Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Hamilton, Democracy, And Theatre In America, Patricia Herrera

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

I, along with University of Richmond professors Lázaro Lima and Laura Browder, received an National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association Latino Americans grant this year to organize the Latinos in Richmond program, which coincided with two classes that we taught this spring: the Tocqueville Seminar “Performing Latino USA: Democracy, Demography, and Equality” and the First-Year Seminar “Telling Richmond’s Latino Stories: A Community Documentary Project.” Since the goal of both courses was to explore how Latinos—the nation’s largest “minority” group in a representative democracy like America­—is also the most underrepresented, I was interested in understanding Hamilton through …

Review: Americans In The Treasure House: Travel To Porfirian Mexico And The Cultural Politics Of Empire. By Jason Ruiz, George T. Díaz

History Faculty Publications

Well written and persuasive, Jason Ruiz gives readers a beautiful book on Americans’ literal and figurative image of Mexico under and immediately after Dıaz. A history of pictures rather than a pictorial history, Americans in the Treasure House has great depth and will be useful to scholars of U.S.–Mexican relations, travel, and the gendered politics of empire.

History, Historical Fiction, And Historical Myth: 'The German Doctor' By Lucía Puenzo, Nathan W. Cody

Student Publications

The escape of thousands of war criminals to Argentina and throughout South America in the aftermath of World War II is a historical subject that has been clouded with mystery and conspiracy. Lucía Puenzo's film, The German Doctor, utilizes this historical enigma as a backdrop for historical fiction by imagining a family's encounter with Josef Mengele, the notorious SS doctor from Auschwitz who escaped to South America in 1949 under a false identity. While Puenzo sought to tell a story within a historical context, the film still has important historical commentaries. Ultimately, The German Doctor demonstrates the intersections of history, …

Jesus With A Kalashnikov: Examining Marxist Elements In Liberation Theology And Soviet Influence On Its Origins, Todd "Cameron" Swathwood Jr

Senior Honors Theses

Liberation theology emerged as a prominent feature of religion and politics in the 1960s. Since the beginning, detractors have noted the overtly Marxist tendencies within this ideology. This thesis introduces the core concepts and presuppositions of liberation theology itself, and then focuses on specific and varied allegations concerning any influence the Soviet Union may have had on its formation and propagation. Particular weight is lent to the testimony of Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, formerly the head of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s national intelligence service and the highest-ranking defector ever received from the Soviet Bloc. Pacepa has shared his insider …

Gendered Geographies In Puerto Rican Culture: Spaces, Sexualities, Solidarities, Radost A. Rangelova

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

This is a critical study of the construction of gendered spaces through feminine labor and capital in Puerto Rican literature and film (1950-2010). It analyzes gendered geographies and forms of emotional labor, and the possibility that they generate within the material and the symbolic spaces of the family house, the factory, the beauty salon and the brothel. It argues that by challenging traditional images of femininity texts by authors and film directors like Rosario Ferré, Carmen Lugo Filippi, Magali García Ramis, Mayra Santos-Febres, Sonia Fritz and Ana María García, among others, contest the official Puerto Rican cultural nationalist discourse on …

Malestar En El Eje Horizontal: Iconografía De Ruptura En Neuva Corónica Y Buen Gobierno (1615), De Felipe Guaman Poma De Ayala, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Durante la última década, los estudios coloniales producidos en el contexto de la academia norteamericana han abogado por llevar adelante una agenda descolonizadora. Este cambio de perspectiva ha propiciado la incorporación de textos marginales al canon literario colonial, así como la revisión de los presupuestos ideológicos y culturales que subyacen en los análisis críticos. Este nuevo rumbo tiene coma propósito abordar la experiencia de la conquista y la colonia considerando sus secuelas en las políticas culturales y territoriales que los Estados-Nación posteriores aplicaron sobre las comunidades indígenas. El texto de Guaman Poma ingresa al campo de los estudios coloniales en …

