Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Contra La Guerra Contra Las Madres: Una Revisión Feminista De La Figura De La Madre En Las Obras De Gabriela Wiener, Marta Dillon Y Las “Madres De Soacha”, Fatima Velez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation critically examines how the figure of the mother appears across a set of contemporary Latin American cultural productions. Through the analysis of the work of Peruvian writer and performer Gabriela Wiener; the literary, journalistic, and cinematic production of Argentine writer and activist Marta Dillon; and the collective work of the Colombian human rights group known as the Mothers of Soacha—particularly the participation of three of its members in the play Antígonas, tribunal de mujeres—this study proposes the concept of a “war against mothers.” In dialogue with the term coined by Rita Segato (2016), “war against women,” this …

Conga Santiaguera: A Century Of Innovation And Competition, Nick Herman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Santiago de Cuba is home to the island’s biggest, oldest, and most famous carnival.  Any local resident will confirm that “sin conga no hay carnaval (without conga there is no carnival).” In Santiago, conga refers to a vibrant street procession, the music that drives it, and the ensemble that makes the music.  Conga Santiaguera: A Century of Innovation and Competition presents a musical history of the conga from roughly 1910 to 2010.  This project, https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/conga employs an eBook, musical analysis, oral histories, and audiovisual media to show how the conga has been constantly reinvigorated by innovation, competition, and Afro-Diasporic …

Humanist Abstractions: Zilia Sánchez’S Forms Of Symbolism And The Reframing Of The Picture Plane, Sydney Srnka

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the culturally specific visual language within the work of Zilia Sánchez through an analysis of her biography and semiotic strategies, arguing that meaning in her work emerges through the materiality of form, rather than through conventional stylistic categorization. It reconsiders how art-historical movements are used to organize artists, proposing a framework better suited to Sánchez’s practice. The issues of reception and legibility have shaped Sánchez’s career as an exile whose experience of displacement informed her shaped canvases. These works articulated a simultaneously unique and universal sense of experience. In researching Sánchez’s history, an alternative story for the …

Course Syllabus. Spn 415 Transatlantic Cinema, Álvaro Baquero-Pecino

Open Educational Resources

Course syllabus. SPN 415-Transatlantic Cinema.

This seminar explores the relationship between film, culture, and society in Spain and Latin America through a discussion of representative texts and films, and their historical and political contexts. The course provides an interdisciplinary survey of cinema as an art form, a component of the entertainment industry, and a medium of communication via screenings, lectures, and readings on modern and contemporary Latin American, Spanish, and U.S. Latino cinema. This class will be taught in Spanish

Funded in part by the CUNY OER Initiative.

Autoconvocadxs: Interpretaciones Biopolíticas Y Psicopolíticas Del Poder Popular, El Archivo Y La Memoria En La Cultura Popular De Puerto Rico, Jose A. Acosta-Seda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Autoconvocadxs analizan el nacimiento, el desarrollo y la consolidación de la asamblea popular como un mecanismo para fiscalizar la labor del Estado. Este, insuficiente y al servicio de las instituciones imperiales, se ha desentendido de las necesidades del pueblo en momentos de crisis. Al servicio de la agenda imperial estadounidense, el gobierno puertorriqueño echó mano de diversas estrategias de coerción y vigilancia que perjudicaron el desarrollo social, económico y político de Puerto Rico. Sin embargo, dichas estrategias e instrumentos de vigilancia han evolucionado a través del tiempo: desde una perspectiva biopolítica en los años 1970, hasta el triunfo de la …

Propuesta Curricular Para La Asistencia Médica Bilingüe Orientada A La Concordancia De Lenguas Y La Interpretación Médica En Español, David Sanchez-Jimenez, Noemi Rodriguez, Justin Harnandan, Margarita Perez, Melissa Garcia

Publications and Research

Resumen: El presente trabajo describe el proceso para establecer una especialización secundaria bilingüe centrada en la comunicación y la interpretación médica en una universidad de Estados Unidos designada como Institución al Servicio de los Hispanos. Este nuevo título universitario brindará a los estudiantes bilingües de español e inglés especializados en el área de la salud la oportunidad de mejorar sus destrezas comunicativas para convertirse en competentes profesionales de la salud concordantes de lengua.

