashioned poetic genealogy. Ramírez Rojas approaches de Greiff’s poems as cultural maps that reveal both a desire of connectivity with the world and a need for reorganizing the imaginary library of world literature. From a self-assumed position of eccentricity, de Greiff builds a network of global connections and disputes the binary division of cultural centers and peripheries, revendicating marginality as a productive condition. The study of this alternative cosmopolitanism brings de Greiff’s …

Teaching Abortion As A Historical Construct: The Case Of Early Twentieth-Century Brazil And Beyond, Cassia Roth

Feminist Pedagogy

Using open-access primary sources available online, this activity teaches abortion as an unstable category through a specific case study, early twentieth-century Brazil. The one-week module, although specific to one geographic region and chronological period, can serve as a lesson plan for undergraduate history courses, for disciplines that use genealogy methods, and for interdisciplinary courses. The lesson plan helps undergraduates think critically about what we think we know about abortion, and how our current understandings are not fixed but rather contingent on the society in which we live and on who is practicing abortion. Changing understandings of what constitutes an abortion …

Weaving Testimonio And Territory In La Comuna Ancestral Las Tunas, María J Durán González

Pomona Senior Theses

“Nosotras las mujeres ibamos al río a lavar la ropa pero sin con tanto químico y nada de esas cosas. Ahora, pues, cómo ve…” (Tomala, 2023).

The woman’s vignette of La Comuna Ancestral Las Tunas, or the Ancestral Commune of Las Tunas is a testimonio of the territory, yet women’s testimonios are registered separately from the dominant tales of territorial resistance of la Comuna. The analysis of testimonios arises from Chicanx/Latinx feminist studies that center the voices of Chicana/Latina women to form a collective narrative emerging from silences. I aim to interlace Latinx and Latin American geography principles with …

Ya Llegamos | We Are Here, Audrey Hermila Salgado

Senior Projects Spring 2023

ya llegamos | we are here, a Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College, is piece on gender and migration. It is a play that explores how family dynamics, class issues, education, and gender play a role in why people leave their home country. It explores the journey and relationship of Saturnina and Francisco as they travel across the Mexico/U.S. border.

Attempt At An Open Letter To The Bronx, Christopher Valdivia

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Open letter to and interrogation of the Bronx, in the form of autoethnographic writing.

¿Quién me encontrará a mí, en la noche, en el Bronx, a mis 22 años?

Revolutionary Visions: Jewish And Politics In Latin American Film, Mirna Vohnsen

Articles

Stephanie Pridgeon’s Revolutionary Visions, a book that deals with the intersection of Jews and revolutionary politics in films from Latin America, is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on Latin American Jewish studies. As the author herself notes, the cinematic depiction of Jewish experiences with revolutionary movements in Latin America has not received, until now, the scholarly attention it deserves, a neglect that Pridgeon has set out to remedy in her volume. The book brings to our attention the significance of the Latin American revolutionary culture of the 1960s and 1970s not only to Jewish life in the region …

Span 290 - Survey Of Spanish-American Literature Ii, Mariana C. Zinni

Open Educational Resources

This course is designed for any student interested in Spanish American literature. No previous knowledge of it is needed. However, a good command of written and oral Spanish is indispensable. We will examine several literary periods, topics, artifacts and works from 20th and 21st centuries. We will watch a series of movies and documentaries related to specific topics and events.

Book Review: Michela Coletta. Decadent Modernity: Civilization And ‘Latinidad’ In Spanish America, 1880-1920, Jeremy Smith

Comparative Civilizations Review

There are too few perspectives in civilizational analysis that examine Latin America. One exception is found in the work of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt on multiple modernities and the Americas. Eisenstadt’s research is a point of departure for Michela Coletta’s Decadent Modernity: Civilization and ‘Latinidad’ in Spanish America, 1880-1920. Through chapters on the so-called Latin Race, rural and metropolitan identities, national education, and what Coletta calls the ‘aesthetics of regeneration’, the author explores cultural, sociological, and political trends in Southern Cone countries Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina in the fin de siècle era of European and American modernities. This is a …

Religious Syncretism In Spanish Latin America: Survival, Power, And Resistance, Ian Mcguckin

