Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Hasta Que La Muerte Los Separe: La Representación De La Violencia Machista En La Literatura Y El Cine Hispánicos Contemporáneos, Anna M. Martija Perez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Violence against women is a worldwide social problem that is far from being eradicated. Sociologists and psychologists have studied this complex issue rooted in the unbalanced distribution of power between the sexes and writers have portrayed it in their works since the Middle Ages to present. This dissertation provides a comparative study of recent representations of male violence in fictional and non-fictional works produced in different Hispanic countries. The works analyzed include: Icíar Bollaín´s film Te doy mis ojos (2003); recent documentaries such as Home Truth (2017) and Las tres muertes de Maricela Escobedo (2021); shortfilms like Disonancia (2005) and …

Canadian Banks And Imperialism In The English-Speaking Caribbean, Tamanisha J. John

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Canadian banks have been important components of an imperialist system since at least the 19^th century. However, their long and rich history of operating as purely exploitative entities in the English-speaking Caribbean region is often overlooked— leading to many incomplete and conflicting narratives about Canada’s role within the global system. I argue that Canada is an imperial actor that exerts agency in supporting a Canadian banking oligopoly both within Canada and in the English-speaking Caribbean. Insufficient attention is given to these Canadian banks, especially considering the power they have wielded in the Caribbean over the centuries. By analyzing the …

Fronteras Hispánicas: Identidades Fronterizas Y Diálogo Intercultural En La Literatura Y El Cine Contemporáneos, Claudia Battistel

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Border-crossings —both geographical and metaphorical— are a fertile territory for critical and fictional discourses that explore the forging of gendered personal, social, and cultural identities. The notion of the border becomes a political, material, discursive or symbolic limit, a space of conflict, resistance and negotiation, where power relations are articulated. In this dissertation I analyze the following border-crossing narratives and films: The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; Jo també soc catalana and El último patriarca, by Najat El Hatchmi; Retorno a Hansala, by Chus Gutiérrez, and Sin dejar huella, by María Novaro. My study …

Modernización Y Espacio Urbano: El Protagonismo De La Ciudad En La Literatura Latinoamericana De Fin De Siglo (1880-1920), Gabriela Carolina Escobar Rodríguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Urban space has played a prominent role in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Latin American literature and culture due to the historical and political importance that cities have had and to the relevant role they played in the passage of Latin-American to modernity at the end of the nineteenth century. In spite of this, the fin de siècle´s city novels have not received the attention they deserve. They have often been misclassified (the Latin American urban novel has been studied almost exclusively as a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century) and/or ignored even though they …

Intermedialidad En El Documental Cubano Contemporáneo, Esteban Alfonso Lopez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cuban documentaries, which have experienced dramatic changes in the last two decades, are now more in tune with the most recent global trends in cinema. However, the scarce implementation within the documentary genre of other perspectives and modes of analysis, outside those that are purely cinematographic, has stalled investigations in the field, thus creating a disengagement with the structural and thematic renovation that has been taking place within the discourse of contemporary Cuban documentaries.

My dissertation “Intermedialidad en el documental cubano contemporáneo” examines a select sample of representative texts and Cuban documentaries, with a view to adapting and/or developing an …

Miedo, Celebración Y Otredad Racial En El Cambio De Siglo: Hacia La Construcción Del Negro En El Discurso Artístico-Literario Cubano (1880-1933), Alberto Sosa Cabanas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The disrupting visual and literary languages of the turn of the 19^th century to the 1930’s constitute an area of research as a moment of crystallization of the Cuban national consciousness or identity. Writers and artists in Hispanic Caribbean region had to face the challenge of finding ways to include highly racialized elements (such as religion and popular culture) within the rhetorical space of the elites, in other words, what Angel Rama has labeled the "Republic of letters". The result of these efforts not only opened a new kind of negotiation of the idea of nation, but also meant …

Politics And Its Impact On Code-Switching In Puerto Rico, Juliette Marie Acosta-Santiago