Abstract:This paper details the process to establish a new bilingual academic minor in health communication and medical interpretation at a United States university designated as a Hispanic-Serving …

Herejías En La Ciudad Global: Legados De Tercermundismo, Asimilación Y Desplazamiento Urbano En Las Narrativas Literarias Contemporáneas Latinx Y Afroportuguesa (2000-2022)., Ricardo Martín Coloma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Esta tesis examina de manera comparativa dos corpus de novelas contemporáneas que interrogan los múltiples espacios de poder y vulnerabilidad que experimentan las diásporas latinx y africanas que logran movilidad social a través del trabajo en las ciudades globales de Nueva York y Lisboa. Mediante el análisis de autores tan diversos como la mexicano-puertorriqueña Xochitl González, la dominicana Cleyvis Natera, el puertorriqueño-ecuatoriano Ernesto Quiñonez, la angoleña-portuguesa Telma Tvon, la angoleña-portuguesa Djamilia Pereira y el angoleño Kalaf Epalanga, establezco un diálogo entre las narrativas literarias de autores caribeños de la diáspora sobre la ciudad de Nueva York y las diásporas africanas …

An Archeology Of Looking, Marco G. Dasilva

Theses and Dissertations

Marco DaSilva’s mosaics explore camouflage and syncretism, blending symbols from American culture, Catholic saints, Afro-Brazilian deities and queer spaces. His work examines objects as relics, where identity is hidden and revealed. By integrating simple materials and transforming them into unique compositions, DaSilva creates hybrid objects where all of his worlds intersect, crafting his own mythology.

Aquí Y Ahora A Dance Tribute To Gustavo Cerati And The Expression Of Hispanic Immigrant Identity In New York City, Karina Terán

Theses and Dissertations

This Thesis explores how dance serves as a language of cultural identity among Hispanic immigrants in New York City. Through a multidisciplinary performance and research, it reflects lived experiences, blending movement and music to celebrate legacy, resilience, and community, while honoring the influence of Argentine rock icon Gustavo Cerati.

Geraldo De Barros’S Fotoformas: Towards The Construction Of New Forms Of Legibility, Jay Bravo

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the legibility and reception of Geraldo de Barros’s Fotoformas within Western art institutions, using MoMA’s 2021 Fotoclubismo exhibition as a case study. It argues that the integration of Brazilian modernist photography into canonical narratives often hinges on strategic affinities with Euro-American frameworks. Drawing on institutional critique, postcolonial theory, and the concept of Anthropophagy, the study explores how Fotoformas challenges conventional photographic discourse and reveals broader dynamics of artistic legitimacy and representation.

La Intensificación En Los Comentarios De Noticias: La Prensa Deportiva Digital, David Sanchez-Jimenez

Publications and Research

Las plataformas digitales de los periódicos permiten una comunicación más fluida y dinámica con y entre la audiencia, que refleja algunos patrones de la comunicación oral (Briz, 1997, 1998; Yus, 2001, 2010; Albelda, 2004; Albelda y Estellés, 2021). Entre ellos, se encuentran los recursos lingüísticos de intensificación que refuerzan la fuerza ilocutiva de los comentarios emitidos, en una clara apuesta por dotar al texto de una mayor interactividad con sus potenciales receptores. El objetivo de esta investigación consiste en conocer cómo se relacionan entre sí los participantes de estas plataformas en la prensa deportiva. En particular, se prestó especial atención …

Ai-Enhanced Essay Prompt: Exploring Your Identity And Life Experiences, Victor M. Torres-Velez

Open Educational Resources

This assignment, AI-Enhanced Essay Prompt: Exploring Your Identity and Life Experiences, guides students through a reflective writing process that integrates personal narratives with academic concepts related to identity, globalization, and migration. Students will examine how their nationality, ethnicity, race, social class, and gender are shaped by larger cultural and transnational forces. The structured approach encourages students to engage with AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Grammarly) as personalized writing tutors, assisting with brainstorming, organization, clarity, and revision while maintaining their authentic voice.

The essay requires students to build upon previously submitted personal anecdotes, analyze their experiences through course readings (including works …

Los Intelectuales, Las Palabras Y El Poder Presidencial: Descolonización, Nacionalismo Y Cholificación En Las Izquierdas Contemporáneas De Bolivia, Perú Y México, Cesar Augusto Coca Vargas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Los fenómenos históricos del indianismo, el nacionalismo y la cholificación, son interpretaciones intelectuales que se suceden durante todo el siglo pasado. Son explicaciones o razonamientos provenientes de círculos intelectuales que pretendieron comprender las nuevas identidades nacionales. Son también —y continúan vigentes— discursos empleados por figuras políticas que provienen de o enuncian por capas populares, con el objetivo de llevar a cabo proyectos políticos. Son también ideologías de ruptura o de gesto descolonizador, respecto de otras manifestaciones conservadoras o reaccionarias. En buena cuenta, las tres ideas centrales de esta tesis son horizontes, a la vez, teóricos y pragmáticos, que canalizan preocupaciones …

