Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Escribir El Desarrollo, Desplegar La Cultura: Historias De Imaginación Económica En Colombia Y Brasil, Diego Bustos

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

In this dissertation, we analyze how a group of artists negotiate through their novels and cultural performances a repertoire of meanings on inequality and plurality, formulating a program of socio-cultural transformation via literature. In the first two chapters, we examine the work by Colombian author Augusto Morales Pino (comprised of four volumes), as proponent of a transnational genealogy of economic development, offering a repertoire of meanings and practices for contemporary public policy in which the concept of middle class predominates. I argue that these representations actively shape the possibility and limits of the contemporary models of inclusion and cultural citizenship. …

Caudillos De La Misma Tela: Unveiling Neoliberalism In The 2020 Presidential Advertisements, Viviana Ayala Sandoval

Scripps Senior Theses

In the 2020 Presidential Election, Joe Biden and Donald Trump acknowledged the importance of the plurality of the Latinx community in the targeting of Latinx voters through the use of Spanish advertisements. This shift in political strategy as seen in the microtargeting of the Latinx community in the 2020 election was the first time that the Latinx electorate was treated as a political entity with diversity. In my semiotic analysis of the Biden and Trump 2020 Spanish advertisements, I seek to answer two questions. First of all: How was the Latinx electorate perceived by the Democratic and Republican campaigns in …

Lo Visible, Lo Invisible Y Lo Imaginable: Neoliberalismo Y Ciudad En Las Producciones Culturales De Posguerra En Centroamérica, Maria A. Leon Umana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project researches the radical change that the peace treaty of the 1990s brought to Central American societies in connection with economic models. Specifically, it examines the way in which the implementation of neoliberal policies has transformed the cities concerning the spatial and the social; consequently, resulting in an important urban shift in regard to postwar cultural productions. I build a theoretical model organizes the investigation in three representative examples of Central American urban imaginaries (The Visible, The Invisible, and the Imaginable) so as to enlighten and/or enrich the analysis of the region’s urban social realities—examined in detail in a …

Las “Brujas” En Las Carceles Clandestinas De Argentina: La Prisionera Politica Embarazada Y Otra Madres En La Imaginaria Cultural Del Terrorismo Estatal, Brianne Cotter

Honors Papers

My research attempts to build an archive of the violence that mothers and daughters faced under the Argentine "Dirty War" dictatorship of 1976-1983 with specific attention to pregnant women who visibly straddle the identity of mother and daughter. By looking to state-sanctioned resources and fictional narratives, including novels and film, I hope to better understand a lived experience of pregnant prisoners that has been historically erased, and understand how this intergenerational trauma instilled a legacy of terror through the exploitation of feminized bodies. My thesis proposes that subversive, pregnant women posed the historically rich threat of being “brujas” (witches) against …

Terminal Youth: The Failure Narrative Of The Dysfunctional Family As The Non-Viability Of Capitalist Economic Liberalism In Contemporary Latin American Film, Sharrah Lane

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This project examines the desire for national and international belonging and citizenship in the figure of the child intersectionally marked by race, class, and gender in contemporary Latin American film, a desire that is ultimately met only with precarity and violence. Chapter One analyzes the figure of the orphaned street child in terms of the desire for connection with a mother figure as a stand-in for the lack of affective community in Pixote: a lei do mais fraco (Brazil, 1981), La vendedora de rosas (Colombia, 1998), and Huelepega: ley de la calle (Venezuela, 1999) in which the protagonists either die, …

Encuentro Con La Precariedad: La Reaparición Del Gitano En El Cine Documental Español De La Crisis De 2008, María Julia De León Hernández

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

In 2008, Spain’s financial crisis had a great impact on the primary sector on which the nation’s ‘economic miracle’ was founded: housing.Land speculation, the increase in housing construction, and easy loans had become one of the hallmarks of twenty-first-century Spanish identity. The crisis del ladrillo (“brick crisis”) plunged the national economy into chaos and condemned many Spanish citizens to job insecurity, loss of earning power, threat of eviction, and put them at high risk of social marginalization. This dissertation studies the unusual proliferation of documentary films during the years surrounding this economic downturn about the ghettoization of the Spanish Gypsy …

El Futuro Ya Está Aquí: A Comparative Analysis Of Punk In Spain And Mexico, Rex Richard Wilkins