MA in Linguistics Final Projects

Puerto Rico is considered a bilingual community for having English imposed to it as a result of the Spanish-American war. However, a notable difference between the perception of code-switching (a natural phenomenon after language contact) in Puerto Rico, and other bilingual communities such as Miami seems to take place. Research states that a considerable amount of Puerto Ricans have a negative perception against code-switching, while the limited research on code-switching in Miami states that Miami Cubans have a more positive perception towards code-switching. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the ways in which listeners perceive and …

Un Pajaro Guarachero: Los Intercambios Socio-Musicales Entre Puerto Rico Y Cuba, Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University

Cuban Research Institute Events

No abstract provided.

Irene Rodriguez: Su Mas Reciente Proyeccion Coreografica, Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University

Cuban Research Institute Events

No abstract provided.

Migrations: The Hardships Of Hope

Hemisphere

Migration has long been a part of the political, social and humanitarian landscape of Latin America and the Caribbean. Individuals and societies confront conditions outside of their control, which make people risk the perils that migration implies. In this issue, guest editor Luis Guillermo Solís, former President of Costa Rica and Interim Director of LACC, invites scholars to examine some of the most salient cases of migration in the Americas. Articles examine the causes of population movements within the region to destinations including Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, Chile and Argentina and address how volatile environments are exacerbated by factors such …

Society And Climate Change In Latin America And The Caribbean

Hemisphere

This issue of Hemisphere examines some of the steps that are being taken to conserve marine, terrestrial and urban ecosystems for the biodiversity they contain and the human communities that depend upon them for sustainable livelihoods. The invited contributors to this issue work at NGOs, botanic gardens and universities in The Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Mexico, El Salvador and the United States. The articles not only raise concerns for the social, economic and environmental consequences of climate change in the region, but also explore avenues for facing these challenges and offer clear case examples in which imperative actions are needed.

The Racial Equation: Pan-Atlantic Eugenics, Race, And Colonialism In The Early Twentieth Century British Caribbean, Christopher Anderson Davis

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intellectual discourse on race in the early twentieth century, particularly from 1919 to 1958, examining how British and American eugenicists and Caribbean nationalists debated the limits of colonial politics in the British Caribbean using academic and scientific language. These discussions emerged in the aftermath of World War I, the economic crises that led to the Great Depression, the political and labor unrest in the British Caribbean, and consequences of the Second World War. The dissertation’s goal is to examine how residents of the British Caribbean understood, appropriated, and challenged some of the principles of eugenics, particularly …

Documented: The Colonial Archive And The Future Of The Americas

Hemisphere

In the last three years, guest editor Bianca Premo has participated in and led a series of hemisphere-wide seminars on the archives of colonial Latin America, specifically what the historical record reveals and what it hides, and how records affect the stories we tell and the lives we lead. For example, one of the objectives of opening the archives is to tell the human stories of the colonial disempowered and use those to better understand today's disenfranchised. This approach to examining the archives reveals far more than past accounts and parallels to the present; in many ways it also provides …

2018 Fiu Cuba Poll : How Cuban Americans In Miami View U.S. Policies Toward Cuba, Guillermo J. Grenier, Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University

Cuba Poll

No abstract provided.

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 …

Listening/Reading For Disremembered Voices: Additive Archival Representation And The Zong Massacre Of 1781, Jorge E. Cartaya

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis grapples with questions surrounding representation, mourning, and responsibility in relation to two literary representations of the ZONG massacre of 1781. These texts are M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! and Fred D’Aguiar’s FEEDING THE GHOSTS. The only extant archival document—a record of the insurance dispute which ensued as a consequence of the massacre—does not represent the drowned as victims, nor can it represent the magnitude of the atrocity. As such, this thesis posits that the archival gaps or silences from which the captives’ voices are missing become spaces of possibility for additive representation. This thesis also examines the role voice …