Revelations: Spirituality As Privileged Perspectivism In Magical Realist Distortions, Isabella Scala-Kazanecki

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the role of spiritual beliefs in the literary mode now known as magical realism in Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949), Indian-Born British and American Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), and a lesser-known novel, Household Saints (1981) by Francine Prose, an American writer. The Kingdom of This World, itself the originator of the mode of magical realism, has allowed me to conclude with Carpentier that magical realism arises from “privileged revelations,” as he notes in the preface to his seminal book. But these revelations in magical realism are not necessarily always of the …

Nchetjá Kuènté Chjasin Jnantáyo: El Barro Del Pueblo De Metzontla, Xítjōahnko Cruz, Eric Silberberg

Publications and Research

Nchetjá kuènté chjasin Jnantáyo, tíhi mé jnko xroon chronka nkexrín t’óna ti nchetjá kuènté ti Chjasin Jnantáyo, T’áninka. Ti xroon mé kjaxin tsoxraxinkakonxin chojni nkexrín k’uénixja sín itan ngiva ti chjasin Jnantáyo. Ti ixra nohen chojni ich’e ndesi ósé, mé tíha la jína tsoxrakonxin ti itan ngiva, kíxi kaín xjanchjin ko xjandoa mé ts’itja ti itan. Tjinkaoni kíxin tsokjan tsonixja sín ti itan k’uénixja chojni ósé, ko kjaxin ts’itjáñahña ti nkehe nohen chojni ch’énaxín nchetjá.

Nchetjá kuènté chjasin Jnantáyo: El barro del pueblo de Metzontla, es una obra que está dedicada a la alfarería de Los Reyes Metzontla, …

Prls 3316: Banned Books: Teaching Latinx Children And Youth Literature, Carla España

Open Educational Resources

Banned picture books, early readers, middle grade, and young adult novels by Latinx authors and illustrators. Emphasis on contemporary books dealing with topics of identity, (im)migration, intergenerational connections, community, LGBTQ+, social movements, and changemakers. Literature analysis and advocacy plan; translingual texts, and translanguaging pedagogy in monolingual and bilingual settings. Censorship in education.

Intro To Puerto Rican And Latinx Studies, Jasmine Mitchell

Open Educational Resources

“Survey and theoretical foundations in Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies. Case study on Puerto Rico. Pertinent themes in Puerto Rican and Latinx history, culture, literature, contemporary society, and politics. Impact of the United States’ economic policies on Puerto Rico and the causes of Puerto Rican and Latinx migration to New York City and urban centers. Satisfies Pathways Flexible Core US Experience in Its Diversity requirement.”

Latin American Culture, Bernardita Llanos Mardones

Open Educational Resources

This course examines a series of contemporary cultural and social issues in Latin America through the study of case studies in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Nicaragua, Chile, Peru and Bolivia. Among the topics we will analyze are: feminicide- or the killing of women due to their gender, abortion rights, historical and cultural memory, peace and war, sexual abuse and male power, politics and corruption, machismo and racism. The course ends with the ethics and life style based on the community practiced by the Andean world and summarized in the thirteen principles of “el buen vivir o Sumak Kawsay.” Through the readings …

Ni Reprimir, Ni Rezar, Ni Traducir: Latinos En Nueva York Piden Cuidados De Salud Mental Incluyentes, Laura Rojas Aponte

Capstones

In New York City, only three out of ten Latinos diagnosed with depression receive treatment, compared to over half of white adults with the same condition, according to the latest Department of Health report. Despite the clear need for mental health care, access remains limited, with a lack of culturally competent services further widening the gap.

While mental health has become a more open topic in recent years, many Latinos still face significant barriers to therapy, including high costs, limited insurance coverage, cultural stigma, and disconnects between patients and providers. However, there are ongoing efforts to address these challenges, ranging …

Story Of Everything, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Publications and Research

Story of Everything, by Mariana Romo-Carmona. Translated by Caragh Barry.

Original title: Cuento de todas las cosas.

Prls 2250 Digital Life Stories: Chicana/Latina Testimonio, Jasmine Mitchell

Open Educational Resources

This is an introductory course exploring intersecting histories, ideas, and social, political and cultural structures in Latin America. We will focus on the workings of Latin American cultures as shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, place, and religion. Throughout this course we will ask: Where is Latin America and what is Latin America? Over the semester, we will ask critical questions of a wide variety of materials: essays, television, poems, photographs, films, music, visual art, historical documents and legal texts. Students will be exposed to and experiment with a wide range of current interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches with …