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

This paper explores the theory of religious syncretism and its application within early modern Latin America. It proposes a new model for understanding religious syncretism in order to eliminate the previous bias in the scholarship and misconceptions inherent in the term and seeks to discover why cultures chose specific religious elements over their counterparts in syncretic scenarios. Reviewing primary and secondary sources analyzing the religious characteristics and atmosphere of this period revealed that there was a pattern to syncretism and religious selection in Spanish Latin America. Europeans, Indigenous Peoples, and Africans in the New World selected religious elements based on …

Destination Icaic: Cosmopolitan Intellectuals, Documentary Film And The Image Of The Cuban 1960s, Gabriel Arce-Riocabo Rollins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the interaction between foreign intellectuals and ICAIC (Instituto cubano de artes e industrias cinematográficas) in shaping the image of Cuba in the 1960s. I make the case that the idea of Revolution was a product of cosmopolitan intellectual engagement and that in this process documentary film was a privileged medium. By tracing the development of normative stories of commitment, cosmopolitanism, and aesthetic experimentation embodied both in written texts and travel essay films, I argue that such circulation destabilizes fixed ideas of Cuban, Revolutionary or Intellectual. The archive of Danish filmmaker and ICAIC collaborator Theodor Christensen as well …

Imagining Costumbrismo: Connecting Image And Text In Nineteenth-Century Colombian Cuadros De Costumbres, María Sol Echarren

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by nineteenth-century scientific trends, Costumbrismo was a literary and artistic genre combining aspects of Romanticism and Realism and presenting traditional customs of autochthonous daily life. Nineteenth-century cuadros de costumbres, or “sketches of manners,” often used local color to depict national scenes, regional types, and cultural traditions. The cuadros, comprised of short but illustrative writings published as periodical pamphlets, contained visually charged descriptive language infused with a didactic objective in order to shape readers’ perspectives about the nation and present specific sociopolitical philosophies.

This dissertation analyzes the connections between literature and art through the written cuadros de costumbres …

Resistance, Social Reproduction And Emerging Commitments For Collaborative Design From The Margins, Nathaly Pinto, Brenda Vertiz, Andrea Botero

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The paper introduces two design research cases tracing how the concepts and experiences of resistance and social reproduction can help design research become a more assertive part of the coding that interprets, exposes and disputes social reality, particularly in Latin America. Through reflections on (1) a design intervention contributing to an Indigenous popular education initiative in the Ecuadorian Amazon and (2) a series of ongoing public space design interventions taking place in colonias populares of Mexico City, we propose four interrelated commitments (visibility, sustainment, tensions and collectivity) to orient ourselves in understanding what it actually takes to build knowledge and …

Song Of Exile: A Cultural History Of Brazil’S Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018, Joshua Alma Enslen

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil’s Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias’s “Canção do exílio.” Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, “Song of Exile” has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every generation of Brazilian writers has adapted the poem’s Romantic verses to glorify the wonders of the nation or to criticize it via parody, exposing a litany of issues that have plagued the country’s progress over the years. Based on a …

The Search For Enduring Peace: Promoting Rebel Party Formation In Post-Civil Conflict States, Isabel Villegas

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

Civil wars have been a common occurrence throughout human history and have had an immense impact on political developments worldwide. Infamous examples include those in Rwanda, the Congo, Ukraine, and more recently, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan⸻all of which were, or haven been quite violent and with a range of human rights abuses committed by both state and rebel actors. Civil wars often have a variety of outcomes: a decisive win by government and military forces, a revolutionary victory and overthrow of current powers accomplished by rebels, the creation of a “failed state” lacking legitimate leadership and political institutions, or a …

The Normalization Of Detention Centers In The United States, Laura Beth Mulligan

Honors Theses

Since the beginning of 2022, 19,948 immigrants have been detained in the United States. Mistreatment of Latin American immigrants occurring across the 215 detention centers located in the United States has grown completely out of control in the more recent years. The U.S. detention system is one that is motivated by racism and superiority complexes of one race over another, leading to Latin American immigrants being treated as less than human. This Senior Thesis explores what a detention center is, the presence of detention centers in the United States, the power structure of ICE and other employees, with personal stories …

Dream/Reality, Mercedes Llanos

Theses and Dissertations

Mercedes llanos explores the surreal aspect of dreams as they concern with waking life issues, mainly focusing on power-roles in domestic partnerships embedded in a South American patriarchal upbringing. In her dreams, she subconsciously navigates the repression of freedom firsthand experienced, and that of the transgenerational woman collective.