Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Leaders, Ideas, National Interests, And Economic Strategies: Explaining The Regional Integration Decisions Of Mexico And Brazil, Roberto Genoves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Regional integration agreements (RIAs) facilitate economic integration by allowing member countries access to each other's markets and by removing or reducing trade and investment barriers. Their increasing influence on international patterns of trade and investment flows has stimulated substantial academic work. Yet, scholars note that we lack an adequate comprehension of the factors that cause governments to seek RIAs, and why they prefer a particular type of integration arrangement. These are important questions because they speak to the forces that shape cooperation among states, a vital issue in international relations with implications for global governance.

Using an eclectic analytical approach, …

El Oficio De La Escritura Y La Estetica En La Obra De Roberto Bolano, Ainoa Inigo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims at attaining a general understanding of the aesthetics and philosophy on the practice of writing of Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), the Chilean poet and writer, through interpretive devices developed by him and by extrinsic means. Bolaño claimed that his works stemmed from a pre-extant poetic universe, so that each work is interrelated thematically with the rest of the oeuvre and individually representative of the totality.

Throughout the works analyzed, our two primary questions--the aesthetical and ethical--intercept while we examine his understanding of the role of the writer and literature itself. Estrella distante (1996), Los detectives salvajes (1998) and …

Roundup Ready Nation: The Political Ecology Of Genetically Modified Soy In Argentina, Amalia Leguizamon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a case study of agrarian transformation in an agro-export society, Argentina. I study the process of adoption of the technological package of genetically modified (GM) soy in the Argentine countryside, its socio-ecological consequences, and Argentines' responses to it. In particular, this research addresses Argentina's unique situation of being a developing country that has positively embraced the biotechnology of GM seeds as a key accumulation strategy without the emergence of major contestation against GM soy monocropping. In order to answer the puzzle of quiescence, I look at how power relations structure access to social and environmental goods and …

"A New Way Of Doing Politics": The Movement Against Cafta In Costa Rica, Jeremy Rayner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In October of 2007, Costa Ricans voted in a referendum to ratify a Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA, or CAFTA). The first referendum in their nation's history--and the first referendum ever held on a Free Trade Agreement--marked the culmination of a cycle of contention over liberalization that transformed practices and expectations of politics in a country often considered an exemplar of representative democracy. In this dissertation I provide an account of the opposition to CAFTA (the NO), based on two years of ethnographic research with the Patriotic Committees (Comites Patrioticos), the decentralized, grassroots network at the heart …

Writing The Visual In "Baroni: Un Viaje" And Other Recent Work By Sergio Chejfec, Margaret Carson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation has three parts. First, I explore the ways in which word intersects with image in several recent texts by the contemporary Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, whose oeuvre is replete with verbal descriptions of visual artifacts. Second, as a complement to the critical essay, I present my English translation of Chejfec's Baroni: un viaje (2007), a novel featuring the Venezuelan artist Rafaela Baroni, whose extraordinary wood carvings of Virgins, saints and other figures are described in key passages. Third, as a bridge between these two parts, I reflect on the related critical discourses of ekphrasis and translation and on …

Estandarizacion Linguistica Y Construccion Nacional: La Norma Espanola Y La Norma Americana (1823-1857), Laura Villa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes five salient moments in the history of the standardization of the Spanish language that took place in the central decades of the nineteenth century: first, the reformed spelling system proposed in London by Andrés Bello and Juan García del Río in 1823 in order to promote Latin American literacy; second, the simultaneous officialization in 1844 of two different orthographic norms in Chile and Spain, both of them surrounded by intense ideological debates, the former led by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the latter by a teachers' association established in Madrid; third, the publication in 1847 of Bello's grammar, which …

Ética Y Estética De La Narrativa Femenina Hispanoamericana Contemporánea: Un Diálogo Con Las Teorías Bajtinianas Del Discurso Literario, Aranzazu Borrachero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study traces textual contradictions in the narrative of some contemporary female writers of Latin America: Isabel Allende's La casa de los espiritus (1982), Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate (1989), Cristina Peri Rossi's "Desastres intimos" and "Entrevista con el Angel" (1997), Zoe Valdes' Te di la vida entera (1996), Eva Sefchovich's Demasiado amor (1990), Carmen Olle's Las dos caras del deseo (1994), and Sylvia Molloy's En breve carcel (1981).

I define "contradiction" as the coexistence of conflicting discourses within one narrative voice, i.e. discourses of love and violence, of romance and rape, of female strength and submission. I contend …

De La Pantalla Al Papel: El Cine Mudo Y La Narrativa Vanguardista Española, Maria Montoya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to document and explain the influence of silent film on the vanguard works of three outstanding Spanish prose writers—Francisco Ayala, Antonio Espina, and Benjamin Jarnes—during the 1920s, as well as on essays of theirs that appeared in Revista de Occidente and La Gaceta Literaria. Three aspects of film of particular importance to the analysis of these writers' works are: movies as a social phenomenon, Hollywood film stars, and the influence of film on their narrative techniques.

An examination of the main cultural and film magazines of that decade, as well as of …