Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Modeling Sound In Ancient Maya Cities: Moving Towards A Synesthetic Experience Using Gis And 3d Simulation, Graham Goodwin

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

Digital technologies enable modeling of the potential role of sound in past environments. While digital approaches have limitations in objectively rendering reality, they provide an expanded platform that potentially increases our understanding of experience in the past and enhances the investigation of ancient landscapes. Digital technologies enable new experiences in ways that are multi-sensual and move us closer toward reconstructing holistic views of past landscapes. Archaeologists have successfully employed 2D and 3D tools to measure vision and movement within cityscapes. However, built environments are often designed to invoke synesthetic experiences that also include sound and other senses. Geographic Information Systems …

The Variable Expression Of Transitive Subject And Possesor In Wayuunaiki (Guajiro), Andres M. Sabogal

Linguistics ETDs

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. …

Revealing Silences: The Representation Of Black Identities In Hispanic Afro-Caribbean Autobiographical And Biographical Writing, Bryn Campbell

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This project explores how the historical contexts of the Hispanic Caribbean, including the regions of the Circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean Diasporas in the United States, have sustained dominant racial and nationalist ideologies that continue to silence or negate the identity of Afro-Caribbean subjects in national letters. My research focuses on the autobiographical and biographical writing of four Hispanic Afro-Caribbean men: Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano¾originally published and translated to English in 1840 by Richard R. Madden¾ Klabel (2002) by Víctor Virgilio López García, Down These Mean Streets (1967) by Piri Thomas, and Las criadas de la …

Emotion Norms In Media: Acculturation In Hispanic Children's Storybooks Compared To Heritage And Mainstream Cultures, Victoria R. Sanders, Wolfgang Friedlmeier, Mayra L. Sanchez Gonzalez

Open Access Publishing Support Funded Articles

Cultural artifacts such as children’s storybooks may serve to facilitate learning of emotion display norms. We compared emotion displays in European American and Mexican books to infer cultural differences between the mainstream and a heritage culture to ultimately explore acculturation orientation in Hispanic storybooks. Totally, 1,059 images were coded from 10 popular storybooks from each cultural group. We focused on emotion type (positive, negative socially engaging, and disengaging) and intensity of expression. Context variables such as social partners and gender were also compared. Positive emotions were dominant in all groups, occurring most in Hispanic storybooks; Mexican and Hispanic storybooks displayed …

Activismo, Literatura Y Cambio Social En El Caribe Hispano: Aproximación En Tres Movimientos, Maria Alejandra Aguilar Dornelles

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Este ensayo convoca a la reflexión de los vínculos entre literatura, activismo y cambio social en el Caribe hispano privilegiando ciertas intervenciones lideradas por mujeres, las cuales han contribuido a la defensa de mejores condiciones de vida y a un pacto social más equitativo. Teniendo en cuenta la diversidad y movilidad que caracteriza a la región caribeña, esta reflexión comienza examinando las organizaciones feministas autónomas que surgieron en la década del 70 en Puerto Rico para luego desplazarse hacia el trabajo de cuestionamiento a la historia planteado por la poesía de Aída Cartagena Portalatín en República Dominicana, concluyendo con una …

Santería In A Globalized World: A Study In Afro-Cuban Folkloric Music, Nathan Montgomery

Lawrence University Honors Projects

The Yoruban people of modern-day Nigeria worship many deities called orichas by means of singing, drumming, and dancing. Their aurally preserved artistic traditions are intrinsically connected to both religious ceremony and everyday life. These forms of worship traveled to the Americas during the colonial era through the brutal transatlantic slave trade and continued to evolve beneath racist societal hierarchies implemented by western European nations. Despite severe oppression, Yoruban slaves in Cuba were able to disguise orichas behind Catholic saints so that they could still actively worship in public. This initial guise led to a synthesis of religious practice, language, and …

Coarticulation In Two Fricative-Vowel Sequences Of Latin American Spanish, Jeff Renaud

Celebration of Learning

Dialectal surveys of Latin American Spanish (Perissinotto 1975, Resnick 1975) describe three main possible pronunciations for fu (fuego 'fire') and fo (foco 'focus') sequences: faithful [f], velarized [x], and bilabialized [ɸ], in order of frequency. While the velar realization has received phonetic and theoretical consideration (Lipski 1995, Mazzaro 2011), little is understood about the voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ] in Spanish. This paper describes a three-part production study to uniformly account for the unfaithful velar and bilabial realizations.