Féminas Speaking Up: Three Papers On Feminine Transgender Identities, Gender Identity Activism, And Language Reform In Lima, Peru, Ernesto Cuba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this three-paper dissertation, I explore the linguistic and discursive practices of Féminas, a leading transgender rights activist organization based in Lima, Peru. Building on scholarship on language ideologies (Irvine & Gal, 2000), queer linguistics (Motschenbacher, 2011), and socio-onomastics (Ainiala & Östman, 2017), I analyze the role that language beliefs and language-in-use plays in performing local (trans)gender identities and shaping grassroots politics within this specific community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992). Based on an extensive corpus of semi-structured interviews and ethnographic material gathered during my long-term investigation with Féminas, I present three studies exploring distinct –though related– ideologically-driven sociolinguistic …

Extractivism And The Defense Of Life And Territories: An Account Of Latin American Environmental Thought, Pedro Monque

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We are living today through an environmental crisis of planetary proportions. Recent decades have seen the proliferation of distinct environmentalisms around the world. In Latin America, a unique environmental vocabulary is being born out of resistance to northern framings of the environmental crisis whose proposed solutions often deepen environmental injustice vis-à-vis the global south.In this dissertation, I provide an account of the key themes in this lively but undertheorized tradition that I call Latin American environmental thought.

The conceptual core of Latin American environmental thought, I argue, are the concepts of extractivism, the defense of life and territories, and alternatives. …

Metric Schemas And Projections In Three Colombian Folk Genres, Lina S. Tabak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how stylistic expertise can affect metric perception, through the analysis of three Colombian folk genres—cantos de boga and currulaos from the Pacific region and joropos from the Eastern plains bordering Venezuela. Specifically, it considers the tension between metric perceptions which arise from bottom-up mechanisms for entrainment (such as projections), and those which are based on top-down mechanisms (such as schemata). This tension is at play when more and less musically enculturated listeners perceive entirely different metric structures when listening to identical music.

Taking bottom-up and top-down metric perception as a thread, this dissertation isolates three additional metric …

Spn 122 - Latin American Language And Culture, Salvador Salazar

Open Educational Resources

Spanish 122 provides an overview of Latin American cultures. Students will analyze and discuss representative texts and other forms of cultural production (film, visual art, music, etc.) from various regions and time periods to better understand and appreciate the diversity of Latin American history and society. The course will be conducted in Spanish.

The Golden Age Of Mexican Cinema, Daniel Galindo

Publications and Research

This presentation is about the film called María Candelaria (1943), a film of the cinema of the golden age of Mexico that shows the lifestyle of the people of that time, more than anything it shows how women were reviled in the macho society. The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema is a period of brilliance in the history of Mexican cinema, which began in 1936-1956.

Distortion And Subversion: Punk Rock Music And The Protests For Free Public Transportation In Brazil [Book Review], Mariel Acosta

Publications and Research

Around the year 2003 some friends and I from “el way,” the self-referential youth slang the alternative music scene and subculture members used in the Dominican Republic, started attending meetings for the youth political group Juventud Rebelde at the borrowed backyard of the left-wing political party Fuerza de la Revolución. The yard had a gazebo-like structure with a cemented floor and a zinc roof under which foldable chairs were arranged in a circle. There we participated in multigenerational study groups to discuss radical communist and anarchist texts in relation to current political issues, we heard talks and report backs …

Decolonizing World Civilizations Ii: 1500 A.D. To The Present, Juliana Nalerio

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Representaciones Ideológicas De La Lengua, La Conversación Y La Comunicación En Manuales De Urbanidad Del Siglo Xix En México: Guías Para La Civilización, El Orden Y El Progreso Nacional, Luis B. Quesada Nieto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explores the main ideological representations of language, language use, conversation and communication found in a set of five etiquette manuals that were published and used in Mexico during the 19^th century. Following a glottopolitical perspective for the study of normativity, language policies, and sociolinguistic practices, the main hypothesis developed establishes that the ideas about language contained in these texts are strongly connected with the social, political, and economic period in which they are elaborated and enunciated, that is, the moment in which the nation is still defining itself, struggling to consolidate its viability and its value facing …

No Ela Without Ella: Understanding The Naming And Crafting Of Gendered Subjectivities In Puerto Rico, Carmín Quijano Seda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the beginning of the 20th century, the official metadiscourses about gendered job titles sedimented the idea that names or indexes pointing to women should be interpreted as unskilled, cheap, or even free labor in Puerto Rico (Azize, 1985; Muñiz Mas, 1998; Baerga-Santini, 1999). For this reason, Puerto Rican women organized and fought for equality in work settings. Furthermore, they became more active in politics and the government. Nevertheless, the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) and local media discourses and interpretations about women’s labor discouraged them from participating in more senior positions (Acevedo Gaud, 2012).

However, this interpretation seemed to have …