Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

The Realm That I Am: An Interdisciplinary Memoir On Identity And Healing, Maria R. Flores

University Honors Theses

This thesis is an interdisciplinary exploration into identity, self, and meaning-making. Engaging queer studies, Chicano/a Studies, narrative therapy, creative nonfiction, and visual arts, this project is both a collage and self-portrait in two parts. Part one uses the ideas of philosophers Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, Jack Halberstam, and Judith Butler to explore identity formation in the author’s family and social contexts. Part two follows the experience of having C-PTSD and uses memoir and creative writing to explore the narrative therapeutic mode. Both sections explore themes of identity, social isolation, relationships, failure, mental illness, trauma, and addiction. The work is underscored …

The Latino Cultural Center: Higher Education And The Importance Of Community, Kamilah Mercedes Valentín Díaz

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

The Latino Cultural Center (LCC) at Purdue University is 1 of 2 in the state of Indiana, with the other housed at Indiana University. Choosing to pursue higher education has its challenges, but not everyone has access to the same resources or community support that helps make the process easier. The LCC, like the other cultural centers on campus, is vital in distributing resources that aid in student success. They work to create an inclusive environment for the entire campus community by fostering meaningful dialogue and cultural understanding of the Latino/e/x community. They aim to support Latino/e/x faculty and staff …

Pachuquismo E Identidad Nacional Imaginada En Los Estados Unidos Y México En La Década De 1940, Isabel Saavedra-Weis

Hispanic Studies Honors Projects

Pachuquismo was a counterculture born in the barrios of East L.A. in the 1940s. Mexican-American youth created their own social group defined by specific clothing (zoot suits), music fusions (mambo and swing), and linguistic dialects (caló). However, on both sides of the U.S. and Mexican border, pachucos had a poor reputation. In the U.S., mainstream media portrayed pachucos as juvenile delinquents and domestic threats. In Mexico, pachucos were mimicked and heavily criticized for their Americanization. In this essay, I identify how U.S. and Mexican mainstream media reacted to pachucos, and what those portrayals can tell us about the imagined national …

Colonial Education: Puerto Ricans And The Carlisle Indian School, Progenitors Of The Mythic Identity, Melissa Swinea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

‘GOD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES’ reads a subheading of The Red Man –a historic periodical memorializing the tune of 19th century Americana with references to Godliness and its connection to Indianness and ostentatious capitalism in a canon of school newspapers. The Red Man was the staple periodical of the Carlisle Indian Industrial Institute published monthly and declared “in the interest of Indian education and civilization” for the annual price of 50 cents[1] The subject and recipients of The Red Man would also include 193 Puerto Rican students sent to Carlisle through the U.S.’s campaign to Americanize the Caribbean …

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …

La Autenticidad Y El Yo: Un Análisis Sobre La Experiencia Urbana De Las Mujeres Indígenas En Ecuador, Madison L. Mcclellan

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

As research on the urban indigenous experience continues to expand, considerations of how indigenous populations understand, express and introspect upon their being indigenous in the city still proves an underexplored topic. The generalizing notion that indigenous persons are staticーin temporal, migratory and identity termsーcategorically conflicts with the growing trends of rural to urban migration patterns. Even more, deep-rooted indigenous-rural associations engender identity disorientations among indigenous women living in the city. The city becomes a space of self-confrontation and re-construction as indigenous women encounter questions of authenticity and shame.

Based in literature on identity, performance, authenticity and shame, this research considers …

Doing Latinidad While Black: Afro-Latino Identity And Belonging, Vianny Jasmin Nolasco

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study centers on the experiences of Afro-Latinos and how the racialization of Latino as a distinctly ‘brown’ identity—thereby excluding Blackness—shapes their identity and sense of belonging within Latino communities and spaces. Through in-depth interviews with eight Afro-Latinos, and using West and Fenstermaker’s (1995) work, ‘Doing Difference’, I find that the invisibility of Blackness, being categorized as Black, and therefore not Latino, and the negative meanings attached to Blackness may make it difficult for Afro-Latinos to come into their racial and ethnic identity and feel like they belong in Latino spaces. However, these experiences are also an important step to …

Immigrants: A Threat To The Economy Or Cultural Identity? A Case Study Of Haitian And Venezuelan Immigrants In Chile, Erin Geist

Honors Theses

Historically, countries often faced the difficult task of favoring one immigrant group over another. Typically, this is in response to their inability to support those immigrants due to an unstable economy. However, some scholars argue that during times of economic prosperity, excluding immigrants may be the result of the group’s incapacity to assimilate to the nation’s “cultural identity”. Since Chile’s conception as a nation and as one of the most prosperous Latin American countries, they have received notably minuscule immigration rates. As a result, Chileans prides themselves as a relatively homogeneous country. Consequently, in 2018, President Sebastián Piñera differentiated visas …