Mazzaro (2011) explains the velar [x] variant by arguing that, given the acoustic similarity of, e.g., [fu]/[xu], listeners misperceive a speaker's …

Mapping The Nature Of Empire: The Legacy Of Theological Geography In The Early Iberian Atlantic, Ángel Jazak Gallardo

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

This investigation revolves around one central question: if Christianity became the official ideology for sixteenth-century imperial expansion, then how does a theological conception of nature undergird or undermine colonial configurations of knowledge and power? I argue that, in the wake of 1492, Iberian empires racialized religious identity and mapped hemispheric dominion by leveraging a theological geography, that is, a scholastic vision of the natural world.

In Chapter One, I examine the order of nature in late medieval cosmology. By analyzing Fra Mauro’s Mappamundi (c. 1450), I show the ways in which Aristotelian Thomism provides an intellectual framework for subsequent global …

Fear And Loathing On The Green Hills Of Africa, Donald Miller

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this article is to establish a textual parallel between Hunter S. Thompson`s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Ernest Hemingway`s Green Hills of Africa. Thompson took Hemingway’s novel as a challenge to write under extreme duress. Thompson twisted many passages from Green Hills to fit his own text. He used bitter irony to translate Hemingway`s text into his own “Gonzo” reportage.

Thompson`s friend and traveling companion, Oscar Z. Acosta, is used as an example of how Thompson rewrote Hemingway. Acosta`s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo is referenced as the nexus of the two novels, making …

Escribir La Pesadilla: Dávila Y Tario, Entre Lo Fantástico Y El Terror. Dos Ejemplos En La Literatura Mexicana Del Medio Siglo, Adriana Álvarez Rivera

Nomenclatura: aproximaciones a los estudios hispánicos

En este trabajo se analizan dos cuentos de escritores mexicanos cuya obra, hasta hace relativamente poco, fue considerada marginal: “El jardín de las tumbas” de Amparo Dávila y “La noche de los cincuenta libros” de Francisco Tario. Como sustento teórico se retoman, en especial, las posturas de David Roas y Tzvetan Todorov, defensor y detractor respectivamente de la idea del miedo como esencial a lo fantástico. El análisis más concreto de los textos se basa en conceptos de narratología -fundamentalmente la focalización y la voz narrativa- y teoría de la recepción -en particular el horizonte de expectativas- para poner en …

Undocumented Queer Latinx Students: Testimonio Of Survival, Maria E. Fernández

McNair Research Journal SJSU

Recent U.S. political turmoil has deliberately embedded fear into many marginalized and underrepresented people living in the U.S. The fact that the United States was founded on the demanding work of diverse populations of immigrants is vitally important to how immigrants are being treated today. In 2016, the U.S. presidential electoral win for Donald Trump left many marginalized communities—including Undocumented Queer Latinx students—fearful of how his administration would affect their communities. This paper reviews literatures on Queer immigration history, the homophobic and transphobic psychological history behind legal immigration barriers, and the recent mobilization to include Undocumented Queer Latinx students in …

El Viaje Desde Centroamérica A Los Estados Unidos: How Us Foreign Policy Impacts Migration From Central America To The United States, Cecilia Cerja

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

In the face of ever increasing civil conflict in Central America, the United States is attempting to grapple with immigration reform as the number of refugees continues to rise. Though the dominant narrative seems to indicate that people are flocking to the United States for economic opportunity, upon further analysis it seems that there are a variety of push and pull factors for migration to the United States. In this thesis three case studies of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are analyzed to determine the push and pull factors causing migration to the United States. After examining the push and …

The Devil In Cartagena: Slavery, Religion And Resistance In Seventeenth-Century Caribbean Colombia, Daniel James Dawson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis examines the role of religion in African communities in seventeenth-century Caribbean Colombia, and the tensions between the system of racial and religious hierarchy imposed by the Catholic Church and Spanish authorities and the everyday religious life of free and enslaved Africans and their descendants. It will examine interactions between African religion and Christianity and African resistance to Spanish Catholic authority. It will examine Spanish-Catholic thought on African spirituality, and investigate the relationship between African subjects and Catholic authorities in the Spanish Atlantic. It explores the goals of Catholic authorities in relation to African subjects, and the various methods …

Los Cuatro Puntos Cardinales Del Lente De Juan Carlos Alom, Reynaldo Lastre

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Breve análisis de los tópicos característicos en la obra fotográfica del fotógrafo cubano Juan Carlos Alom, en especial las que resumen su reciente exposición en el Jorgensen, Center for the Performing Arts, de la Universidad de Connecticut.

