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Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons™
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Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
The Boo Of Viramontes’S Cafe: Retelling Ghost Stories, Central American Representing Social Death, Karina Oliva Alvarado
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 …
“La Cara De Luna De Mi Madre”: Nuria Amat’S Revolution In Poetic Language In “Casa De Verano” (1999), David Richter
“La Cara De Luna De Mi Madre”: Nuria Amat’S Revolution In Poetic Language In “Casa De Verano” (1999), David Richter
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Nuria Amat’s 1999 short story “Casa de verano” ‘Summer House’ presents the reader with a sensorial collage of unsettling language and violent images that effectively portray domestic abuse and the difficulty of escaping oppressive environments. The Barcelona writer’s text crosses the generic boundaries of narrative and poetry as her discourse flows freely and irrationally by employing a wide variety of charged poetic devices such as metaphor, metonymy, and antithesis. The story focuses on three orphan children who are prohibited from speaking about their subversive bisexual mother, from reading the few remaining books in the summer house, or from playing with …