Perpetual Resistance: Societies And Violence In Latin America

Hemisphere

Violence has been a part of the LAC region’s landscape since before independence, evolving from interstate to intrastate, and, more recently, emerging as criminal violence in the 1990s. Today LAC is the world’s most violent region —home to seven of the ten cities registering the highest homicide rates. According to recent polling, insecurity is one of citizens’ two top concerns. Guest editor Jose Miguel Cruz unites top scholars to examine the complex problem from various disciplinary perspectives —history, sociology, political science, journalism, communications and public policy —to identify the drivers and manifestations of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Sound Of Silence: Ideology Of National Identity And Racial Inequality In Contemporary Curaçao, Angela E. Roe

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses racism in contemporary Curaçao—a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean that remains a component of the Kingdom of The Netherlands. The dissertation theorizes racism as a partially hidden constituent of the island’s ideology of national identity, which throughout its history has emulated hybridity before being influenced, more recently, by multiculturalism. The research’s main objective is to uncover the ways race and racism have been entangled with Curaçao’s hegemonic ideology of national identity, a reality too often omitted and always under-theorized in Dutch and Dutch Caribbean scholarship.

Using historical, ethnographic, statistic, and discourse analysis data, the dissertation reveals …

An Ethnography: Discovering The Hidden Identity Of The Banilejos, Yehonatan Elazar-Demota

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During June of 2015, an anthropological and sociological study was conducted in the Dominican city of Bani. On the surface, the banilejo people appear to be devout Catholics. However, having had access to their personal lives, it was evident that their peculiar family traditions and folklore hinted at their liminal identities. This study involved interviewing 23 female subjects with questions found in the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitorial manuals. In addition, their mitochondrial DNA sequences were analyzed and demonstrated a high percentage of consanguinity and inbreeding within Bani's population. The genetic analysis of their mitochondrial DNA yielded genetic links with Jewish …

The United States And Cuba After D17

Hemisphere

With the D17 announcement, US-Cuba policies were suddenly and dramatically transformed after decades of stale and repetitive relations. Guest editor Jorge Duany, director of FIU’s famed Cuban Research Institute, invited a group of leading experts to examine the repercussions of the restoration of diplomatic ties and discuss the intractable obstacles to the full restoration of relations between the two countries. Although normalization of diplomatic relations and the prospect of change have produced an exciting time for scholarship and policy analysis, the conclusion fifteen months later is that rapproachement has been slower and more modest than expected.

Recent Changes In U.S.-Cuba Relations, Jorge Duany

Cuba Research Institute Publications

Cuban Americans will likely be one of the key social actors in the reconstruction of the Cuban economy a􀈻ter the restoration of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States. They are already sending large sums of money, purchasing goods, transferring technology, and consuming services in the private sector of the Cuban economy. The role of Cuban-American remittances could be even more significant in the near future as sources of funding for independent business growth on the Island. However, in order to maximize the potential contribution of Cuban Americans to the Cuban economy, substantial changes in the laws and regulations …

2016 Fiu Cuba Poll: How Cuban Americans In Miami View U.S. Policies Toward Cuba, Guillermo J. Grenier, Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University

Cuba Poll

No abstract provided.

Epistemologías Culturales Del Caribe: Modelos Conceptuales Metafóricos En El Ensayo Caribeño Del Siglo Xx, Diana M. Grullón-García

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

El Caribe ha sido reconocido por considerarse una pluralidad de espacios que simultáneamente son solo uno. Contrario al contexto de su fragmentada geografía, su segregada historia colonial y su diversidad racial y lingüística, los intelectuales caribeños han establecido puentes de unidad cultural con la intención de configurar una identidad pan-caribeña. Por consiguiente, los ensayistas del siglo XX se enfrentan a la necesidad de examinar críticamente los factores que formulan sus respectivas identidades, en contraste con aquellas tradicionalmente impuestas bajo el discurso colonial y metropolitano. Desde el tercer cuarto del siglo, pensadores como Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969), Fidel Castro …