Lingering Colonialities As Blockades To Peace Education: School Violence In Trinidad, Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

Book Summary: Bringing together the voices of scholars and practitioners on challenges and possibilities of implementing peace education in diverse global sites, this book addresses key questions for students seeking to deepen their understanding of the field. The book not only highlights ground-breaking and rich qualitative studies from around the globe, but also analyses the limits and possibilities of peace education in diverse contexts of conflict and post-conflict societies. Contributing authors address how educators and learners can make meaning of international peace education efforts, how various forms of peace and violence interact in and around schools, and how the field …

A Mark In Salvadoran History, Jose Alvarado

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

El Salvador is considered one of the smallest countries in Central America. This miniature country went through a very gruesome civil war that took the lives of 75,000 victims. Violence has always been a factor that exists in the country, ever since it first originated. The Salvadoran civil war had many effects on the country and the citizens including migrations, poverty, and violence that still continue to this day.

The Salvadoran Civil War had many effects on the country, not just economically, but also socially. This research answered many of my questions, but some still remain unanswered. Does the country …

Impermeable Assemblages: Flooding, Urban Infrastructure, And Stormwater Politics In São Paulo, Brazil, Nate Millington

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This project analyzes efforts to remake the relationship between water and city in São Paulo, Brazil. Currently experiencing overlapping problems of flooding, scarcity, and pollution, São Paulo illustrates the challenges of managing water in a contemporary mega-city. This dissertation subsequently considers the city’s water management through an approach that borrows from urban political ecology, social studies of science, and post-colonial urban theory. With an epistemological grounding in these literatures, this project analyzes ongoing conversations about water management in São Paulo, and focuses on how water is encountered and engaged with in the landscape by engineers, artists, and activists. This project …

Cuanto Más Miro, Más Veo: Dialéctica De La Imagen Y La Palabra En Tres Obras Sobre La Última Dictadura Argentina, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Las reflexiones de Marianne Hirsch (1997) sobre la función de las imágenes fotográficas en los procesos individuales y colectivos de indagación sobre el pasado han ocupado un papel destacado en estudios recientes sobre la experiencia dictatorial en la Argentina (Fortuny y Blejmar, 2011). Para la estudiosa, las imágenes indiciales no son medias para evocar ese tiempo pretérito, sino para poneren evidencia su caracter fragmentario e inabordable (1992-1993: 27). Par su parte, en su reconocido trabajo On Photography (1990), Susan Sontag sostiene que las fotografías transmiten momentos o experiencias específicas. Como lo que le sucede al personaje del relato de Julio …

La Identidad Ecuatoriana A Través Del Humor De Miguel Antonio Chávez, Luis Enrique Yanez

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis project provides a close reading of the literary work of Ecuadorian author Miguel Antonio Chávez. The analysis in this work discuses how the author use humor to criticize the discourses that have been produced in order to represent indigenous and Afro-descendants in the country, as well as the fragility of social and political institutions such as the church, the state, and the country's educational system in the pieces La puta madre patria, La kriptonita del Sinaí, and El electroshock nuestro de cada día. This thesis analyses humor as a narrative tool with its function to reproduce and criticize …

Dying To Better Themselves: West Indians And The Building Of The Panama Canal, Written By Olive Senior, Michael L. Conniff

Faculty Publications, History

A book review of Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, by Olive Senior. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2014. xxiii + 416 pp. (Paper US$ 40.00)

Collective Amnesia, Boca Floja

South

A wide gap exists between the phenomenon of cultural appropriation and historical claim. How do you justify when you are 12 and at that age you have been programmed by an information structure and culture that has defined every identifying feature?