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the punk genre's evolution into commercial mainstream music in Spain and Mexico. It looks at how this evolution altered both the aesthetic and gesture of the genre. This evolution can be seen by examining four bands that followed similar musical and commercial trajectories. In Spain, Kaka de Luxe and Radio Futura; in Mexico, Size and Ritmo Peligroso. Since punk music's gesture is both visceral and political, various methods of suppressing or containing the punk gesture arise. For both Spain and Mexico, containing the punk gesture was a matter of government censorship in the early years of punk. …

Affect, Neoliberalism And Forgiveness In Alonso Cueto's 'Redención' Trilogy, Anthony Joseph Pearce

Theses and Dissertations

In the aftermath of the bloody twenty-year internal conflict in Peru, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR) documented the massive human rights violations by Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian state. The CVR contextualized these abuses by producing a broad historical narrative which has fomented the creation of a new discourse in Peruvian cultural production. This thesis is concerned with how the CVR and the post-conflict search for reconciliation have influenced contemporary Peruvian literature. This paper will focus on the ‘Redención' trilogy by novelist Alonso Cueto. The three novels explore notions of forgiveness and …

Literary And Cinematic Representations Of Neoliberal Forms Of Contemporary Violence In Latin America With Special Interest In Mexico And Colombia, Ivan De Jesus Iglesias

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the last decades, with an increased rhythm and greater intensity, the so-called neoliberal violence has come to play a relevant role within the history of world societies. The Latin American institutional, political, social, and economic changes of the 1970’s and 1980’s, especially those produced under dictatorships, contributed to create the conditions for the implementation of the processes of economic liberalization and global market as part of the concept of institutional modernization and cultural globalization that gave rise to the neoliberal mentality. In this context, neoliberalism becomes hegemonic as a mode of discourse and is incorporated into the way individuals …

La Nación Está En Otra Parte: Cultura Y Neoliberalismo En México (1977-1996), Rafael Lemus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies a series of cultural products and practices that, between 1977 and 1996, either contributed to the formation and propagation of a neoliberal rationality in Mexico or opposed it. By analyzing objects as diverse as cultural magazines, art exhibitions, literary polemics and social movements, it addresses the reconfiguration of the Mexican cultural field triggered by the neoliberal turn in the 1980s as well as the construction of a new national narrative intended to displace the old revolutionary tale and to rationalize and facilitate the insertion of the country into the global economy.

The first chapter focuses on the …

Neoliberal Dystopias: Postmodern Aesthetics And A Modern Ethic In Four Pairs Of Plays By Argentine And Irish Playwrights (1990-2003), Noelia Diaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is an exploration of eight plays, four from Argentina, four from Ireland, comprehending the period between 1990 and 2003. Both countries share a strong tradition of national theatre that, from its beginnings, was closely intertwined with the development of the nation state. Theatre functions in Argentina and Ireland as a medium through which representations of what it means to be Irish or Argentine have been explored, questioned, and contested. It is the aim of this project to examine how the apparently non-political and ahistorical theater of the playwrights I will examine is indeed a response to a contextualized …

Politics Of Writing: Latin American Testimonio, Brazil's Literatura Marginal And The Question Of Neoliberalism, Ana Maria Todescan Young

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the light of Latin American testimonio theoretical approach, which includes questions such as the cultural production under the intensification of neoliberal policies and the inquiry of the complicity between literary practices and the state as formulated by Rama in The Lettered City, this study examines the novel Capão Pecado, representative work of the writer and cultural activist Ferréz, and the potential relation to the formal elements of the former criticism. By thinking alongside John Beverley's case study on I, Rigoberta Menchú's testimonial narrative and Ferréz, prominent author of the contemporary production of literatura marginal and representative of the expression …

Una Cárcel De Cultura: Secuelas De La Dictadura Chilena En Un Centro De Arte Comunitario, Sofia Leblanc

Honors Papers

In Chile, wounds from the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973 to 1990 still fester under the surface of its post-transitional society. The regime of terror lives on in economic policies, architecture, the country's grave-pocked landscape, and in the everyday lives of Chileans. My research examines a former prison and torture center that has been converted into a cultural park: a space of culture, art, and community, sanctioned and administered by the state. It serves as a microcosm for Chile, which has chosen to erase its violent past while also perpetuating a system of class stratification and power structures that come directly …