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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Post-Revolutionary Post-Modernism: Central American Detective Fiction By The Turn Of The 21st Century, Gael Guzman-Medrano

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary Central American fiction has become a vital project of revision of the tragic events and the social conditions in the recent history of the countries from which they emerge. The literary projects of Sergio Ramirez (Nicaragua), Dante Liano (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Ramon Fonseca Mora (Panama), are representative of the latest trends in Central American narrative. These trends conform to a new literary paradigm that consists of an amalgam of styles and discourses, which combine the testimonial, the historical, and the political with the mystery and suspense of noir thrillers. Contemporary Central American noir narrative depicts …

Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Transnational Alliance, Protective Accompaniment And The Presbyterian Church Of Colombia, Michael C. Brasher

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to explore how Christian networks enable strategies of transnational alliance, whereby groups in different nations strive to strengthen one another’s leverage and credibility in order to resolve conflicts and elaborate new possibilities. This research does so by analyzing the case of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (IPC). The project examines the historical development of the IPC from the initial missionary period of the 1850s until the present. Specifically, the purpose of the study was to consider how the historical struggle to articulate autonomy and equality vis-à-vis the U.S. Presbyterians (PCUSA) and paternalist models of …

Propuestas Para Una Reconceptualización Surrealista Y Postmoderna De La Sexualidad Femenina En Los Textos De Cristina Escofet E Isabel Allende, Zoila Clark

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female sexuality has commonly been viewed as the passive counterpart of male sexuality. Building upon Adrienne Rich's theory of compulsive heterosexuality, I would suggest that the fundamental location of this problem lies within the subconscious. Cristina Escofet's stance on this issue is to argue in favor of a deconstruction of Jungian archetypes, revealing their constructed rather than intrinsic character. In this dissertation, I study representative texts by Escofet and Isabel Allende and show not only how they depict patriarchal compulsive heterosexuality, but also try to reconceptualize female sexuality through surrealist and postmodern techniques such as self-reflection, dialogue with our double …

Environmental Stewardship And The Fate Of The Brazilian Amazon : A Case Study Of The Madeira Complex, Karyna Do Monte

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present paper analyzes a case study of the Madeira Complex, which plans to build two massive dams on the Amazon River's largest tributary, to identify religious discourse in ecological debates. Three sides of the debate are investigated in order to analyze the various perspectives of proper human relations with the rest of nature that emerge. The Brazilian government and large corporations support the project as a necessary step to meet future national energy needs, the indigenous groups settled in federal territories that are directly affected by the environmental impact of the project and have mixed opinions, and environmentalist organizations …

El Paradigma Ético De La Escritura Martiana : Desbordes De La Modernidad, Carlos E. Cenzano

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the nature of Jose Marti's ethical ideas in relation to the rise of late Nineteenth Century Modernity and in tandem with the deconstruction and subversion of the principal constituencies of colonial and aesthetic discourses. Marti proposes a new paradigm that question the insatiable pursuit of novelty, the hostility towards tradition, the historical perspectivism and a critical stance with regard to social aesthetic Modernity. He also questions the cult of reason, the linear historicism, and the teleological progress framed in philosophical utilitarian pragmatism of bourgeois Modernity. His radical criticism of the structures and institutions of the hegemonic power …

The Political Party System And Democratic Crisis In Bolivia, Jennifer Marie Cyr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using Kenneth Roberts’ (2002) party-society linkages framework, this study examined the reasons for the decline of the political party system in Bolivia after 2000. The political party system that emerged in 1985 was connected to society primarily through clientelist-based linkages. The economic and political model adopted after the transition to democracy severely debilitated the party system’s capacity to forge linkages with society beyond clientelism.

Using interviews, survey data, and primary and secondary documents, the study demonstrated that prolonged economic recession and social change revealed the weaknesses of the linkages connecting the political party system with Bolivian society. It concluded that …

Playing Miami : Afrocuban Performance Artists Negotiating Cubanidad, Kameelah Nicole Benjamin-Fuller

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The social scripts that are deeply involved in cultural production by AfroCuban identified artists in Miami, during the late nineties to the present, participate in a climate that is informed by and feeds from the so-called Latin Explosion of this time period. More specifically, varying historical, socioeconomic, and geopolitical trajectories have placed Africa and African-based religion and cultural production (via music and theatre) at the center of Cuban national identity. The purpose of this study is to facilitate a discussion of the experiences of AfroCuban performance artists and the climate for production, given the aforementioned dynamics, in mass media. These …

Chicle Commercialization: Institutions, Sustainability And Green Markets, Tineke A. De Vries

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the central question: "How the institutional factors, sustainability aspects, marketing and green markets condition the potential for chicle commercialization to increase incomes and to contribute to tropical forest preservation in Quintana Roo, Mexico?"

I reviewed general literature on chicle, Non Timber Forest Products, institutions, sustainability , marketing and green markets. During the summer of 2001 I held forty semi-structured interviews with relevant actors in Quintana Roo.

Main findings were that producers need to increase control over the production process. Under current extraction practices ecological sustainability is likely to be maintained, but underutilisation …

The Effects Of Political Corruption On Caribbean Development (Working Paper No. 5), Michael W. Collier

LACC Working Paper Series (2001 - )

No abstract provided.

Botánicas: Absence In Cuba, Proliferation In The United States, José A. Lammoglia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Afro-Cuban Religious Complex (ARC), developed in Cuba, where the material used in their rituals was obtained trough different sources. However, the concept of a centralized store of religious goods, called bótanicas, for the ARC did not develop in Cuba alongside the religion. The reasons for the absence of these stores in Cuba until the early 1990s is explored via personal interviews with members of the ARC, participant observation, 200 questionnaires distributed in Cuba and Miami, and anchored in scholarly works about the psychology and economics of migration, as well as in those concerned with religious anthropology and sociology. …