El Mundo Anti-Negro Y Los Hip-Hop Blues: Los Rakas Y J-Cole, Josué R. López

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Tenemos que contender con el mundo anti-negro. Los Rakas, un dúo artístico panameño-estadounidense, y J-Cole, un artista afro-estadounidense, utilizan al hip-hop como una avenida para comunicar sus ansiedades, sufrimientos y fortalecerse en la lucha infinita al ser el Otro Oscuro. Los blues forman parte de como uno lidia con la permanencia del racismo y nuestra existencia en un mundo anti-negro. A través de Frantz Fanon, Derrick Bell y Lewis Gordon, argumento que el estilo musical de J-Cole y Los Rakas constituye una forma de los hip-hop blues. Examino las canciones “Sueño Americano” y “Neighbors” para analizar cómo los artistas entienden …

Relanzamiento Of Nicaragua’S Christian Base Communities: Forging New Models Of Church And Society For The Twenty-First Century, Lara M. Gunderson

Anthropology ETDs

How do narrative practices used by members of Christian Base Communities (in Spanish, CEBs) construct particular Catholic-political subjectivities within the Church, the nation-state, and the larger global institutions? Christian Base Communities, the vehicle by which liberation theology is put into practice, played a significant role in Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution. Their proclaimed renewal is happening under dramatically different contexts from which they first emerged. Their religious beliefs continue to justify and place a moral thrust on their struggle for a more egalitarian society despite the reduction of social programs on the part of neoliberal governments, including the current Sandinista party administration. …

Hocicona, Contestona, Repelona: Breaking The Silence Through Testimonio A Collection Of Prose And Poetry, Valerie Ann Leal Cerda

Theses and Dissertations

Testimonio of a first generation Mexican American navigating a duel identity, and examining the clash of two cultures and languages through personal experiences in a collection of prose and poetry.

Tracing Dominican Attitudes Towards Race: A Historical Analysis, Marcos Polonia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The common misconception is that all Dominicans are racist – that Dominicans live in a Fanonesque reality where we believe we are white, but we clearly inhabit black bodies. These attitudes permeate Dominican society from the highest echelons of power to the everyday experiences of Dominicans on the street. The notion that Dominicans are racist is widespread among Latinos and African-Americans as well. Recently, global attention was focused on the Dominican Republic as the country changed its constitution in order to prevent Dominicans of Haitian descent from becoming Dominican citizens. But, where do these notions of race come from? This …

The Other At War: Performing The Spanish-Cuban-American War On U.S. And Cuban Stages, Juan R. Recondo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish-Cuban-American War, declared by the United States on April 25, 1898, marks a colonial shift in the history of the Caribbean and solidified the expansionist thrust of the United States outside national borders. Theatres in turn-of-the-century New York, which at this point was one of the theatrical centers of the nation, debated for audiences the imperialist character of the U.S. The Cuban struggle and the resulting Spanish-Cuban-American War permeated U.S. drama, thereby portraying a Caribbean in need of salvation by the military intervention of the United States. New York stages of the time became locations where various cultural representations …

Climate Change, Colonialism, And Second-Class Citizenry: A Case Study Of The Impacts Of Hurricane María In Puerto Rico, Aislyne Calianos

Senior Honors Projects

The hurricane season of 2017 was a historic one, with mammoth storms making landfall one after another, in what seemed like an unrelenting assault on our coastal cities and communities. Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, Irma plowed through Florida, and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, but one of these storms was unlike the others. Why is it that the American citizens of our southern states were able to recover so much more quickly than our citizens in Puerto Rico? In the era of climate change, we will be forced to reckon with the modern legacy of colonialism, as vulnerable communities must face …