The migration phenomenon, the informal market, and the constant flow between the idealization of the First World in the northern corner and the underworld in the backyard, made it possible for me one day, while walking with my grandmother in a street market in Mexico, to stumble across a cassette tape with Ice Cube’s face on it that said …

Vanguardia Mujerista Haciendo Escuela: An Oral History Of Cuban Feminism, Marie Eszenyi

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The high rate of female political participation in Cuba has led many journalists, political scientists, and activists to claim that the country is quite possibly the most feminist in Latin America (Torregrosa, 2012). As the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality (2012) indicates, Cuba ranks third in the world for female participation in legislative bodies. Indeed, Cuba has a long history of female political and revolutionary involvement that positions Cuban feminism both on the forefront and the margins of the economy, governmental institutions, culture, society, military systems, and the workplace during various historical points. Moreover, Cuba’s location just 90 miles …

The Disappearing Mestizo, Book Review, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Grenada. Joanne Rappaport. Duke University Press, 2014, 368 pp., $25.99, paper. By probing “when and how” an individual was considered a mestizo (a person of mixed heritage) in the early colonial New Kingdom of Grenada (modern-day Columbia), Joanne Rappaport’s Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Duke University Press, 2014) adds to the growing scholarship on racial difference in colonial Spanish America.

Las Casas Remembered:The 500th Anniversary Of The Struggle For The Human Rights Of The Native Peoples Of America, David M. Traboulay

Publications and Research

At first a part of the colonial system as an encomendero, he later dedicated his life to the struggle for justice and human rights of the indigenous peoples of America. At the grand debate of 1551 between Dr. Sepulveda and Las Casas, Las Casas presented a very modern view of human rights that is one of the useful models of human rights for the contemporary world.

La Voz January 2015, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue:

• Mead Lecture: Jossiana Arroyo-Martinez
• Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer
• El Instituto Internship Placement
• Blood Rising: Art and Social Justice

A Monastery For The Revolution: Ernesto Cardenal, Thomas Merton, And The Paradox Of Violence In Nicaragua, 1957-1979, Brendan Jordan

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

In 1957, a young Nicaraguan poet named Ernesto Cardenal, recently graduated from Columbia University, entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani, located outside Louisville, Kentucky. There he met a prominent Catholic thinker and pacifist, Thomas Merton, who soon mentored young Cardenal. Though Cardenal departed Gethsemani in 1959, Merton continued to counsel him in spirituality, poetry, and social activism until Merton’s death in 1968. While Cardenal during these earlier years was a committed pacifist, his experiences after returning to Nicaragua in 1965 radically altered his view of social action. Cardenal established a semi-monastic community in the Solentiname islands in southern Nicaragua, and …

Las Madres De Plaza De Mayo, Then And Now: A Comparative Analysis Of Its Fractured Factions And Lasting Sybolism In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sondra Anton

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

I conducted research on three different factions of the original Madres de Plaza de Mayo cause in Buenos Aires, Argentina: Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora, and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Through interviews and archival research, I have completed a comparison of the three groups. I have concluded that although their original cause of demanding the whereabouts of their disappeared children united them, they are now deeply fragmented among one another due to their differing opinions of how to achieve justice in post-Dirty War Argentina. Furthermore, it is interesting to note the …

Historicity, Achronicity, And The Materiality Of Cultures In Colonial Brazil, Amy J. Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"In this essay, I use three nontraditional forms from the visual culture of colonial Brazil—Tupinambá featherwork, Portuguese Atlantic mandinga pouches, and azulejos (tilework)— in order to meditate upon materiality and temporality as methodological problems with which our discipline should engage. Each of these art forms has historical trajectories that span cultures, continents, and centuries, a circumstance that raises questions as to how such diverse and stubbornly nonhistoricizable genres can be melded into a coherent historical narrative of the visual and material cultures specific to 'Brazil,' especially when two of them — the mandinga bags and azulejos — are not intrinsically …

Memory, State Violence, And Revolution: Mexico's Dirty War In Ciudad Juárez, Vanessa Claire Johnson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

After the uprising that took place in Madera, Chihuahua on September 23, 1965, the first armed challenge to the state since the Mexican Revolution, the north became a region of historical significance for understanding the subsequent "Dirty War" that spanned from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Ciudad Juárez was a key locale in which a wide variety of revolutionary groups conducted both open and clandestine activities. Attempting to rouse the masses, a dedicated few organized protests, counter-meetings, popular assemblies, and launched a prepa popular to reorganize and democratize education. The Mexican state responded to these events with repression, …

Latino Catholicism And Indigenous Heritage As A Subfield Of Latino Studies: A Critical Evaluation Of New Approaches, Elizabeth C. Martinez Ph.D.