Identity Through Clothing: Argentinian Vs. American Women, Magali Farfan

Apparel Merchandising and Product Development Undergraduate Honors Theses

According to Roach-Higgins, Eicher, and Johnson (1995), “individuals acquire identity through social, physical, and biological settings” (pg.12). When acquiring identity, culture plays a vital role. Because of numerous influences on identity, a conflict exists for those who identify with more than one culture. This study focuses specifically on the problems of women who identify both as Argentinian and American. The purpose of this creative project was to create an outfit that could be worn by an Argentinian/American woman in the presence of family and friends, regardless of culture, and not feel that she is disregarding societal norms of either culture. …

Reimagining African Authenticity Through Adichie's Imitation Motif, Ivette Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie …

Creating A Multiracial Lesson Plan, Clayton Davis

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The purpose of this project is to teach students about multiracial identity issues. Multiracial populations in the U.S. continue to grow and it’s important for educators to address the needs of these students. A 5-E multiracial literature lesson plan was created for second grade that incorporates KWL and Text-to-World teaching strategies. A second grade class were read two children’s picture books, each featuring a biracial protagonist, and were asked to discuss and evaluate the content and commonalities of these stories. Students recorded what they learned in this lesson in their KWL’s. The results reveal that some students understood the problems …

Latinos And Afro-Latino Legacy In The United States: History, Culture, And Issues Of Identity, Refugio I. Rochin

Professional Agricultural Workers Journal

Introduction

Since my first visit to the campus in 1992, I have looked forward to this event. Tuskegee University is a world famous campus with many firsts in science and higher education. And it gives me great pleasure to speak about Latinos and Afro-Latinos.

My presentation has three objectives: first, to address the historical origins, and challenges facing U.S. Latinos; second, to expand on the national interest in U.S. Latinos and the surfacing issues of our relations with African-Americans, and, third, to advocate coalition building and suggest ways of working together.

I wish to begin by citing a few caveats …

Sounding Identity: Soundscapes, Music, And Technoculture In The Chinese Diaspora Of Panama, Corey Michael Blake

Masters Theses

Present in Panama since the 19^th century, the Chinese diaspora in Panama City, Panama represents an empowered community of individuals who identify as both Chinese and Panamanian. These Chinese Panamanian hybrid identities emerge within sonic environments through an engagement with transnational media and digital technologies, notably within retail stores. Specifically, music surfaces as an especially important sonic marker of the Chinese Panamanian hybridity. Within the mall of the Panamanian Chinatown of El Dorado, an interesting mixture of both Chinese and Latin American popular music genres sounds throughout the various stores. This mixture of music genres demonstrates Chinese Panamanian agency …

Performing Blackness In A Mulatto Society: Negotiating Racial Identity Through Music In The Dominican Republic, Angelina Maria Tallaj-García

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation analyzes Dominican racial and ethnic identity through an examination of music and music cultures. Previous studies of Dominican identity have focused primarily on the racialized invention of the Dominican nation as white, or non-black, often centering on the building of Dominican identity in (sometimes violent) opposition to the Haitian nation and to Haitian racial identity. I argue that although Dominicans have not developed an explicit verbal discourse of black affirmation, blackness (albeit a contextually contingent articulation) is embedded in popular conceptions of dominicanidad ("Dominicanness") and is enacted through music. My dissertation explores ways in which popular notions of …

Parades Banlieusardes. El Hadj De Mamadou Mahmoud N’Dongo Et Les Identités Criminelles, Hervé Tchumkam

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article aims at understanding the relation between crime and identity formations in the French banlieues, especially in the wake of the 2005 urban riots. The essay performs a reading Mamadou N’Dongo’s novel El Hadj at the intersection of aesthetics and politics in order to scrutinize identity formations and related debates at stake in the prisons of poverty and oppression that constitute the banlieues whose inhabitants are the third or fourth generation of the heirs to African immigration in France. Ultimately, the paper contention is that what I call “banlieue parade” stands out as the new model of identity that …

Un Pie Aquí Y Otro Allá: Translation, Globalization, And Hybridization In The New World (B)Order, Jorge Jimenez-Bellver

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis explores the role of translation in the production and manipulation of identities in the contemporary Americas as exemplified in the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Underscoring the instrumentality of borders vis-à-vis dominant constructions of identity and in connection with questions of language, race, and citizenship, I argue that translation not only functions as an agent of hegemonic superiority and oppression, but also as a locus of plurivocity and hybridization. Drawing from the concepts “continuous variation” (Deleuze and Guattari [1987] 2004), “coloniality of power” (Mignolo 2000), and “hybridization” (García-Canclini 1995), I discuss the connection of translation with three main topics: …

Folie De L'Écriture, Écriture De La Folie Dans La Littératureféminine Des Antilles Françaises, Pascale De Souza

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

There are many female characters with sick/mutilated bodies in Guadeloupe and Martinique’s female literature. Madness, anorexia, self-mutilation, even the suicide of these female characters not only denounce a repressive social order inherited from the history of slavery, but also represent means to affect a social environment that is not responsive to the female quest for identity. Madness, crisis or acts of self-mutilation allow them to escape (“marronnage”) a system, which tries to negate their very existence.