A Cross-Generational Analysis Of Spanish-To-English Lexico-Semantic Phenomena In Emerging Miami English, Kristen Mullen

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sociolinguists have documented the substrate influence of various languages on the formation of dialects in numerous ethnic-regional setting throughout the United States. This literature shows that while phonological and grammatical influences from other languages may be instantiated as durable dialect features, lexical phenomena often fade over time as ethnolinguistic communities assimilate with contiguous dialect groups. In preliminary investigations of emerging Miami Latino English, we have observed that lexical forms based on Spanish lexical forms are not only ubiquitous among the speech of the first generation Cuban Americans but also of the second. Examples, observed in field work, casual observation, and …

Children's Literature, Ideology, And Cultural Identity Before And After The Cuban Revolution, Zeila M. Frade

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mediante de un acercamiento cronológico, esta disertación analiza la función de la ideología como herramienta poderosa para construir la nación y moldear al futuro ciudadano en la narrativa infantil cubana pre y pos-revolucionaria. Aunque una tradición y un proceso de formación de identidad nacional anteceden la literatura infantil publicada antes del triunfo de la Revolución, en los períodos posteriores existe una estrecha relación entre el contexto social de los textos y su función ideológica. Partiendo de “La Edad de Oro” (1889) de José Martí, este estudio se enfoca en los cambios socio-culturales que influyen en el desarrollo de una narrativa …

On The Threshold Of Paradise And Present: Memory In Contemporary Cuban‐American Literature, Adrian Suarez Ávila

Undergraduate Research at FIU (URFIU) Conference

The exile leaving his or her homeland for new and unknown territory travels with much more than just luggage and the clothes on his or her back. He or she carries a weighty collection of memories. Available for the exile in times when the harmony of the past is far removed from the difficult circumstances present during the process of cultural assimilation, these memories present an opportunity for the exile to fashion for him or herself an identity that mimics the realities of life in the home left behind. In this creative endeavor, I seek to examine the powerful potential …

30 Years Of Reform: Decentralization, Subnational Governments And Development In Latin America

Hemisphere

More than 30 years after Latin America transitioned from dictatorships to democracy, decentralization, and institutional reforms to give impetus to citizen participation, transparency, government accountability and good governance, expectations have disappointed and concerns are raised today over a slowdown, or even reversal. Guest editor Cristina A. Rodríguez-Acosta, Assistant Director of FIU's renowned Institute for Public Management and Community Service, invites leading experts to analyze where the region stands and how decentralization reforms can be deepened.

Hispanic Orientalism: The Literary Development Of A Cultural Paradigm, From Medieval Spain To Modern Latin America, Svetlana V. Tyutina

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers a novel approach to Hispanic Orientalism, developing a dynamic paradigm from its origins in medieval and Renaissance Iberia during the process of the Christian Reconquest, to its transatlantic migration and establishment in the early years of the Colony, from where it changed in late colonial and post-Independence Latin America, and onto modernity.

The study argues that Hispanic Orientalism does not necessarily imply a negative depiction of the Other, a quality associated with the traditional critique of Saidian Orientalism. Neither, does it entirely comply with the positivist approach suggested in the theoretical research of Said’s opponents, like Julia …

How Free Are Media In The Americas Today?

Hemisphere

Guest-edited by Raul Reis, Dean of FIU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Volume 23 takes an in-depth look at a key challenge to democracy: freedom of the press. Despite the significant progress made over the past two decades to consolidate political rights and civil liberties in the region, the situation facing media professionals is more precarious; news outlets are closed, journalists’ ability to inform the public intensifies, and violence and intimidation targets them. Gag orders and legislation have increased the costs of reporting on important issues such as corruption, crime and violence. As a result, self-censorship has become the …

Cuba Poll 2014 : Full Survey Results, Guillermo J. Grenier, Hugh Gladwin, Cuban Research Institute

Cuba Poll

The full survey results include the full list of questions and tables with results for each question.