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

Posed through critical theory on "third-space," and a brief history of Latin American Studies, this article pursues analysis of recent interdisciplinary scholarship in English, to delineate the emergence of a new subfield in Latina/o Catholicism, connected to greater understanding of Indigenous legacy. The article also demonstrates the path of study toward creation of a themed academic issue.

Faith, Works, And Praxis: Emergent Post-Colonialism And The Catholic Church In North America, Alexander Odicino

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The personal papers of American Jesuit priest, Wilfrid Parsons, evince an international information war concerned with the praxis of "facts" pertaining to Mexico’s Church and state conflicts of 1925 to 1939. While editor-in-chief of the Jesuit weekly magazine, "America", (1925-1936) Parsons transformed the publication into the pre-eminent Catholic source of information about the "Mexican situation", consequently enabling him to coordinate the publication of "facts" with several other New York based Catholic publications. However, rather than speaking to strictly Catholic interests in the Mexican conflict, research has shown that, when analyzed as a focal point of information processing, the sources in …

A Case Study Of Information System Security Compliance Of Small Medical And Dental Practices, Debra Landry Folse

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Small medical and dental practices must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, and Title XIII Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The case study, utilizing interviews, observations, and existing documentation of two medical and the two dental practices, not only analyzed the compliance solution choices made involving procedures and technologies, but also analyzed the emotion aspects of fear of non-compliance, perceived confidence in compliance, and the primary and secondary appraisals of the compelled compliance. Although compliance is not an easy process, …

Interpretative Ingredients: Formulating Art And Natural History In Early Modern Brazil, Amy Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"In this article I look at two early modern texts that pertain to the natural history of Brazil and its usage for medicinal purposes. These texts present an informative contrast in terms of information density and organization, raising important methodological considerations about the ways that inventories and catalogues become sources for colonial scholarship in general and art history in particular."

Women Write About Che, Nancy Stout

Library Staff Publications

In the last five years, three women have written biographies of Ernesto "Che" Guevara after decades of his life story being solidly in the hands of men. The question is: do women write biography differently?

La Voz Fall 2014, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue:

• Elizabeth Mahan
• Migrant Farm Workers
• La Comunidad Intelectual

Manuel De La Cruz Gonzalez: Transnationalism And The Development Of Modern Art In Costa Rica, Lauran Bonilla-Merchav

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While scholars are increasingly scrutinizing twentieth-century Latin American art and inserting it into the canon of modern art history, studies of the region usually leap from Mexico to South America, skipping Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. This is not due to a lack of dedicated artistic effort in the isthmus, but rather to poor cultural infrastructure, which made being a modern artist in the region particularly challenging, and the underdeveloped state of local art histories, which have yet to traverse national borders. This oversight of Central American art makes it difficult to grasp the full …

Picturing Argentina: Myths, Movies, And The Peronist Vision, Currie K. Thompson

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

No individual has had greater impact on Argentine history than Juan Domingo Perón. The years 1943–1945, when he was an influential member in his nation’s governing junta, and 1946–1955, when he was its president, were tumultuous ones that transformed Argentina. Perón was a highly controversial figure, and his memory continues to provoke intense and often acrimonious debate. Moreover, the nature of his legacy resists neat classification. Many of his achievements were positive. He oversaw the passage of progressive social legislation, including women’s suffrage and prison reform, and he implemented programs that aided the nation’s poor and working classes. On the …

La Voz Spring 2014, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue:

• Alturas Duo
• Dominican Citizenship
• Magdalena Gomez
• Roberto Tejada